Mar. 8, 2015 – Elizabeth Green, Chalkbeat.orgChalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green examines the case for and against ‘no excuses’ discipline, drawing on reporting from her book ‘Building a Better Teacher’ Continue reading
School Discipline
Restoring the Promise to Black Girls: A Conversation in Pittsburgh with Monique W. Morris
Save the date! March 9, 2016: 6–8 p.m.
Monique W. Morris, cofounder of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute and author of Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, will discuss her new book, and the challenges Black girls face in public schools – from inappropriate pushout policies and practices, to barriers to academic achievement. Click through for more information.
Federal Education Law Delivers Vital Protections for Foster Youth
Feb. 22, 2016 – YouthToday –
Children involved in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems face countless barriers to educational success. Continue reading
Opinion: Unless we’re careful, the new ‘No Child’ may still leave some behind
PennLive Op-Ed – Dec. 24, 2015 – By Deborah Gordon Klehr and Jackie Perlow:
Earlier this month President Barack Obama signed into law a comprehensive overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), previously known as No Child Left Behind.
First passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the mission of this federal law is “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education.”
While past iterations of ESEA have failed to fulfill this promise, this month’s reauthorization offers states like Pennsylvania an opportunity to reaffirm ESEA’s central mission to advance educational equity and protect the civil rights of vulnerable students.
In several ways this reauthorization, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), represents an improvement over existing legislation.
It will provide targeted support to struggling schools, including schools where traditionally overlooked student groups consistently underperform.
The new ESSA does more to hold schools responsible for the achievement of English language learners, including those with disabilities, and provides significant educational protections for children in foster care and those experiencing homelessness.
The law also expands educational opportunities for youth in the juvenile justice system and supports their smooth transition both into and out of juvenile justice school placements.
In addition, we know that many vulnerable students experience trauma, and ESSA also takes positive steps to support schools to recognize and address trauma. We applaud these important new provisions.
However, the Education Law Center remains concerned about whether the new law has the teeth to guarantee a quality public education to our state’s most vulnerable students.
On its face, the changes in ESSA will do little to improve resource inequities, discipline disparities, or the lack of opportunities for educationally at-risk students in Pennsylvania.
Most worrisome, however, is the law’s lack of federal oversight and accountability.
Under ESSA, much of the responsibility for ensuring educational opportunities for vulnerable students has been shifted to the states.
Both current research and our experience in Pennsylvania show that when states are given unfettered control over education, the civil rights of the most educationally vulnerable students often go unprotected and their academic outcomes suffer.
We are concerned that without federal oversight, schools in Pennsylvania may ignore the needs of the educationally vulnerable students they serve.
In no area is this concern more pressing than when it comes to school discipline. Under No Child Left Behind, schools faced harsh consequences if students failed to achieve on high-stakes testing.
This focus on standardized test scores incentivized schools to push out the students who posed the greatest challenges.
At the same time, states largely turned a blind eye to the resulting discipline practices that disproportionately excluded students of color and students with disabilities.
While data shows that students of all races violate school rules at the same rate, black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students.
The consequences of punitive discipline reach far beyond missing a day or two of class.
Students who are suspended even once in ninth grade are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school.
We know that unless the state actively holds itself accountable for eliminating existing discipline disparities, discriminatory and overly punitive discipline practices will continue to act as barriers for our most vulnerable students.
While ESSA will not require Pennsylvania to address these disparities, it does offer an opportunity to do so.
Under ESSA, each state is charged with developing an accountability plan. This plan must include three academic factors and one non-academic factor.
The law permits states to choose “school climate” – a broad term that encompasses suspensions, expulsions, and removal to alternative education settings – as the non-academic factor in their accountability plan.
The Education Law Center urges Pennsylvania to take advantage of this opportunity and identify school climate as the fourth factor in its accountability plan.
We also caution Pennsylvania not to replicate the incentives in No Child Left Behind that drove schools to adopt exclusionary discipline practices in a failed attempt to improve school performance.
Rather, the state’s renewed attention to an accountability framework should address improving academic performance in tandem with addressing school discipline.
