Charter schools don’t suspend more students than nearby district schools, according to Nat Malkus, an American Enterprise Institute research fellow writing on RealClearEducation.

“Charters have come under increasing fire in the media for their alleged disproportionately harsh discipline practices,” he writes. “A widely cited report by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA finding that charter schools have higher suspension rates than traditional public schools, particularly for students of color and students with disabilities.”

That’s not true, when charters are compared to the neighboring schools students might otherwise attend, Malkus’ research has found. Half of charters have similar suspension rates. The rest are more likely to be lower than nearby district schools than they are to be higher.

In response to Education Secretary John King’s call for charters to rethink tough discipline policies, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli worries about top-down dictates to remove the suspension tool.

“There’s a big risk that discouraging schools from suspending kids will result in more disorder in the classroom (though in-school suspensions could keep that from happening),” Petrilli writes. “More disorder is disastrous for all kids, but especially poor children of color (who) make up the vast majority of the nation’s charter school population.”

Parents often choose charters because they’re more likely to provide a safe, orderly environment, he writes.

There’s a reasonable case, then, for simply making suspension data transparent to the public and to parents, who can decide which schools to shun and which to patronize.

Flypaper is running more responses to King’s speech on charter school discipline.

Better teaching can improve student behavior and close the racial discipline gap, suggests a new study published in School Psychology Review.  Virginia middle and high school teachers who received coaching in improving instruction referred fewer students for discipline: Blacks were no more likely to be referred than other students.

The “teacher coaching did not explicitly focus on equity or implicit bias, or draw teachers’ attention to their interactions with black students,”  reports Madeline Will in Education Week Teacher. “It was focused on skills in effectively interacting with any student.”

When teachers have high expectations and facilitate “higher level thinking skills, problem solving, and metacognition,” students are more engaged and better behaved, researchers concluded.

“The findings held when accounting for risk factors including students’ achievement levels, gender, economic status, and teacher characteristics like race and experience,” writes Will.

Teachers in the control group, who received no mentoring or feedback, referred black students for discipline more than twice as much as whites.

After the two-year program ended, the teachers who’d received coaching continued to show no evidence of a racial discipline gap.

Unfortunately, the study didn’t analyze the achievement gap, but it’s a good guess that more engaged, better-behaved students also learn more.

Credit: Seth Tobocman

The case against suspensions is unproven, argues Max Eden, a senior fellow of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, who’s guest-blogging for Rick Hess.

The attack on suspensions, writes Eden, rests on three assertions: “Disparate impact of school suspensions is evidence that they are racially motivated; (2) Suspensions do significant harm to students; (3) “Restorative justice” is a viable and more humane alternative, so we can reduce suspensions safely.

Blacks are suspended far more than Latinos, whites or Asians.

 The University of Pennsylvania’s Shaun Harper conducted a major study of suspensions in southern states that showed some disparities far too striking to be explicable without racial bias. Another study showed that white teachers tend to view black student behavior more negatively than black teachers.

But policy changes that assume “racial bias is solely responsible for the disparity” may go too far, breeding “rampant disorder,” writes Eden.

He also questions the “oft-heard claim is that school suspensions place students in the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’.”

You would rather expect long-term differences between a troublemaker and a well-behaved student of a similar background; you wouldn’t necessarily conclude that the suspension caused the differences.

The most dubious claim, writes Eden, is that there are safe alternatives to suspension.

While there “are case studies of schools that have successfully adopted a ‘restorative justice’ model,  “much of the reliable evidence on the effects of rapid, large-scale school discipline reform in major urban districts is pretty grim,” he writes.

In Chicago, where a thorough study of the effects of shortening suspension length found a significant worsening of student-reported peer-relations, and teacher-reported crime and disorder. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has also undertaken a major suspension-reduction initiative. In de Blasio’s first year, according to the NY State Education Department, the number of violent incidents in schools increased from 12,978 to 15,934, the steepest increase on record.

In St. Paul, Superintendent Valeria Silva ordered “racial equity” reforms to narrow the discipline gap. Rising disorder is one of the issues that led to her firing (with a $787,500 exit package).

