Schools pressed to ease tough discipline policies
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday pressed the nation’s schools to abandon what it called overly zealous discipline policies that send students to court instead of the principal’s office. Even before the announcement, school districts around the country have been taking action to adjust the policies that disproportionately affect minority students.
Attorney General Eric Holder said problems often stem from well intentioned “zero-tolerance” policies that can inject the criminal justice system into school matters. “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” Holder said.
But it’s about race, too, the government said in a letter accompanying the new guidelines it issued Wednesday.
“In our investigations, we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students,” the Justice and Education departments said in the letter to school districts.
In American schools, black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended, according to government civil rights data from 2011-12. Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.
More than half of students involved in schoolrelated arrests or referred to law enforcement were Hispanic or black.
The federal school discipline recommendations are nonbinding. They encourage schools to ensure that all school personnel are trained in classroom management, conflict resolution and approaches to de-escalate classroom disruptions — and understand that they are responsible for administering routine student discipline instead of security or police officers.
The administration said that it would attempt to work out voluntary settlements if school disciplinary policies are found to violate federal civil rights laws.
Zero-tolerance policies became popular in the 1990s and often have been accompanied by a greater police presence in schools. The policies often spell out uniform and swift punishment for offenses such as truancy, smoking or carrying a weapon.
In many parts of the country, there already has been a shift toward recognizing that school discipline polices can be discriminatory, said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a think tank that specializes in social issues affecting minority communities.