This opportunity is timely because the Wolf administration and the Pennsylvania Department of Education have recently announced plans to revamp the state’s current and flawed School Performance Profile metric, which often penalizes schools impacted by poverty rather than rewarding progress.
However, including this factor is only the first step. As the state begins the process of developing and implementing its accountability plan, it is vital that Pennsylvania engage parents, students, advocates, and educators in these decisions.
We urge the state to seek out communities and leaders with diverse perspectives and include their voices at every step in the accountability plan process.
Only by holding ourselves accountable for eliminating the barriers that harm vulnerable students and providing schools with the resources they need to support them will Pennsylvania be able to avoid the shortcomings of the ESSA and ensure that all students in the state receive the quality education they deserve.
Deborah Gordon Klehr is the Executive Director of the Education Law Center. Jackie Perlow, Esq. is the Kaufman Legal Fellow at the Education Law Center.
http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2015/12/unless_were_careful_the_new_no.html
Zero Tolerance for Zero Tolerance
December 7, 2015 – The Philadelphia Citizen (Online) – BY ROXANNE PATEL SHEPELAVY
Even before the video emerged this fall of a South Carolina high school girl being thrown to the ground by a white police officer while sitting at her desk, before the story of a Muslim boy in Texas arrested in September for bringing to school a handmade clock, before an Oklahoma City school resource officer allegedly punched a 16-year-old in the face, Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel had had enough.
As a Philly cop for 29 years, Bethel had witnessed the escalation of the school safety movement, intended to prevent the sort of carnage that occurred at Columbine in 1999. In Philadelphia, zero tolerance for guns had morphed into a prohibition on other tools that might cause harm—like pointy-tipped scissors—and to other types of behavior that are more about adolescent defiance than actual violence. By 2013, Philadelphia police were arresting 1,600 students a year, as young as 10 years old, more than half of whom were first-time offenders.
It was a stark and literal illustration of the schools to prison pipeline: One minute, a child who may be struggling at home acts out at school, the next he’s being hauled out in handcuffs and thrown into a holding cell.
“We’re supposed to be the adults here, the ones who know better,” Bethel says. “A child could be getting abused at home, have no food at home, and then we don’t even ask them questions before arresting them? I’ve watched us use the stick for discipline for decades. But the stick hasn’t worked.”
So Bethel, who two years ago began overseeing the 84 Philly cops who work with schools, decided to upend the system as we know it. Today, Philadelphia is one place in America where an incident like that in South Carolina is increasingly less likely to occur. Since the start of school last year, Philadelphia police officers no longer take part in disciplining students for nonviolent “code of conduct violations”—like refusing to put away a cell phone or leave a classroom. All school resource officers are trained in mediation and de-escalation, something not mandated by Pennsylvania or 27 other states. And first-time juvenile offenders accused of any in-school crime are no longer arrested. Instead, they’re sent to a pre-arrest diversion program that evaluates the root of their behavior and sets them up with social services.
Launched in the spring of 2014, the program has already been more effective than even Bethel anticipated. Last school year—the first full year of diversion—police made 858 fewer arrests, a more than 50 percent drop. (This was the program’s five-year goal.) Instead, 702 students were diverted for social services. And Bethel says only six of those 702 students had another incident at school that required police intervention—compared to the one out of five juveniles arrested in Pennsylvania who are re-arrested within two years. The School District’s chief disciplinarian says vastly fewer students were referred to her for expulsion hearings. And this year so far, 150 students have been diverted, which may be even more successful than last.
“If you change the trajectory of where a child goes, if they can find the inner soul to get through and graduate high school, it can make a real difference in their lives,” Bethel says.
The pre-diversion program takes one step further a program started by the District Attorney’s office several years ago, in which 85 percent of students arrested in schools went before a Youth Aid Panel, rather than to juvenile court. That kept their records clean, but they were still arrested first—by a uniformed cop, using handcuffs, who took their fingerprints and put them in a holding cell for up to six hours. “That’s traumatic for a young kid,” Bethel notes.