In an incisive postmortem, the Center for the American Experiment’s Katherine Kersten quotes St. Paul Police spokesman Steve Linders saying that fights that “might have been between two individuals … [now become] melees involving 40 or 50 people.” Kersten also relates the story of a teacher who, after being crushed into a shelf by a student, asks her students to use a secret knock before she’ll open the door to her classroom.

Denise Rodriguez, president of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, demanded, “Do students and staff deserve to come to work every day and not expect to be assaulted?”

“Disturbing a school” or acting “in an obnoxious manner” is a crime in South Carolina, but the law is unconstitutionally vague, charges the ACLU. Thousands of students — disproportionately African-American — have faced charges, says the civil rights group.

After her arrest for “disturbing a school,” Niya Kenny dropped out and earned her GED.

The ACLU is challenging the law on behalf of Niya Kenny, who was arrested last fall after a school police officer violently removed a classmate who’d refused the teacher’s order to put away her phone.

Kenny stood up and cursed the officer, but didn’t interfere with the arrest, she told the New York Times.

Kenny was calling attention to police abuse, according to the ACLU’s account:

Fields picked the girl up, flipped her in her desk, and then grabbed an arm and a leg to throw her across the room. Niya stood up and called out, she recalled later. “Isn’t anyone going to help her?” she asked. “Ya’ll cannot do this!”

Niya was arrested, handcuffed, charged as an adult, and taken to jail.

Afraid to return to school, Kenny dropped out, missing her senior year, and earned a GED. She’s set to appear in court on “disturbing” charges in September.

The ACLU is also challenging another law, which makes it a crime for students to conduct themselves in a “disorderly or boisterous” fashion.

Let’s concede that teachers need to enforce order in the classroom. Does it make sense to criminalize disruptive,  “obnoxious” and “boisterous” behavior? How many of us would have escaped a criminal record if we’d been held liable in court for being obnoxious?

Increasingly, school police officers are equipped with Tasers.

“The demise of school reform has been greatly exaggerated,” concludes Education Next in reporting on its survey of 10-year trends in education opinion.

“Public support remains as high as ever for federally mandated testing, charter schools, tax credits to support private school choice, merit pay for teachers, and teacher tenure reform,” the survey found. “However, backing for the Common Core State Standards and school vouchers fell to new lows in 2016.”

In 2016, 50% of all those taking a side say they support the use of the Common Core standards in their state, down from 58% in 2015 and from 83% in 2013. Republican backing has plummeted from 82% in 2013 to 39% in 2016. The slip among Democrats is from 86% to 60% over this time period. Eighty-seven percent of teachers supported the initiative in 2013, but that fell to 54% in 2014 and to 44% in 2015, stabilizing at that level in 2016.

When “Common Core” is not mentioned, two-thirds back the use of the same standards.

Nearly four out of five respondents, about the same as in 2015, favor the federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in each grade from 3rd through 8th and at least once in high school. However, only half of teachers support the testing requirement.

A “federal policy that prevents schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students” is very unpopular, backed by only 28 percent of the general public and of teachers.  In 2016, 48 percent of black respondents express support for the idea, down from 65 percent in 2015. Thirty-nine percent of Hispanics express support, showing little change from last year.

Respondents rated local schools more favorably than in the past, but continued to give low marks to schools nationally.

Replacing suspension with “restorative justice” circles is “effective but exhausting,” concludes Susan Dominus in the New York Times Magazine.

Students and teachers “strengthen connections and heal rifts” by discussing their reaction to an incident, she writes. In Denver and Oakland, schools have lowered suspension rates, improved graduation rates and improved the school atmosphere, she writes.

Tuson Irvin and Annika James are student mediators at their New York City high school. Photo: Melissa Bunni Elian/New York Times

New York City’s Leadership and Public Service High School started experimenting with restorative practices five years ago.

Principal Phil Santos is committed to the approach, but calls it “exhausting” and “messy.”

He recruited a new dean, Erin Dunlevy, who’d trained in restorative practices. She trained student leaders, but was “rattled when, within the first month of school, one girl from that group brawled with another girl,” throwing a fire extinguisher that broke the dean’s toe, writes Dominus.

Dunlevy has trained students and other deans in how to get each party in a conflict to take responsibility and make amends.” For example, “a student who had left a classroom in disarray might help the teacher clean it.”

She also coached teachers on how to use language that set a welcoming rather than punitive tone. “As opposed to, ‘You’re late, sign this late log,’ it’s, ‘Hey, this class is not complete without you — I need you to be here,’?” Dunlevy says.

Suspensions are way down at the school, but absenteeism is high and college-readiness rates are below the district average, writes Dominus. In fact, students and teachers are somewhat less likely to say the school has a “safe and respectful environment.”

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City has made it much harder for principals to suspend students for defiance and disobedience, writes Stephen Eide in a look at the progressive mayor’s education policies.

Believers in the “school-to-prison pipeline,” progressives nationwide are trying to limit suspensions, he writes in Education Next.

“While below-proficient students are believed to benefit the most from a lower suspension rate, those who have the most to lose are the above-proficient, low-income strivers,” writes Eide.

The De Blasio administration claims school crime has fallen by 29 percent over four years. However, Families for Excellent Schools cites state data showing rising levels of violent incidents.

There are only four “persistently dangerous” schools in the city, down by 85 percent, the administration claimed last month. The school-safety agents union head pointed out that not a single high school had made the list, notes Eide.

In May 2016, the New York Post reported that school-safety agents and police officers had confiscated 26 percent more weapons from students during this past school year than over the same span in 2014–15.

In a recent teachers’ union survey, “more than 80 percent of the respondents said students in their schools lost learning time as a result of other disruptive students.”

De Blasio is trying to close the achievement gap through “turnarounds instead of closures, heavy emphasis on addressing the ‘root causes’ of K–12 underperformance through pre-kindergarten education and social services, less antagonistic relations with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and more-relaxed school-discipline policies,” writes Eide. “The results have been something less than revolutionary. “

To replace inflexible zero-tolerance policies, schools are adopting inflexible “no student removal” policies, writes Richard Ullman a high school teacher in Allegany County, New York, in an Education Week commentary.

Keeping “dangerous and defiant students” in the classroom makes it difficult for teachers to teach and students to learn, he argues.

If Johnny can’t read very well, the teacher gets the blame, writes Ullman. “It have more to do with the pathologically disruptive classmate who, given infinite ‘second chances’ by detached policymakers and feckless administrators, never gets removed from Johnny’s classroom.”

“Restorative justice” programs, which stress counseling, try to keep students in school, he writes. “Higher suspension and expulsion figures for minority students” are blamed for what’s known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

However, while all educators must be mindful of biases and pushing out kids considered at risk, it bears emphasizing that the biggest victims of warehousing miscreants are the large numbers of nondisruptive, genuinely teachable students who tend to come from the same home environments as their poorly behaved classmates.

. . .  just how many times should the student who spews obscenities be sent back to class with no reprisals? Just how much instructional time has to be sacrificed to hold yet another assembly on why yet another schoolwide brawl occurred?

Administrators and “experts” are raising the academic bar while they’re lowering or eliminating discipline standards, writes Ullman. Teachers are left to do the heavy lifting.

Black preschoolers are far more likely to be suspended, according to federal data, mirroring the harsher discipline they’re likely to experience in K-12 schools.

A new Yale study concluded that white and black preschool teachers expect trouble from black boys, reports Melinda D. Anderson in The Atlantic. However, white teachers tended to go easy on black children, while black teachers were tougher on black students.

Asked to observe video clips of children to spot “challenging behaviors,” teachers more closely observed black boys, an eye-tracking system found.

Then teachers read bout behaviors such as “difficulties napping and following instructions to blurting out answers and taunting other children,” writes Anderson.

Each vignette contained a pre-selected, stereotypical black or white boy or girl name: DeShawn, Jake, Latoya, and Emily. The participants were then asked to rate the severity of the behavioral challenges—the only difference in each vignette was the perceived race and sex of the child—and the likelihood that they would recommend suspension or expulsion.

White teachers appeared to have lower expectations of black children, finding them as a group more prone to misbehavior, “so a vignette about a black child with challenging behaviors [was] not appraised as … unusual, severe, or out of the ordinary.”

Conversely, black teachers seemed to hold black preschoolers to a higher behavioral standard; pay notably more attention to the behaviors of black boys; and recommend harsher, more exclusionary discipline.

Black parents believe they need to be tough to prepare their children for “a harsh world,” says researcher Walter Gilliam, a Yale professor. “It seems possible that the black preschool teachers may be operating under similar beliefs … that black children require harsh assessment and discipline.”

Tracking black boys more doesn’t prove “implicit bias,” argues Kay Hymowitz of City Journal.  Nobody says teachers have “implicit bias” against boys, even though they track them much more than girls, she adds.

BTW, I first heard “implicit bias” from Hillary Clinton in the first debate. Since then, I’ve heard it multiple times a day. I miss plain old “bias.”

Many schools are reducing out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, but it’s not clear how discipline alternatives affect school safety, according to a study reported in Education Next.

One of the only programs supported by strong research is Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, authors write. “The approach aims to change school culture by setting clear behavioral expectations, designing a continuum of consequences for infractions, and reinforcing positive behavior.” Students say their school is safer even as suspensions are less common.

Other strategies may be effective too, but so far the evidence is “thin.”

It’s easy to reduce suspension rates by lowering behavioral expectations. Creating a safe, orderly learning environment is much, much harder.

It’s also not clear that “exclusionary discipline” (suspension and expulsion) creates a school-to-prison pipeline, the authors write. Children who frequently get in trouble at school, whether suspended or not, may be much more likely to get in trouble as adults. Chicken, egg.

Schools are swinging from “zero tolerance” to softer let’s-try-to-reason-with-’em approaches,” reports the New York Times.

“School safety did not improve” when zero tolerance led to more arrests, suspensions and expulsions, Steven C. Teske, a juvenile court judge in Georgia, told a Senate subcommittee in 2012. If anything, juvenile crime increased, the judge testified. “These kids lost one of the greatest protective buffers against delinquency — school connectedness.”

The “school to prison pipeline” is a problem, tweets Robert Pondiscio. “But who speaks for those who want safe & serious schools?”

It’s not clear how softer, talk-it-out discipline alternatives will affect “school safety and student outcomes,” write Matthew P. Steinberg and Johanna Lacoe. “A safe school climate is essential for student success.”

Recent evidence also shows that exposure to disruptive peers during elementary school worsens student achievement and later life outcomes, including high school performance, college enrollment, and earnings.

It’s important, they warn, to monitor “the effects of discipline reform on all students, not just those being punished.”

Nobody really knows how a Trump presidency will affect education policy, but let’s speculate.

Education Week interviews Trump education advisor Gerard Robinson, an American Enterprise Institute fellow and former state chief in Florida and Virginia, who says Trump may curb the Education Department’s civil rights office, impacting school-discipline disparities.

Chickens will come home to roost, writes Rick Hess. Ganders will get sauced.

President Obama, who “bragged about his intent to govern with his ‘pen-and-phone’,”  extended “the reach of Washington via ‘gainful employment,’ Title IX, the redefinition of gender, guidelines governing Title I spending, and much more,” writes Hess.

Trump can dump those pen-and-phone policies and replace them with his own edicts. “The door has been opened for enthusiastic Trump appointees to get creative about pressing states to adopt school voucher programs, abstinence-only sex education, biologically-aligned locker rooms, curbs on PC-speech-restrictive policies on college campuses, and whatever else they can dream up.”

With a Republican-controlled Congress, Trump could fulfill his pledge to fund “vouchers that would let students use federal money to attend the schools of their choice, be they charters, private or parochial schools, magnet programs, or traditional public schools,” writes Emily DeRuy in The Atlantic.

On the campaign trail, Trump called for the repeal of Common Core standards, but he also backed local control. He can’t order Core states to drop the standards if they wish to stick with them.

School 27 is one of the Indianapolis schools given autonomy in a pilot program. Photo: Alan Petersime/Chalkbeat

Given power over her school budget by Indianapolis Public Schools, Principal Tihesha Guthrie decided to increase class sizes to fund counselors and add 30 minutes to the school day, reports Chalkbeat. By adding five students per class, the elementary school was able to hire a “discipline specialist, a math coach and a teacher who specialized in teaching social skills like relationship building and self-control,” reports Dylan Peers McCoy.

School 99 was one of just six schools that piloted the district’s new “autonomy” program this year in which principals were given a set amount of cash per student and allowed to spend the money in any way they thought made sense for their school.

The program will expand to all district schools next year, writes McCoy. “Principals will have full control over their main general education budgets,” while the district will pay for special-needs students.

Guthrie said fewer students are being sent to the principal’s office for discipline problems and attendance has improved significantly.

Maintaining order in the classroom was an issue in 1955, when Glenn Ford starred as a novice New York City teacher in Blackboard Jungle. 

Under pressure to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions, schools are turning to “restorative justice” programs that encourage offenders to discuss their actions and make amends.

Earlier this year, Indianapolis and New York City teachers complained about poorly implemented “restorative justice” programs, reported Emmanuel Felton in Ed Week. Now, teachers in Fresno and Des Moines are saying new discipline policies are making it harder to teach.

“As Fresno Unified officials were praising McLane High School’s restorative justice program” at a conference, “teachers at the school were circulating a petition that says those same strategies have led to an unsafe campus plagued with fights and disruptions,” reports the Fresno Bee.

At least 70 of the 85 teachers at McLane High have signed a petition demanding a stricter and more consistent student discipline policy, as well as more say in how students are punished for their actions.

The teachers paint McLane as a place where there are constant disruptions and numerous on-campus fights and where teachers are verbally assaulted.

. . . While suspensions and expulsions at Fresno Unified have dramatically decreased since then, some teachers say the pressure to curb disciplinary action has led to zero consequences for students, and out-of-control classrooms.

“Students are returned to class without consequence after assaulting teachers, both verbally and physically,” the petition declares.

There are problems in Des Moines too. “Students scream, threaten, shove and hit teachers or other students, with little consequence, students, parents and union leaders told the Register.”

Remember when a 13-year-old Albuquerque boy was arrested — taken in handcuffs to a juvenile detention center — for fake burping in P.E. class? His mother sued, but the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver ruled in favor of the school district in July 2016.

Judge Neil Gorsuch, now a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote a memorable dissent, reprinted in Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post column.

If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what’s a teacher to do? Order extra laps? Detention? A trip to the principal’s office? Maybe. But then again, maybe that’s too old school. Maybe today you call a  police officer. And maybe today the officer decides that, instead of just escorting the now compliant thirteen year old to the principal’s office, an arrest would be a better idea. So out come the handcuffs and off goes the child to juvenile detention. My colleagues suggest the law permits exactly this option and they offer ninety-four pages explaining why they think that’s so. Respectfully, I remain unpersuaded.

When the law is “a ass — a idiot,” as Dickens put it in Oliver Twist, “there is little we judges can do about it,” Gorsuch wrote. However, “in this particular case, I don’t believe the law happens to be quite as much of a ass [sic] as (his colleagues) do. I respectfully dissent.”

Education Week reports on all the education decisions in which Judge Gorsuch participated.

Rescinding the joint 2014 “dear colleague” letter on school discipline should be a top priority for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, writes Checker Finn,

Districts don’t have to obey the “guidance,” which doesn’t have the force of regulation. But they were threatened with federal investigation if their discipline practices had a “disparate impact” on minority or disabled students.

. . . Classroom behavior — and the consequences of misbehavior — is the proper purview of individual schools, districts, and states, which must strike a workable balance between fairness and due process for those who misbehave and the rights of a far larger number of students to calm, orderly, and unthreatening environments in which to learn.

. . . Federal civil rights enforcement is warranted when actual acts of invidious discrimination take place, not when bean counters calculate that members of one group are being hauled to the principal’s office more often than members of another group.”

Here’s a primer on restorative justice from The 74.

Classroom discipline has more impact on achievement than education spending, reports The Australian, citing an international study by researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Chris Baumann and his Macquarie colleague Hana Krskova assessed PISA data to examine the impact of school discipline — students listening well in class, the noise level, teacher waiting time, class start times, and students working well — against the impact of increased education spending.

“When we contrasted school discipline and education investment on the effect of performance, it was roughly 88 per cent in comparison to 12 per cent for education investment,’’ Dr Baumann said.

The Aussies are worried about their students’ performance on international exams.

