UN-TEACHING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
disappeared, suspensions for graver acts of violence multiplied. Under pressure from Mayor Bill de Blasio, district administrators in New York City discouraged school resource officers (SROs) from reporting in-school offenses and recording official police referrals of the sort the city would have to pass on to the feds. Suspension rates plummeted, satisfying federal expectations. But informally, deans and principals tell teachers not to kick kids out of class if they curse, throw furniture, or hit another student. And even when an unruly student makes his way to the principal’s office, he’ll know no graver consequence awaits him there than a cozy in-school suspension or a transfer to another school. At schools across the country, the old tried-and- true system of deterring misbehavior by punishing it with a predictable and unfavorable consequence hasn’t held up. In Broward County, Florida – where 19-year- old Nikolas Cruz killed 14 high school students and three staff members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – traumatized teachers and their tough-talking union president say they’ve been discouraged from punishing students or reporting their formerly punishable offenses. The shift in district policy began five years ago under Superintendent Robert Runcie, a former Arne Duncan acolyte from Chicago.
from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, crafted by then-Secretary and longtime Obama associate Arne Duncan told school leaders: Carrying out school discipline policies as they stand may now land your school in hot water with the feds. Duncan cited a 2011 study finding African- American students three times as likely to be suspended or expelled. “It is the only way,” Duncan said of his top-down policy overhaul, “to change the reality that our children face every single day.” A subsequent guidance made clear that any school that punished minority students more often would face a costly federal investigation. And so by threat of lost funds, these misguided directions bore the force of federal law. Ever since, teachers and students have seen their schools fall out of control and into chaos. Districts nationwide “reformed” accordingly, adopting similar practices to discourage the documentation of in-school violence and fudging the data when they found these new policies didn’t work. In Miami, documents reporting thousands of violent in-school fights have “disappeared” from the district’s records since 2015. In Philadelphia, the reforms have so far backfired abundantly. Truancy rates had been on a steady decline until federal guidance forced the city to ban suspensions for non- violent acts of “willful defiance” – after which truancy increased 16% in the next three years. Black students, whose disproportionate punishment the federal reform intended to deter, were suspended more often than before. While “willful defiance” suspensions
66 May 2018
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