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too many students are being
kicked out of school as a form of
discipline, but that Black students
and those in special education are
singled out the most – with Black
special education students being
by far the most likely to be exclud-
ed from school.
Shame is a Barrier
Daniel Losen is one of the top
researchers on the issue nation-
wide, which is saying something;
literally an ocean of data docu-
ments the ways black students are
being pushed out of public schools
by excessive suspensions and
expulsions.
Further, the research details how
young people are moving in a
direct pathway out of the class-
room and into the jails and pris-
ons, which is why even the Obama
Administration calls it the “school
to prison pipeline.”
“The public has a right to know
this information but oftentimes we
don’t see this information,” Losen
told The Skanner News. “The peo-
ple are shocked to see that 30 to 50
percent of students from one sub-
group to another are being sus-
pended in middle school in a given
year – but they shouldn’t be but
they’re shocked because first of all
I think that if the public knew
more about this that these kids
wouldn’t be suspended so fre-
quently.”
(A recent report by The Mult-
nomah County Commission on
Children, Families & Community
said almost 40 percent of all Black
students have been suspended or
expelled — a rate 3.5 times the
rate of white students — and that
the students are punished more
harshly for offenses, and that the
offenses triggering the discipline
are more a matter of “subjective
judgement” of the adult rather than
required suspensions such as
fighting, drugs, etc. Washington
State does not have any compara-
ble data from a government
agency.)
Losen says the issue is a tough
one to grapple with in part because
for parents – the main advocates
for kids – the disciplinary process
is embarrassing for the whole fam-
ily, and often involves labeling
them “troublemakers” rather than
understanding the big picture of
what the students need in the
classroom.
“A lot of times, if it happens to
your kid, you’re sort of ashamed,
you think ‘what did my kid do
wrong?’ Parents don’t realize that
there’s often a problem with the
school policy or practice, lack of
training for the teachers in the
school, lack of classroom manage-
ment, lack of behavioral manage-
ment,” Losen said. “There are
things schools can do to really
improve things.”
Losen’s research shows a lead-
ing reason kids get suspended is
truancy.
“Now truancy is not an act of
violence,” he says. “The kids are
not coming to school so we’re
going to say, ‘you can’t come to
school.’
“That’s really the schools abdi-
cating responsibility — to make
sure the kid comes to school and
doing what they can in terms of
outreach — by suspending them.”
Page 4 The Seattle Skanner March 7, 2012
Data, Data, Data
Following the Money
Mark McKechnie of Youth
Rights and Justice in Oregon says
that even as the schools have qui-
etly been pushing kids out of the
classroom as a form of discipline,
communities have increasingly
criminalized youth behavior – all
of which combines to wallop
municipal budgets with a fiscal
sledgehammer.
“The juvenile court system was
created originally to recognize the
differences between children and
adults, and recognizing that when
they got in trouble there were dif-
ferent approaches beyond the tra-
ditional
incarceration,”
McKechnie says.
“But in the last 20 years there
has been an increasing trend to
incarcerate youth, particularly
In Washington State, League of
Education Voters state field coor-
dinator Maggie Wilkens says
“data is the magic word” in advo-
cating for school disciplinary
reforms on push-out.
And when state officials start
publicizing the data they are col-
lecting on disproportionate sus-
pensions and expulsions in 2012,
it’s not going to look good, she
warns.
“We’re really hoping that we can
work with the data governance
work group down in Olympia to
ensure that this information that
they’ll be releasing in 2013 is dis-
aggregated by race and is also bro-
ken down by income levels,”
Wilkens says. “It’s a big step
because, again, we’re anticipating
that the data is not pretty.”
‘There’s not a school district that isn’t
facing some issues around
disproportionality’
--Maggie Wilkens, League of Education Voters
as parents and community mem-
bers, as guardians to students, to
ask their principals and ask their
superintendents to be more
accountable on these issues.
“Whether that means addressing
it at school board meetings, or
whether it means sitting down one
to one with parents or a group of
parents that are having issues over
and over again, and really talking
about the discipline policies and
really talking about the school
dynamics and the classroom cul-
ture,” Wilkens says. “There’s so
many different components about
how you talk about school push-
out and school discipline in the
context of zero tolerance policies –
that’s only one of the issues.
“What’s really tough in school
reform in general is whether it’s an
issue that needs to be solved
through legislative strategies
statewide? Or is this something
that we can address here in our
own school communities? In a lot
of ways I think it’s both,” Wilkens
says. “Every different perspective
that we can get moving on this I
think is very helpful.”
Empowering Families
under mandatory sentencing laws
and automatic waivers of youth to
adult court, and in Oregon, Meas-
ure 11, which waives youth to
adult court automatically and also
imposes mandatory minimum sen-
tences on both juveniles and adults
who fall under that law.”
The nonprofit YRJ contracts
with the Multnomah Public
Defender to represent children,
youth and parents in the juvenile
court system; about 75 percent of
their clients – are children in foster
care.
“The expense is a big issue that
both states and local governments
are running right now, and I’d say
there’s more data than ever show-
The LEV has worked for several
years on the issue, also convenes
public hearings and forums, and
has tried without success to pass
legislation to change how disci-
pline is meted out in the schools.
Their website features an informa-
tional audio podcast series and
fact-filled blogs on the issues
around youth incarceration – par-
ticularly the cost.
Wilkens is enthusiastic about
Washington State Superintendent
of Public Instruction Randy
Dorn’s steps so far.
“School push-out is a pretty
tough issue to tackle in a lot of
ways because it’s something that
communities that are most directly
‘Parents don’t realize that there’s often
a problem with the school policy or
practice, lack of training for the
teachers in the school, lack of
classroom management...’
ing that the sort of traditional
approaches to juvenile crime,
which tend towards incarceration,
actually are not very effective in
achieving the goals of reducing
crime,” McKechnie says. “The
recent Annie E Casey Foundation
report basically shows that the
recidivism rates for youth who’ve
been incarcerated are extremely
high in most states, and the few
states that have really bucked that
trend and opted for more commu-
nity based responses probation
and different kinds of evidence-
based mental health treatments
and other kinds of interventions,
have actually seen reductions in
juvenile crime while at the same
time they’re reducing the rates of
incarceration.
“That really bucks the conven-
tional wisdom that you prevent
crime by locking up the people
who are committing the crimes
and therefore incapacitate them
for the period of incarceration.”
impacted by disproportionate dis-
cipline in the school/prison
pipeline issues have felt for more
than two decades,” Wilkens says.
“We can trace it back and it’s well
established in the juvenile justice
system as well, that there’s dispro-
portionate rates of incarceration
and just plain ole contact with
police people.
“However in the school system,
policymakers have been a little
slow to respond to some of this,
because there’s really this lack of
data around the issue.
“It’s tough because, what I’ve
been seeing in national trends in
every state in every school district
is that it doesn’t look good,”
Wilkens says. “Overall there have
been a rise suspensions and expul-
sions as a whole and there’s not a
school district that isn’t facing
some issues around disproportion-
ality.”
Wilkens says that the most
important thing for parents to
know is that “it’s their human right
Sheila Warren, founder and
director of the Portland Parents’
Union, is a local standard-bearer
for the movement against push-
out. Partnering with the national
group Dignity in Our Schools, the
PPU holds parent meetings every
second Wednesday of the month at
their offices in the Left Bank
Building.
“It was blatant when folks
looked at the data from all around
the country, that the zero tolerance
has been the very thing that has
created the epidemic that kids are
being pushed out,” she says.
Warren, who has worked on the
issue since 2007, is both hopeful
and frustrated at Oregon’s
progress; while she has testified
before state officials and facilitat-
ed meetings at schools, she says
she – and the overlooked families
she often represents — are still
often left out when power-brokers
get together to talk about solu-
tions.
She sees the OEIB meeting at
SEI as a victory – but says neither
she nor her group were actually
invited to the forum.
“Members of the board came up
to us after out testimony and
talked about setting up a forum –
but when it came down to it actu-
ally happening, I heard about it
third-hand,” Warren said. “Even
though Tamberlee and my testimo-
ny is what convinced them to hold
the forum they didn’t even call us
back to tell us it was scheduled.
“SEI already gets it – their fami-
lies are not the ones struggling
with expulsions. The people who
are suffering the most are in the
apartment complexes, they’re on
the edge, they’re not plugged into
a successful system like SEI,”
Warren said.
“What is the state really doing to
reach out to the people who are
already left out?”
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