Student discipline must move beyond ‘willful defiance,’ educators say - by Jane Meredith Adams
California schools urgently need strategies for discipline that help children learn from mistakes, make reparations for harm and go on to succeed, a group of educators said last week in support of a bill that would dramatically change school discipline practices by banning the use of “willful defiance” in meting out expulsion and restricting its use in mandating suspension.The educators made their case to the Senate Education Committee, which then voted 7-1 to pass Assembly Bill 420 and move the measure to the Senate floor. The bill would bar suspensions for the subjectively defined “willful defiance of school authorities” for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, while middle and high school students could be suspended for willful defiance only for a third offense – and only if alternative means of discipline had been used for the previous offenses. No student at any grade level could be expelled for willful defiance.
The use of willful defiance as a cause for suspension and expulsion has become a flashpoint in the debate about how to manage school environments, particularly when students come to school with complex emotional issues stemming from poverty, violence and trauma. The term is listed as a
