California public schools can’t suspend students for disobeying teachers
kron4.com
kron4.com
That said, this bill isn't banning suspensions entirely for violent or bullying behavior. They just can't suspend students for willful defiance, which as the stats showed has some clear racial bias associated with it.
I think suspensions and expulsions should remain options but last resort and before we get there opt for other kinds of activities which could change their behavior. It'd be interesting to see if those tactics work or if they become "badges of honor" rather than disincentives.
I’m also unconvinced that prison work is bad. Should they just hang out and do nothing? When tied to a shortened sentence, prison work seems just fine.
In the case of public schools using child labor for discipline one possible problem is that the children, if they were actually effective laborers, might tempt a school district to suspend more children to get more work done around the school, and possibly even reduce the number of maintenance workers they hire. You'd want such a system strictly regulated and audited to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
[1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
It's an empty metric
That clears it up. At first reading it seems that teachers couldn't suspend a student if they are being disruptive, but that's not the case.
Thinking about some more I am not sure if this changes the equation much as I can imagine the teacher can reinterpret the "they disobeyed me" into a "they were being disruptive" situation in most cases.
Having chaperoned a few field trips for my kids' school and having dealt with students who are disruptive, I can sympathize with teachers trying to get a handle on one or two kids who just refuse to listen. It can ruin the environment for the rest of the class and take away precious learning time. Having said that I don't really have a solution. Not sure if assigning extra work or isolating them to a separate class would work.
> Black students made up 5.6% of California school enrollments in the last school year, but got hit with 15.6% of all 'willful defiance' suspensions
Interesting. Is it inherent systemic racism coming from teachers? Is that worth investigating more rather than just making the statistic go away by banning those types of suspensions. Something about that doesn't seem right.
More likely it is the the systemic racism of society imposing struggles on the students' communities, which then manifests in the students' disobedient classroom behavior.
The teachers, meanwhile are operating in the same frame of systemic racism and associated socioeconomic conditions as any of us are. We all - black people included - are conditioned by society's default systemic racism towards black youths. But public school teachers serving struggling black communities are made to confront this more directly in the course of their work.
We expect public school to function as social work facilities, treating the social dysfunctions our society creates in young people while also preparing them intellectually to be contributing members of society, but we don't fund them enough to carry out that work.
Given this, public schools, which must by law serve a higher ratio of troubled youth than schools that can choose which students they admit, should be able to employ a higher ratio of behavioral health specialists to do this.
Better yet, those issues should be treated, or prevented, before the children arrive at school, but that would require a conversation about the distribution of wealth, security, and community stability that we as a society don't seem to be ready to have yet.
This subtle (or not so subtle) attack on teachers is sad.
This stat alone doesn't tell us anything, let alone who to blame.
Someone pointed out that black students were disproportionately affected by these suspensions. Suspensions are handed out by the teachers. So what is your explanation then? Racism can be manifested both institutionally a well as personally, unconsciously even. Are you implying someone or something else is telling the teacher to assign these punishments?
> This stat alone doesn't tell us anything, let alone who to blame.
So why bother publish it if it doesn't tell us anything? They seem to have changed the rules for the whole state of California based on such statistics. Do you think they are inaccurately gathered?
There maybe different reasons for that. Maybe some kids are more disruptive than others. This could be for a myriad of reasons, that have nothing to do with the teacher.
Racism exists but blaming everything on racism, especially on teachers, who on average are probably more social aware than the avg person doesnt solve any problems, and might actually make them worse.
Regardless though, suspensions always seemed counter productive to me: "You were misbehaving so as a punishment we won't let you learn anything for a few days."
Instead, put the disruptive into self-study rooms where they have to do school work and the only talking allowed is with an instructor assigned to assist students with the work. Or any other even vaguely related learning activity. But "you're not allowed to learn" is just ridiculous.
Hmm, I might have missed something. Sorry about that. Can you point out where I said the "you're not allowed to learn". I searched my comment for that phrase and couldn't find it there.
actually increased graduation rates
It simply means that teachers have a lot less discretion, which will remove a lot of the potential for bias to affect their students in negative ways.
Not saying I agree with it but in practice it's a backhanded way of punishing parents for having disruptive kids.
Troublemakers, mostly boys, are kids who will not silently sit still. It's easy to blame the parents of these children for their lack of discipline, but casting blame doesn't solve problems.
The problem with troublemakers is that they are disruptive to the rest of the class. Further, they encourage other students, who ordinarily have no problem silently sitting still, to act like troublemakers as well.
Removing troublemakers from the class makes helps teachers teach, helps non-troublemakers learn, and relieves troublemakers from the boredom of silently sitting still. Win-win-win, right?
Unfortunately, troublemakers often feel out-of-school suspensions as a reward, not a punishment. In-school-suspension (ISS) is somewhat better, because the troublemaker can't just play video games while they are supposedly being disciplined. But ISS still reinforces the notion that there is an alternative to education.
As someone who had trouble silently sitting still as an adolescent -- and I still struggle with lectures that discourage audience interruptions -- I hope to see education evolve into more polymorphic system where creativity and spontaneity are valued along with discipline and time management.
The best remedy in this sort of situation, where a boy's got ants in his pants and can't sit still, is sports. Sports give kids a productive way to burn off their energy. I know some people here and in other STEM-associated communities think sports is a four letter word (ackshully it's six) because of the pop culture meme that athleticism and intelligence are mutually exclusive and you can either be a jock or a nerd but not both. But that's nothing more than a dumb pigeon-holing stereotype perpetuated by lazy hollywood and television writers (and sometimes internalized and aped by impressionable children.)
Extramural sports help unruly kids in other ways too. By providing a structured environment for a greater portion of the day, the strain placed on parents is reduced and kids are kept from getting into trouble unsupervised at home.
There are, of course, other ways to accomplish this. I was "scared straight" as a young teen when my mother cancelled her plans for the evening so she could go talk with my teachers after school about my behavior, which wasn't severe enough to warrant suspension but was nevertheless bad enough to disturb my parents and teachers.
Ideally the kid is set back on a good path before their behavior becomes severe enough to warrant suspension, but sometimes (probably most often because of poor parenting) this doesn't happen.
The only way that suspension is punishment is if the parents punish their kid for being suspended.
This only really gets rid of the "arrested for no reason but resisting arrest" style of suspension.
Sometimes we can do some rotten shit as children.
A handful of teachers would give really bad instructions. Like, commanding everyone how to round numbers incorrectly kind of bad. I can’t even wrap my head around it still.
I’d do the work as it’s supposed to be done. When my answers matched the book and nobody else’s did: I was accused of cheating & stealing the answer keys or disobedience & not following instruction.
It's not really fun being abused like a punchbag and emotionally drained by narcissists without a resort. I haven't bullied anyone in school, I haven't been violent towards other kids even close to just broing, I don't get triggered by whatever people tell me. And not much parenting was done here since I mostly lived in my own chamber. (single mentally ill parent with no care taker or anything). A lot of the behaviors I have seen that are disruptive in school or in kids are result of their parents outright. They are violent because their parents train them to be or not care. They are dumbed down by parents because they don't want to work they don't want to take the time to patiently explain why if you beat someone else or be disruptive, it will be bad for you not because someone will punish you, not because the rules said so but the society you live in will have worse environment later on when you grow up.
There are countless bad teachers. Teachers need to be educated to make their subject actually interesting. Too many are trained in classroom management rather than storytelling.
I will give an example. My business law professor was so good that I still have tapes of that class from 20+ years ago. I remember every single lecture! My electronics high school teacher was equally excellent.
No one disrupts a truly interesting class. History can be as boring as a recital of dates or as vivid as creating a play. English can be made interesting by incorporating writing prompts and etymology vs pointless book reports about uninteresting books. I can’t write about poems that are meaningless to me. No one actually taught me how to write term papers and what were the acceptance criteria.
Suspensions are pointless. I was threatened with suspension and was confused how it was supposed to be a punishment. If anything, it felt like a good outcome.
Bad teachers trigger negative emotions. I was 38 when I took a class in choreography from an incompetent teacher in college. She actually banned me from watching our class’s last public performance for which you could buy tickets. I had an ambitious project involving mixing two dance styles in 3 tempos to a Japanese song.
Well, I am not 18 and so I endured her nonsense but at the same time resisted it. She made me cry, which takes a lot. That person hated me with a passion. I must have reminded her of an ex boyfriend because I can’t explain it any other way.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-sec...
- good teachers leaving (because they can't do their jobs)
- quality of teaching going down (because of the above and because disruptive elements will not be dealt with properly)
This isn’t true. The pay is better in public schools, the jobs are more secure and the pensions are much better.
> Professionally minded teachers move on to charter and private schools once they've done their time in the pits long enough to transition into a role where they're not just daycare workers.
Utter tripe. The only part of being a teacher outside the public school system that’s better is the average quality of the students. You have to really value that to think it’s worth more than being effectively unfireable and having a fantastic pension, with pretty good pay once you’re somewhere between three and six years in.
Apparently a lot of teachers care heavily about this going by turnover rates in low-income public schools which are often the starting schools for fresh educators.
Is that the average or median figure for pay? Because I can tell you right now that in LA and San Diego the most common starting place for teachers earning or who have just earned their credentials will either be juvie or low income neighborhoods albeit this is from a highschool perspective so maybe I'm simply wrong with respect to the article. Maybe if you account for public schools in higher income neighborhoods then teaching publically remains competitive and I failed to acknowledge that in my earlier post but the overall picture for a starting teacher is none the less that they will work to either escape public school or ascend out of bad/high-turnover schools.
I think the good old days when a teacher could hit you with a ruler were the best form of discipline. Nothing gets a kids attention better than humiliation.
No it's not. Look up the statistics.
>We certainly did not need to have Police permanently stationed in the school.
Most other developed countries don't either. There's no correlation with corporal punishment in schools and school shootings.
Or does it just feel like it was better? My parents think it's much more dangerous for kids to play outside now than back when I was a kid in the 80s. Despite the fact that the crime rate is much lower.
Using size and power to rule children earns fear, not respect, and I think there are a lot of studies to back that up.
We weren't but given the choice (false dichotomy, obviously) of teachers hitting kids with rulers for being out of line or having someone who is trained to see everything through the lens of "what charges can we toss at this, what law is being violated" patrolling every school I would choose the former in a heartbeat. Kids hit with rulers is a diffuse bad thing. Kids catching criminal charges is a concentrated bad thing.
That is something that's definitely worse today for white kids. If you were a black kid 60 years ago, it was much worse than it is today.
We as a society should screw more white kids because they're not being screwed as hard as the black kids?
Sounds like a good argument to have school resource officers nowhere if you ask me.