The Discipline Gap at My High School
I strongly support the work of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies to close the racial "discipline gap." I want to be clear in my agreement with "Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap?" by Daniel Losen et. al.
Part of my support, however, could be described as something that lawyers call a "concurring opinion." Students can't learn if they are not in class and we need to invest in Restorative Justice, and other alternatives to suspensions. Neither do I claim that educators are blameless or that we don't need to invest heavily in professional development. So, I concur with Losen's findings while worrying that systems will, once again, take the cheap and easy approach of claiming that better classroom instruction is enough to reduce suspensions.
Although I intensively studied nearly 15 years of Oklahoma City suspension data, and taught at the state's lowest performing high school, I am surprised that in the two years after I left the classroom that the Oklahoma City Public Schools became "one of the top ten highest-suspending districts at the secondary level for all students, and is the highest suspending district in the nation for black secondary students." Moreover, between 2010 and 2012, "overall suspension rates at the high school level also increased from 24.7 percent to 45.2 percent during the same period."
The latest database shows that at the secondary school level, OKCPS "suspension rates for Black students climbed dramatically from 36.3% to 64.2%." (I have my own theories on why, at a time when education funding was cut by 23%, the rate ballooned, but I will limit myself to what I witnessed and studied.)
The OKCPS experience confirms a key finding in the Consortium on Chicago School Research's Organizing Schools for Improvement. It identified the intertwined factors of discipline and attendance as prime reasons why troubled schools fail to improve. When the Consortium looked deeply into stalled reforms, its "most powerful single finding" was the relationship between attendance problems and the failure to manage disciplinary issues. Moreover, the Consortium, "found virtually no chance of improving attendance in schools that lacked safety and order," and "where instruction alignment was weak or predominantly basic skills oriented."
By 2009-2010 school year that was first studied by Losen et. al, the OKCPS had no choice but to invest all of its discretionary money for high schools in remediation for students who were failing their basic skills graduation exams. We were in the middle of the Great Recession which increased the state's homeless rate by 79%. The district barely had more than 40,000 students at any given time. Oklahoma City had 20,000 students who lived with their grandparents, foster parents, or other guardians, and most attended OKCPS neighborhood schools.
During that year, I had 227 students with the majority being on special education IEPs or English Language Learners; eighteen of my students volunteered that they were mentally ill and I suspected that the diagnosis applied to another dozen. Every The Discipline Gap at My High School | John Thompson: