Recent coverage on excessive disciplinary actions in charter schools in the Chicago Catalyst and the Washington Post should prompt soul searching for educators in both charter and neighborhood schools. One of the original purposes of charter schools was pushing the educational status quo to think anew. Traditionally, attendance and behavior were the third rail of school politics, and urban schools were especially loathe to address disciplinary issues. Poor secondary schools were caught in a Catch 22, where they were not allowed to enforce their codes of conduct because there was no place to put chronic offenders. But districts refused to invest in alternative schools because educators, who were continually complaining about chaos in their buildings, would supposedly kick the difficult students out. My hope was that reality-based policies, such as allowing charters to build respectful learning cultures, could then be extended to neighborhood schools in the
