Two interesting articles on school discipline have been posted on the Education Week mailing list. First up, Kentucky schools are allegedly suspending "disproportionate" numbers of African American students:
Although 10.4 percent of students across the state are African-American, they constituted 22.3 percent of the youngsters suspended during the 2002-2003 school year.
"Our schools have to answer why they're suspending kids at twice the rate of the population," said Jon Akers, executive director of the Richmond-based Kentucky Center for School Safety, which yesterday released its fifth annual analysis of student discipline....Information is collected from school districts on the number of students punished for breaking criminal laws or violating school board policies, such as those prohibiting fights, defiance of authority, profanity and threats. Numbers show whether students were suspended, expelled or given corporal punishment.
The racial imbalance highlighted in this year's numbers is a big jump from last year, when African-American students represented 10.2 percent of the population and 13 percent of the suspensions.
Akers said the growing inequity should be a call to action for school officials.
What exactly should school officials be expected to do? Set a cap on the number of suspensions per ethnic group? The data don't indicate whether the suspensions are all different students, or a core group of malcontents who are repeatedly suspended. I mean, I'm all for examining root causes, but I wanted to see something in this article suggesting that there is support for school officials who have taken a hard line with discipline and are willing to suspend anyone who is a problem, regardless of how the numbers shake out.
And speaking of hard lines with discipline, a "bullying ban" is now under consideration in Kentucky, and that ban is pretty broadly defined:
It used to be called teasing, razzing that every child went through at one time or another...[but]...the issue of bullying has taken on different dimensions for parents and educators. Two state senators now want to require Kentucky school districts to establish official policies to identify, punish, and prevent the practice.
Their bill passed out of the Senate Education Committee yesterday, but not before several Republican members balked at the notion that it was needed....
The legislation would require discipline codes that prohibit "harassment, intimidation or bullying of a student" for any reason, including "a characteristic" listed in Kentucky's existing statute on hate crimes. Those characteristics include race, gender, religion, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation...
The legislation, tied to major school safety efforts started in 1998, would require schools to make bullying a punishable problem that students or others could report anonymously. Districts would have to provide yearly training on bullying to employees, and report instances to the Center for School Safety.
On the one hand, Kentucky doesn't like the numbers of African American students being suspended, and wants to find "alternative" ways of dealing with the problem to make the numbers go down. On the other hand, Kentucky wants to make bullying a more easily-punishable offense, and I assume that punishment could include suspension. What if Kentucky looks closer at the school disclipine data, which indicates that the vast majority of school suspensions are due to violations of school board policies (and not violations of criminal laws), and discovers that African American are disproportionately suspended for...bullying?
What's more important to Kentucky, reducing the number of students who are suspended, or expanding the definition of punishable offenses? Certainly, both things could be done simultaneously, but I think it's more likely that these two ideas will turn out to be incompatible.
Posted by kswygert at February 3, 2004 09:09 PM