Now, if a student has no arrest record, they are sent home with a letter, and the promise of a visit from the Department of Human Services within 72 hours. During the visit, a social worker (sometimes accompanied by an officer) explains to the family what could have happened if the child had been arrested; talks to them about the child’s needs; and offers to enroll him or her in a 30 to 90 day treatment or other social service program from one of six community health providers. (The services are from existing DHS programs, which had been underutilized.) Rachel Holzman, the school district’s deputy chief for student rights and responsibilities, says 95 percent of families DHS has visited under the program have used the services. This school year, DHS will also refer children to Police Athletic League programs at 18 recreation centers around town.
“We are not all of a sudden going to solve all the ills at school,” Bethel says. “But we are changing what happens with these children. We’re asking them, ‘What’s going on with you?’”
The answer, Bethel says, is often a catalog of the ills that plague communities where most of these arrests stem from: Children in poverty, with parents who are addicted, or are not around, who are sexually or physically abused at home, who are carrying a gun not because they plan to use it, but because they fear for their safety on the walk to school. This important detail in a child’s life can make all the difference. “We can’t control the variables of these children’s neighborhoods,” Bethel says, “but we can control how we interact with them.”
The national mania for arresting students follows the trajectory of our national mania for incarceration that has finally started to wane, with bipartisan talk of releasing nonviolent offenders and reducing prison sentences for drug crimes. After Columbine, states around the country passed legislation intended to prevent shootings in schools. (This has not especially worked.) In Pennsylvania, the Safe Schools Act and zero tolerance policies ballooned to include other weapons like pepper spray, and pointy scissors—even if the student never took it out of their bag. Under the policies, principals and school resource officers often felt they had no choice but to call in the cops for issues that would have been dealt with in-school in another generation.
But as the South Carolina case illustrated, school police officers are often not equipped to understand the very people they are sent to discipline (or protect). Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania, says school resource officers in the state are not required to get training in de-escalation, adolescent behavior, prevention, the impact of trauma or the collateral consequences of arrest. (As The Atlantic reported after the South Carolina incident, only 12 states do this type of training.)
As in the rest of the American justice system, school arrests, suspensions and expulsions disproportionately affect black students; Klehr says African American girls are the fastest growing population in the justice system, and students with disabilities are twice as likely to receive out of school suspensions. “We see what happened in South Carolina happening in Pennsylvania routinely,” says Klehr, who regularly takes on city and state school systems for unfair discipline practices.
Under Bethel’s program, Good Shepherd Mediation Services has trained all 84 city cops and 300 school police officers in mental first aid and conflict resolution. They have also trained other school personnel to handle incidents themselves—which Bethel and Klehr agree is the ultimate goal. Last year, Bethel says school officials diffused 300 incidents that in other years would have required police assistance. Partly, that’s because his cops are no longer allowed in schools for code of conduct violations. But it is also because they now have the tools, and the mandate, to treat these incidents for what they are: School issues.
“We can’t arrest our way out of school climate issues,” says Klehr, who considers Bethel a visionary for his work in Philly. “We need to be providing school guidance counselors and teachers to support these kids, not arresting them. We don’t need police there in the first place.”
Even Bethel, a police officer for nearly three decades, sees the need for less police intervention, not more. Despite the success of his diversion program, Bethel insists it is just a stop-gap until we fundamentally change the way we approach juvenile justice. He’s retiring from the police department this month to work full-time on this issue, with the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform Lab at Drexel University, which has been monitoring the diversion program.(This work will be funded through a three-year Stoneleigh Foundation Fellowship.)
For the next three years, he will continue working with Philly schools, but says his goals are much broader: prevention training for students; advocating for similar programs in other districts around the state and country, which have started to notice the progress in Philly; widening pre-arrest diversion to out-of school crimes, like first time theft; and lobbying for better school safety legislation. Along with the Education Law Center, Bethel says it is time to revamp the Safe Schools Act and zero tolerance policies to allow schools more leeway in disciplining students within their walls, and to keep more children out of jails. Klehr says she is working with the governor’s office on a bill that would require conflict mediation and adolescent training for school resource officers when Districts apply for state funding.
