California released data today showing school suspensions and expulsions continue to fall as a result of new state laws and a wave of actions by communities and educators to keep students in school. School suspensions are down 25% over the past two years, and 15% last year alone. Expulsions fell by 20% last year. That ... Read More
Some people say that if you remove classroom distractions by suspending misbehaving students, other students benefit. A just-published research study says the opposite is true. The study found that high rates of school suspensions harmed math and reading scores for non-suspended students. Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Kentucky followed more than 17,000 Kentucky students ... Read More
Research Shows Zero Tolerance Doesn’t Work Study after study has shown that zero-tolerance discipline policies are harmful to all students and disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students. Recently, the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit center that studies justice policy recently released a report, “A Generation Later: What We’ve ... Read More
Sunday’s New York Times featured an excellent article on social-emotional learning (SEL) in schools. SEL helps garner psychological intelligence and emotional skills that ultimately helps children regulate emotions. The development of SEL in school is an old phenomenon, as even John Dewey argued that schooling should be intended to teach children ‘deeper habits of the ... Read More
This weekend will showcase an entire conference dedicated to fixing school discipline. “We Can Do Better: Collaborating to Reform School Discipline and Accountability,” is sponsored by the Advancement Project and will bring educators, school administrators, community activists, law enforcement and students together to talk about what can be done to combat the school-to-prison-pipeline. You can read more ... Read More
Another look into an absurd school discipline policy that totes a 6-year-old off to jail for having a tantrum during school. Elsewhere in this country, young students have been suspended and jailed for throwing a pencil at another student, doodling on a school desk, and having a food fight. The absence of common sense discipline ... Read More
Even though many of you know that our policy work is focused on California, school districts all across the country are making moves from punitive to restorative justice practices in their schools. We’re hoping to bring you more of these success stories! We’re going to start with stories that recently made headlines. Buffalo, N.Y., Schools ... Read More
UCLA’s Monday release of their report Out of School & Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools gained a lot of of media attention throughout the digital, print and televised world. This cross-section of media, both locally and nationally, is an exciting indication of a widespread desire to examine the way punitive ... Read More
Today, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a new report highlighting the overuse of suspensions and the serious implications that it has on students’ trajectories including graduation rates, achievement scores, life outcomes and incarceration rates. The report looks at data from over 26,000 U.S. middle and high schools during the 2009-2010 academic year. Its findings show ... Read More
There are waves in our schools as restorative justice replaces punitive justice. More than 23,000 schools are letting go of punitive approaches to discipline in favor of restorative models. Schools that adopt these models often see at least a 20% drop in suspension rates during their first year, which impacts graduation rates, test scores and ... Read More
