News
Schools to Prisons
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that hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved by state
and local governments with one simple policy: use suspen-
sions and expulsions as — genuinely — a final resort.
Can reducing the use of kiddie racial profiling to disci-
pline youth by kicking them out of class be the key to
reducing the achievement gap – and the incarceration rate?
New Obama Policy
Last July, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Educa-
tion Secretary Arne Duncan together rolled out the
Supportive School Discipline initiative, dedicated to
addressing “the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ and the discipli-
nary policies and practices that can push students out of
school and into the justice system,” the Justice Department
said.
“The initiative aims to support good discipline practices
to foster safe and productive learning environments in
every classroom,” Holder said at the time.
The policy came in response to a massive University of
Texas study tracking nearly one million seventh graders for
three years; the data showed the vast majority had at least
one suspension — 84 percent for boys, 70 for girls. Black
students were 31 percent more likely to receive a “school
discretionary action” than white or Hispanic students.
“Ensuring that our educational system is a doorway to
opportunity – and not a point of entry to our criminal justice
system – is a critical, and achievable, goal,” Holder said in
a statement last summer. “By bringing together govern-
ment, law enforcement, academic, and community leaders,
I’m confident that we can make certain that school disci-
‘We have seen this kind of
indication for literally decades’
--Oregon Rep. Lew Frederick
pline policies are enforced fairly and do not become
obstacles to future growth, progress, and achievement.”
‘Literally Decades’
Oregon Rep. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, spent many
years as the public information officer for the Portland Pub-
lic Schools; before that he was a television news reporter.
He says he’s not surprised by the idea that kicking students
out of the classroom holds them back in the long run.
“We have seen this kind of indication for literally
decades,” he says. “We know what works, we just have, for
various reasons, political, philosophical and otherwise,
decided that we’re not going to do what works.”
Frederick says that back in 1979-1980, part of the Port-
land schools desegregation plan was “the concern about the
kind of impact that suspensions and expulsions have on
minority kids, black kids in particular, and that in fact was
feeding the pipeline for kids going into the prison system.”
The Data
In Washington state, education officials have yet to agree
on any statistical data on the “push out” issue; in Oregon,
the numbers add up in an almost spooky way.
“More than a third of Oregon young people who have
been incarcerated are convicted of felonies within three
years of their release,” reported the Annie E. Casey Foun-
dation last year in their study, “No Place for Kids: The Case
for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration.”
Meanwhile, a new study by Multnomah County’s Depart-
ment of Community Justice shows nearly 40 percent of
African American school kids throughout Multnomah
County experience suspension or expulsion, almost 3.5
times the rate of white students.
These two statistics measure different things — yet the
“nearly 40 percent” and the “more than one third” propor-
tion are haunting clues to the consistent population of
young people being flushed out of the schools and into the
prisons.
Harsher Punishments
The new Multnomah County report, “Exclusionary Disci-
pline in Multnomah County Schools: How Suspensions and
Expulsions Impact Students of Color,” links early-child-
hood school exclusions to the drop-out rate, youth violence
and incarceration.
“Nationally, Caucasian students are referred to the office
significantly more frequently for offenses that can be objec-
tively documented (e.g.smoking, vandalism, leaving
without permission and obscene language),” it says.
“African-American students, in contrast, are referred
more often for disrespect, excessive noise, threat and loiter-
ing — behaviors that would seem to require more
subjective judgment on the part of the referring agent. And,
on a national level, students of color facing discipline for
the first time are typically given harsher, out-of-school sus-
pension, rather than in-school suspensions, more often than
white students,” according to the report.
‘Open Defiance’
Tarver says this definitely describes her experience at her
son’s school. The boy was well-behaved during his mom’s
interview with The Skanner News despite the fact that the
game he brought to play with didn’t work.
“I feel that as an educator, if you’re dealing with my child,
you should have some type of understanding of what he is
doing with himself and how you can accommodate that,”
Tarver says. “Not just that you see a kid who doesn’t want
to do the assignment, well he throws it on the floor. To them
that is being defiant; to him it means I can’t do this writing
assignment, my hand hurts because I’ve been writing this
long sentence with a lot of letters and my skills aren’t up to
par. That’s what that means to him.
“But to the teacher, he just doesn’t want to do the work,
he’s not listening. ‘I told him to sit down and do his work
and he threw the paper on the floor; he got up and walked
away.’ But they’re two different things, but unless you take
the time and know that – they’re in charge, and that’s a go
home offense. That’s open defiance, that’s insubordination,
that’s all kind of things. They’re all about do what I say and
do it now.” Next: Part 2: Solutions – and Failures
Read the rest of this story online at www.theskanner.com
Youth
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kinds help outreach workers engage youth.
“If it’s raining, how long is a kid going to stand there talk-
ing with us,” said Robert Blake of Brothers and Sisters
Keepers. “But if I can take them for a burger, then I have
their attention for half an hour or more.”
Royal Harris asked community justice workers to allow
youth to play basketball in the park, rather than pick them
up for associating with other ‘gang members.’ If youth on
probation or parole are to stay out of trouble, he said, they
have to have something positive to do.
Page 8 The Portland Skanner February 22, 2012