Tag Archives: zero tolerance policies

Education, education reform, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race

End Zero-Tolerance Policies: A Reader

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What do zero-tolerance policies, “no excuses” practices, and grade retention have in common?

They all negatively and disproportionately impact children from poverty, minority children, English language learners, and boys; and nearly as disturbing, all are discredited by large bodies of research.

Is the tide turning against at least zero-tolerance policies? Lizette Alvarez reports:

Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

Zero-tolerance policies, “no excuses” practices, and grade retention have something else in common: they should all be eradicated from our schools. And thus, here is a reader to help support calls for ending these practices and policies:

Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School, Kathleen Nolan

Review: Police in the Hallways: Confronting the “Culture of Control,” P. L. Thomas

The School-to-Prison Pipeline, Journal of Educational Controversy (vol. 7, issue 1, Fall/2012-Winter 2013)

Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children, Sarah Carr

New Schools, Old Problems [Review: Hope Against Hope], P. L. Thomas

Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era

Truthout TV Interviews P.L. Thomas About the New “Jim Crow” Era of Education Reform

Just Say No to Just Read, Florida, South Carolina [includes retention research]

Implementing Policies to Reduce the Likelihood of Preschool Expulsion, Walter S. Gilliam, PhD

Prekindergarteners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates  in State  Prekindergarten Programs, Walter S. Gilliam, PhD

Henry Giroux on the “School to Prison Pipeline”

The Mis-education of the Negro, Carter Godwin Woodson

Arresting Development • Zero Tolerance and the Criminalization of Children, Annette Fuentes

Charter schools, Poverty

Kids [Still Don’t] Count

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Some predictions aren’t that bold, and this is one of them:

I predict there will be much shouting and gnashing of teeth over the newest CREDO charter schools study and that the Kids Count 2013 report will dissipate into thin air like smoke from an abandoned camp fire.

Ultimately, the charter school debate continues to be much ado about nothing because charter schools produce about the same range of quality as public and private schools. Charter schools are school-choice-lite so they appease the beefy middle ground of conservatives and progressives who want to appear reasonable, but charter schools are not credible solutions to our pressing social and educational problems that remain primarily issues of equity and opportunity.

Schooling in the US continues to be a reflection and perpetuation of the inequities of our society; they don’t transform society, and they never have—primarily because education remains a tool of the political and economic elite who simply do not want social reform since that reform would challenge their perches atop the masses.

And the Kids Count report will remain ignored because it proves exactly that—social reform is needed in the US.

But most disturbing of all, beyond how debates about the CREDO study and charter schools will overshadow substantive examinations of social inequity, is that the CREDO study helps perpetuate the mindless and also distracting focus on data that ignores the ugly underbelly of many charter schools—segregating children by race and class, perpetuating “no excuses” and zero tolerance policies for African American and Latino/a children (but not white children), demonizing and de-professionalizing teachers and teaching, and reducing education for “other people’s children” to test-prep factories beholden to textbook publishers and high-stakes testing regimes (such as the ACT).

Count of this; my prediction will be proven true.

And we all lose in the process.

Addendum

And almost no one is paying attention to the Pew report on economic mobility—except for Matt Bruenig and The Atlantic. Why? Because just as the Kids Count data refute the big political lies, so does the Pew report in terms of the American Dream; for example:

Americans raised at the bottom and top of the family income ladder are likely to remain there as adults, a phenomenon known as “stickiness at the ends.”

  • While a majority of Americans exceed their parents’ family incomes, the extent of that increase is not always enough to move them to a different rung of the family income ladder.
  • Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle.
  • Forty percent raised in the top quintile remain at the top as adults, and 63 percent remain above the middle.
  • Only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as adults, confirming that the “rags-to-riches” story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality. Similarly, just 8 percent of those raised in the top quintile fall all the way to the bottom….

There is stickiness at the ends of the wealth ladder.

  • Sixty-six percent of those raised in the bottom of the wealth ladder remain on the bottom two rungs themselves, and 66 percent of those raised in the top of the wealth ladder remain on the top two rungs.

Blacks have a harder time exceeding the family income and wealth of their parents than do whites.

  • Sixty-six percent of blacks raised in the second quintile surpass their parents’ family income compared with 89 percent of whites.
  • Only 23 percent of blacks raised in the middle surpass their parents’ family wealth compared with over half (56 percent) of whites.

