“Punitive Discipline Policies Have Proven to Be Destructive to Children”
Janine Jackson: Nothing says America 2018 like a spate of storieson how back-to-school shopping includes bulletproof backpacks. Arming teachers and gearing kids up like commandos are presented as more-or-less reasonable responses to concerns about school safety.
Any violence in schools is too much, of course, but a conversation about school safety that’s focused on guns and bullets is a narrow and distorted conversation. Recasting our definition of a “safe school environment” could lead us in some very different directions.
Karen Dolan is director of the Criminalization of Race and Poverty Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author, with Ebony Slaughter-Johnson and Myacah Sampson, of the recent report Students Under Siege: How the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Poverty and Racism Endanger Our Schoolchildren. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Dolan.
Karen Dolan: Thank you, Janine. It’s a pleasure.
Take us through what you see as the most salient observations in this report. What were you looking at, and what did you find?
We were looking at the ways in which children can have the most support and the best chance at the best life. And while we are doing this work and this research, the Parkland shooting happened, of course, and it has been in the news a lot, gun violence and school shootings, which of course endanger our public school students. But at the same time, there’s a larger number of students, there’s millions of students, who are also being endangered simply by having their future cut short by excessive expulsions, suspensions, referrals to the criminal justice system, lack of proper supports in school for academics, for social and emotional learning, and for well-being.
And as we hear the discussions on the airwaves, as we read it in the newspaper, as you said, about going back to school, and the Education Department suggesting that we take money away from student supports and put them into arming teachers and putting more cops in the hallways, it’s really exactly the wrong thing that we should be doing. And what we would like to do is see the debate broaden into looking at safety measures in a deeper, more holistic way as our students return to school.
When you say it’s the wrong thing to do, or the wrong direction, that has to do with the impacts of these punitive, “get tough” school policies, that people often say are aimed at safety, but the fallout from them falls out in certain kinds of ways.
That’s right. The impacts can be very devastating and very long term. So you see everything from a child having one suspension doubling their Continue reading: "Punitive Discipline Policies Have Proven to Be Destructive to Children"