Reducing misbehavior could raise achievement significantly, concludes a North Carolina study of middle schoolers. “If a student in an average school is exposed to 10 percent fewer peer behavioral incidents that require an out-of-school suspension or a more severe punishment, his or her performance on a standardized math test will increase by 6.2 percent of a standard deviation,” write Thomas Ahn and  Justin Trogdon. “This is somewhere between one-third to one-half of the increase in scores that economists have predicted would arise from cutting class size in half.”

Suspensions are down at New York City schools, but teachers and students report more disorder, disrespect, fighting, gang activity and drug and alcohol use, concludes School Discipline Reform and Disorder by Max Eden, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.

Eden relies on the district’s surveys, which ask teachers and students about learning conditions in their school. The first wave of discipline reform under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which banned suspension for first-time, low-level offenses, had little effect on school climate, surveys show. However, school climate “deteriorated rapidly” after Mayor Bill De Blasio required principals to seek permission from district administrators to suspend a student, the study found.

Last year, Families for Excellent Schools  charged that violence had increased by 23 percent in New York City schools. The district said violent incidents requiring police attention were down 8 percent.

Nationwide, 27 states have reduced the use of suspension and expulsion, and “more than 50 of America’s largest school districts, serving more than 6.35 million students, have implemented discipline reforms,” Eden writes. Teachers are complaining in many cities.

One Chicago teacher told the Chicago Tribune that her district’s new discipline policy led to “a totally lawless few months” at her school. One Denver teacher told Chalkbeat that, under the new discipline policy, students had threatened to harm or kill teachers, “with no meaningful consequences.” . . . After Oklahoma City Public Schools revised its discipline policies in response to federal pressure, one teacher told the Oklahoman that “[w]e were told that referrals would not require suspension unless there was blood.”

Eden warns that school order isn’t dependent on “the number of students suspended but rather on classroom culture,” reports the New York Post. Surveys show students perceive “discipline to be more unfair now than five years ago, when there were nearly twice as many suspensions.”

Suspension curbs have “harmed minority students the most,” writes Hans Bader on Liberty Unyielding. The worst declines in school climate and safety occurred at secondary schools with high percentages of minority students, Eden found.

Orderly classrooms help disadvantaged students become achievers, writes Greg Ashman, who teaches in Australia. He cites an OECD working paper based on Programme for International Student Development (PISA) data.

Researchers defined successful low-income students as “academically resilient.”

. . .  the likelihood that disadvantaged students will be resilient is higher in schools where students report a good disciplinary climate, compared to schools with more disruptive environments, even after accounting for differences in student and school socio-economic status and other factors associated with  resilience. Attending orderly classes in which students can focus and teachers provide well-paced instruction is beneficial for all students, but particularly so for the most vulnerable students.”

Strong school leadership, a good classroom climate and low staff turnover are correlated with orderly classrooms, notes Ashman.

Better funding didn’t seem to increase the proportion of disadvantaged students who became “academically resilient.” However, providing extracurricular activities helped in some cases.

Discipline reform may have contributed to the violence at Douglas High School, writes Erika Sanzi, who blogs on Good School Hunting, on Real Clear Education.

. . . since 2013, schools have been under enormous pressure — for good reason — to lower their suspension, expulsion, and student arrest numbers. Broward County was part of the PROMISE program (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports & Education), which was intended, according to the website, “to safeguard the student from entering the judicial system.”

Are Broward schools excusing dangerous misbehavior? asked Ryan Nicol in the Sunshine State News. Why wasn’t Nikolas Cruz arrested for assault or cyber stalking? It’s a fair question, writes Sanzi.

Education Next is hosting a timely forum: “Should the Trump administration retain, revise, or rescind the Obama administration guidance on school discipline?”

The federal guidance misinterprets discipline data and threatens to make classrooms more chaotic argues Fordham’s Michael Petrilli.

Discipline disparities “are often driven by sky-high suspension rates in a handful of high-poverty schools,” he writes.

It could be these schools are overwhelmed by students’ problems — or that “these are simply bad schools, with weak leadership, low-quality teaching, and a broken climate,” he writes. The school-discipline-to-prison pipeline may really be “the bad-school-to-prison pipeline.”

Pushing schools to reduce suspensions without funding alternatives may make these schools even less orderly and safe, he writes.

Don’t walk back the federal guidance, writes Dan Losen of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. Unjustified suspensions harm the futures of minority and disabled students.

