Where kindergartners can be suspended for calling out an answer in class
Most of the 3 million or so students who get out-of-school suspensions are in high school. But increasingly kids in preschool and kindergarten are getting sent home as punishment, and for reasons that you might not expect.
In this PBS NewsHour video, John Merrow reports about suspensions in the Success charter school network in New York City, which began in 2006 with one school and now has 34, most of them elementary. The Success network is a prime example of the “no excuses” model of schooling, which essentially means that teachers are responsible for student achievement and that there are no excuses — not hunger or sickness or violent home lives — for students not doing well. Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and director of the school’s Teach For America program, recently described them this way:
“These schools start with the belief that there’s no reason for the large academic gaps that exist between poor minority students and more privileged children. They argue that if we just used better methods, demanded more, had higher expectations, enforced these higher expectations through very rigorous and uniform teaching methods and a very uniform and scripted curriculum geared to being successful on high-stakes tests, we can minimize or even eradicate these large gaps, high rates of drop outs and the academic failures of these children. To reach these objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told.”
That provides background for Merrow’s video on the Success Academy Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, which is housed in the same building as P.S. 138 in Brooklyn, a traditional public school that doesn’t suspend its students. The contrast in philosophy is striking.
At Success Academy Prospect Heights, students are required to avoid committing any one of 65 infractions that take six pages to explain. The code of conduct, Merrow says, labels as infractions everything from “bullying and gambling to littering and failing to be in a ready-for-success position.” Getting out of a seat without permission or calling out an answer are infractions as well, and it doesn’t take many to get suspended.
Merrow said that at Success Academy Prospect Heights, which enrolled 203 kindergartners and first graders last year, Principal Monica Komery issued 44 suspensions — all to 11 students. One child, Merrow said, was suspended 12 Where kindergartners can be suspended for calling out an answer in class - The Washington Post: