Schools banish kids often and self-righteously. Generally, educators and the public believe that suspensions and even expulsions are sound, necessary practices. If kids don’t behave according to the rules, out they go, onto the streets where apparently they will learn how to control their impulses, anger or poor choices. Feral behavior is sent back into the wild.
Hasta la vista, baby.
I bring this up at holiday time, when people of all ages hope to belong somewhere. As mammals, we dearly want to connect with creatures who connect back to us. So banishment feels horrible. It mainly teaches us to resent or even hate the banishers. It’s barbaric.
Even so, in school year 2006-07 (the latest available national data), America’s schools meted out 3.2 million suspensions. That year Rhode Island’s public schools kicked kids out of school for well over 60,000 days — or 167 years of class time spread among fewer than 18,000 kids. For some reason the data lumps together all 18,000 kick-outs, no matter what kind of suspension they got — out-of-school, in-school, or “alternative program.” They’re a subset of “bad kids” among the 152,000 students attending our public schools that year.
It gets worse. The 167 years are only for out-of-school suspensions. If you also add the days spent in in-school suspension and “alternative programing,” it comes to a total of just under 85,000 days (232 years) of learning interrupted, if not completely halted.
Furthermore, over 5,000 incidents of suspension were for skipping detention. It’d be funny, if it weren’t so awful.
Suspension is a holdover from seemingly-efficient factory-model schools. Defective products are rejected from the assembly line and considered “acceptable casualties” until the number of “casualties” exceeds acceptable and forces the assembly line to stop and solve the problem.
Schools set no such limits. Lots of misbehavior leads to lots of acceptable casualties. And zero-tolerance policies have driven these casualties through the roof in many schools.
Nationally about a third of the kids drop out before graduating from high school each year. Guess what? Most drop-outs have been suspended, many repeatedly.
