The injustice schools ignore
By Christopher Paslay According to The Inquirer's Pulitzer Prize-winning series "Assault on Learning," Philadelphia's public schools have a bit of a violence problem.
By Christopher Paslay
According to The Inquirer's Pulitzer Prize-winning series "Assault on Learning," Philadelphia's public schools have a bit of a violence problem.
From 2005-06 through 2009-10, the district reported 30,333 serious incidents, including 19,752 assaults, 4,327 weapons infractions, 2,037 drug- and alcohol-related violations, and 1,186 robberies. Students were beaten by their peers in libraries and had their hair pulled out by gangs. Teachers were assaulted more than 4,000 times.
So how has the School Reform Commission responded? By easing its student code of conduct and other disciplinary policies. In particular, the commission wants to cut down on out-of-school suspensions.
William H. Hite Jr., the School District's incoming superintendent, shares these goals. He has argued that zero-tolerance policies can't create a school culture free of violence, saying, "We can't arrest or suspend our way to safer schools."
The School District's discipline policies have been criticized as unfairly punishing black and Latino students and creating a pipeline to prison. The activist group Youth United for Change's 2011 report "Zero Tolerance in Philadelphia" made that claim, saying that "every year, tens of thousands of young people - and especially youth[s] of color and students with disabilities - are being criminalized in Philadelphia schools or are being pushed out of school by the use of out-of-school suspensions, disciplinary transfers to alternative schools, and expulsions."
According to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. This is especially noteworthy given that 84 percent of America's public-school teachers are white.
In addressing the report's findings, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan suggested that the harsher punishments were the result of conscious or unconscious discrimination. Duncan said that the report should be an eye-opener for school officials, forcing disciplinarians to reevaluate inconsistent policies and work to make them fair and equitable regardless of race.
Education leaders should not assume, however, that discrimination is the primary reason for the higher rate of suspensions and expulsions among minorities. There is a lurking variable: wealth.
Black students are three times more likely to be poor than their white counterparts. According to the National Poverty Center, 38 percent of black children in the United States are from poor families, compared with only 12 percent of white children. This is extremely significant, because research continues to show that poverty is associated with poor conduct, low academic achievement, and chronic breaking of school rules.
The notion that minority students are being punished more harshly than their white peers, along with high incarceration rates among school dropouts, is most likely at the heart of the School District's revision of its disciplinary policies.
Although School District leaders should be praised for their efforts to replace suspensions with restorative practices, peer mediation, and the like, such measures can only go so far. And education leaders have yet to adequately explain what the schools should do with the scores of students who still misbehave after such services are provided - and after they've taken valuable resources away from better-behaved students who want to learn.
Tragically, these violent and unruly students are too often kept in the classroom, where they continue to rob their peers of a high-quality education. Philadelphia School District officials have yet to speak out against this horrible injustice - just as they have yet to adequately enforce policies that respect the rights of the hardworking majority of students who are struggling to learn.