Blacks are more likely to be stuck in the bottom and fall from the middle than are whites.

  • Over half of blacks (53 percent) raised in the bottom of the family income ladder remain stuck in the bottom as adults, compared with only a third (33 percent) of whites. Half of blacks (56 percent) raised in the middle of the family income ladder fall to the bottom two rungs as adults compared with just under a third of whites (32 percent).
  • Half of blacks (50 percent) raised in the bottom of the family wealth ladder remain stuck in the bottom as adults, compared with only a third (33 percent) of whites. More than two-thirds of blacks (68 percent) raised in the middle fall to the bottom two rungs of the ladder as adults compared with just under a third of whites (30 percent).

 

 

Michel Foucault, school to prison pipeline, schools as prison

More on the Culture of Control

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In my review of Kathleen Nolan’s book on zero tolerance policies in urban schools, I focused on the “culture of control”:

The students in this urban high school are situated in their lives and the school, both of which are permeated by the police gaze and messages about these teens as criminals. Nolan shows that a culture of control in the school creates a reciprocal dynamic in which all people in that culture embrace and perpetuate behaviors in the students that trap them in a continual state of penal control.

Former educator and professor, currently blogging at Education Week, Walt Gardner raised a concern about my review in an email:

I’m a bit more sympathetic about a principal’s job today than I was when I retired in 1992.  I attribute the change to the shootings at so many schools.  That’s why I’m wondering if the “culture of control” that you correctly describe is not unavoidable.  In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need police on campus or metal detectors.  But I don’t see how they can be avoided.  Principals and districts would be held liable if they did NOT take such precautions.

I have received other similar comments, directly about the review but often in response to many of my pieces rejecting the discipline policies in “no excuses” charter schools; thus, I think a few points need to be clarified.

First, let me offer some context.

One day in the first few years of my 18 years as a public school English teacher in the rural South, I walked past the study hall during my planning period. The lunchroom served as the study hall and was filled with two or three classes of students, monitored by one woman who worked as an aid.

It took me a second to realize that the students were all gathered around a fight. I rushed in to find two boys on the ground, the floor swirled in blood. I managed to separate the two boys, one of which had apparently struck the other in the nose with a pair of brass knuckles. Later that day, I arrived at home with my button-down collar shirt and dress pants splattered with blood.

Several years later, as I discussed after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, I bumped into a student gunman just outside my classroom door.

I have lived and worked in the realities of school violence, and I do not take school safety lightly, as a teacher or a parent.

Further, I have spent a great deal of scholarly and public writing confronting the current reform movement that claims schools alone can change society; thus, I am not being a hypocrite about the potential for schools alone to overcome the violence and crime of the communities surrounding far too many urban schools.

In fact, my argument about school academic and discipline reform is the same: Social reform addressing inequity must come first in order to support school reform, but school policies must guard against mirroring and perpetuating social inequity.

And it is at that second part that I reject zero tolerance and “no excuses” policies that institutionalize school-to-prison pipelines and create schools-as-prisons.

Arguments for authoritarian school policies—such as police in the hallways, metal detectors, and one-strike-you’re-out expulsion triggers—often rest on a false either/or choice between anarchy and lock-down. Further, many calls for zero tolerance and “no excuses” practices are masks for racism and deficit views of class and children (see Ta-Nehihi Coates about the racism we tend to skirt or mask with “It’s socio-economic, not race”).

Let me be clear: All children deserve to be safe in their lives and their schools. Period.

And it is both a legal and moral obligation for adults to seek that safety.

But extreme policies that turn schools into prisons are fatalistic, ensuring that children come to see themselves as not potential criminals (which is inexcusable itself) but as criminals.

We must confront that school discipline policies are powerful harbingers of America’s judicial system: Pre-kindergarten expulsions predict the gender and race inequity found in the U.S. judicial and prison systems in which males are disproportionately punished and imprisoned and in which African American males are even more greatly over-represented in both school punishments and incarceration.

My concern is not trapped in an ideal world, and I reject entirely that schools-as-prisons are unavoidable [1].

I also contend that treating students with dignity and respect by rising above the racism and classism of society is not just a desirable goal but something we can achieve.

And nothing about treating students with dignity and respect, nothing about creating a school environment free of racism and classism prevents us from also creating schools that are safe.

[1] For one snapshot of that possibility, consider the documentary Heart of Stone.