He cites a recently published study that compared long-term outcomes for suspended students with those for non-suspended students with similar pre-suspension risk behaviors, self-reported delinquency, parents’ socioeconomic status and other factors. Those who’d been suspended had less education and were more likely to have a criminal record.

In most high-suspending schools and districts, the majority of the offenses and largest share of racial disparities are punishments for minor nonviolent violations of school codes of conduct, not unlawful or dangerous behavior.

“Studies that controlled for prior behavior and poverty have demonstrated that schools run by principals who were committed to using suspensions sparingly had lower suspensions, lower racial disparity, and higher achievement, Losen writes.

Although Petrilli and Losen disagree about the research, they seem to overlap on the question of whether dysfunctional schools rely heavily on suspension.

Vulnerable students — especially those with disabilities and children of color — are hurt by the”cult of compliance,” writes David M. Perry on Pacific Standard.

At the end of January, a seven-year-old Latino boy in Miami, Florida, was arrested and led away from his school in handcuffs. School officials alleged that he had been playing with his food, was scolded, reacted badly, and ended up attacking his teacher. That’s not great behavior, but he’s a small child and posed no real risk. Rather than asking why the incident escalated and how they could change the environment to avoid such incidents, school police simply took him to prison. Later, police told his father that the boy was a “danger to society” and used the Baker Act to involuntarily commit him.

Students with special needs are far more likely than their classmates to be suspended.

The Parkland shootings don’t justify more cops and harsh discipline, writes RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation.

When he brought a knife to San Diego’s Lincoln High School, the student’s special education team decided he wasn’t responsible because it was “a manifestation of the lack of impulse control caused by his disability,” writes Mario Koran for Voices of San Diego. Two weeks later, the student used a knife to slash another boy’s neck.

A student was arrested Jan. 23 at San Diego’s Lincoln High after he slashed a classmate’s neck.

Four years ago, San Diego Unified School District shifted from punitive discipline policies to a therapeutic model that tries “to address the underlying issues that lead to misbehavior, writes Koran. Yet the district “is only in its first year of training staff districtwide on how to effectively implement restorative practices.”

Lincoln High, reopened in 2007 after a $129 million rebuild, has struggled with staff turnover, poor academic performance and dwindling enrollment. Restructuring and rebranding attempts “have fallen short time and again,” writes Koran. “Now, educators, parents and students are coming forward to say they fear for students’ safety at Lincoln High.”

Nicole Stewart, who served as a vice principal at Lincoln from 2014 to 2016, said when the district softened its discipline policies, administrators started dealing with misbehavior by kicking kids out of school for the day. Instead of suspending kids who got into fights – which would show up in Lincoln’s suspension rates – they started sending kids home informally, a practice known as “blue-slipping.”

Stewart believes the practice led to inconsistent consequences and made it harder for teachers to control student behavior.

“The kids run that school from the opening bell to the closing bell,” Stewart said.

In her final year at Lincoln, Stewart hurt her back trying to break up a fight between students. She retired and now works as a consultant.

Consequences for assaulting staff vary greatly, writes Koran.

Lonnie Boswell, a substitute teacher, suffered neck and back injuries after he was charged by a student. “Boswell said the student wasn’t expelled, and weeks later came to school with a knife and tried to stab his classmate,” reports Koran.

In 2016, chaos erupted when a “play fight” between students at lunch turned serious. A school police officer followed a student into the parking garage and shot him with a Taser.  At some point during the struggle, a student struck the officer in the head, injuring him. Other officers who arrived used pepper spray to disperse the crowd of students who had gathered.

Superintendent Cindy Marten used the incident to display the district’s newly softened approach to discipline, and no students were expelled for the incident. Over the objections of the school police officers union, who said the decision set a dangerous precedent, district officials allowed the student to return to Lincoln the following school year.

That same year, “a student with a long history of violent and sexual offenses was caught with a box-cutter at school – an expellable offense – and was later suspended for slapping a girl,” reports Koran. “Administrators did not attempt to expel him, and several months later, he admitted to sexually assaulting a special needs classmate in the boys’ bathroom.”

La’Tia Taylor’s Chicago school replaced suspensions with . . . There was no alternative policy or training in how to deal with second graders like “Tony,” who was diagnosed with “anger impulsive disorder.”