The New York Civil Liberties Union this week issued a report finding that the overwhelming majority of arrests in the city’s public schools are of minority students. This dog-bites-man news is just part of a nationwide drive to undermine school discipline — a drive that’s already on track to raise havoc in New York City classrooms.
I am no fan of having NYPD officers in the city schools; it’s been a bureaucratic nightmare. But the racial disparities here have everything to do with students’ lives before they walk in the school door, and nothing to do with discrimination.
Yet advocates have already gotten the city, as well as other urban US school systems, to adopt discipline codes oriented more toward “therapeutic responses” rather than the traditionalsuspension.
The impetus comes from the Civil Rights Division of the federal Education Department, which has been collecting race and ethnicity data on suspensions. Again, it’s dog-bites-man: Blacks and Hispanics get suspended at far greater rates than whites and Asians.
Most of us would point to higher rates of poverty and single-parenthood as the reason for the underlying discipline problems here. But advocates claim the disparate suspension rates are a cause of disparate incarceration rates of these minorities.
By this logic, reducing school suspensions will lower incarceration rates. Sadly, New York and others are about to test that theory, with a revised discipline code.
Suspensions, except for the most egregious acts of violence, will virtually become a thing of the past. The new code eliminates terms like “seriously disruptive,” “abusive,” “insubordinate,” “dangerous” or “violent.”
And it’s not just the language — there’s a broad reduction in penalties.
The code still categorizes school offenses from Level One to Level Five, the most severe. But a given offense will see the wrongdoer removed from class or school for fewer days — if at all.
Take Level Two infractions, which include using “vulgar or lewd language, gestures or behavior.” Now these bring removal from the class where the offense occurred only after the teacher presents documentation of the behavior to administrators.
That could easily take days — with the classroom disruptions continuing. And the offense no longer merits a suspension unless the behavior is repeated over several days.
Level Three infractions used to include “insubordination” — but that term is gone altogether; now it’s classified as “disruptive behavior.” And it will no longer merit a superintendent suspension — which could get a kid 10 days — in the most severe cases. At most, it’ll mean a principal’s suspension, which can’t last more than five days.
We’re talking about cases where a teacher asks a student to remove a hat or move his seat, or a dean requests that a student leave the room and accompany her to the dean’soffice, and the student refuses. How can it be wise to soften punishment here?
Yet the prescribed antidote for this kind of behavior is now counseling, plus more intensiveoutreach to parents.
It’s not the box cutter smuggled into a school that unravels the institution. Rather, it’s a student population that is allowed to grow defiant, that’s given no reason to respect authority and no concept of what civility is about.
In New York, discipline has already been stressed by the reconfigurationof many new schools to include not just the traditional grades 9-12 but all of grades 6-12. Those of us who teach in those buildings have observed many sixth-graders acting out — emulating the older students that surround them.
And the feds’ collection of racial data on suspensions had already made many administrators averse to suspending minority students, who often make up the majority of our students, out of fear of being charged with racial bias.
I fear that watering down the school-discipline code will be the final ingredient in a deadly reciple.
Marc Epstein was a deanof students at Jamaica HS and has taughthistory there for 16 years.