Under Bethel’s program, Good Shepherd Mediation Services has trained 84 city cops, 300 school police officers and other school personnel in how to deescalate conflict. Last year, school officials handled more than 300 incidents themselves that in other years would have required police assistance.
In the meantime, Bethel sees his work as both potentially life-changing—keeping a student in school, instead of in jail—and a (perhaps overly-optimistic) salve for oft-troubled police-community relations. “We have an opportunity to demonstrate to people that we are not who they think we are,” he says. “All those 700 kids we diverted last year, their first contact with the police department was a positive one. Their opinion of policing is going to change, and they will grow into adults with a much different perspective. ”
Law students advocate for Phila. public school families
April 7th – By Jennifer Wright, The Daily Pennsylvanian – Penn students have the chance to be there for the best times in the lives of Philadelphia public school students. But a few have chosen to help with some of the worst. Continue reading
We must address disparities in school discipline and decrease suspensions
March 4, 2015 – Letter to the Editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – The Feb. 25 editorial “A Place to Learn: Student Suspension Has a Role in Keeping Order” disregards decades of well-established research and best practices to promote regressive school policies.
Pittsburgh schools work with community groups to reduce suspensions
Feb. 23, 2015 – By Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Last school year, the number of suspensions in Pittsburgh Public Schools dropped 15 percent over the prior year, but still more than 9,900 suspensions were issued, nearly three-fourths of them to black students.
ELC Webinar on School Climate and Discipline for Youth in Foster Care
Join ELC for this hour-long webinar highlighting current best practices, policies, and tools that can improve school climate for all students, and especially those in the child welfare system. The webinar was developed for educators, school administrators, teachers, and advocates, and guides participants through the Legal Center on Foster Care and Education’s new tool on school discipline.
Philadelphia’s shift in discipline policy
Dec. 9, 2014 – By Dan Hardy, Philadelphia Public School Notebook – In the wake of the catastrophic Columbine school shooting in 1999, many school district leaders, politicians, and police summed up their response to school violence with two words: zero tolerance.
Infractions that once might have prompted a discussion of motive and intention instead often led to immediate, automatic suspensions, expulsions, and calls to police.
ELC Applauds Pittsburgh Public Schools’ New Code of Student Conduct
Aug. 5, 2014 – The Education Law Center applauds Pittsburgh Public Schools’ new code of student conduct, which reduces harmful zero-tolerance policies that disproportionally impact students of color and students with disabilities, while emphasizing greater protections and supports for English language learners, LGBTQ students, and parenting students. The PPS School Board adopted the changes at its meeting on Aug. 4, 2014.
The new policy will go into effect when school resumes later in the month.
Proposed changes in Pittsburgh schools’ student conduct code emphasize progressive and positive discipline
July 20, 2014 – by Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post Gazette – The board of Pittsburgh Public Schools will vote Wednesday on Code of Student Conduct revisions that replace zero tolerance with more discretion, incorporate ideas from a student-proposed bill of rights and provide explicit protection of students for sexual orientation and gender identity expression.
Cheryl Kleiman, an attorney with Education Law Center, which worked with the district on the proposal, said this version eliminates remaining zero tolerance policies and allows individual discretion.
Racial disparities in school discipline: A Radio Times discussion
March 31, 2014 – WHYY, Radio Times – New information released by the Department of Education shed more light on a disturbing difference when it comes to school discipline — minority students are suspended at a much higher rate than white students. The same applies to expulsions and harsher punishments and the problem is particularly acute in Pennsylvania. With more research to show that zero tolerance policies are ineffective, some educators are rethinking the whys and hows of school discipline.
WHYY’s Radio Times talks to Harold Jordan of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Deborah Klehr of the Education Law Center, and University of Pennsylvania education professor Matthew Steinberg about the issues around school suspensions, expulsions and even arrests, particularly when it comes to minority students.
Philly district orders school police to stay out of level 1 offenses
March 25, 2014 – by Kevin McCorry, Newsworks – Philadelphia School District has directed school police officers to stop responding to calls related to Level 1 student conduct offenses. The proscribed violations range from “failure to follow classroom rules” to “truancy” to “verbal altercations” to “inappropriate touching/public displays of affection.”