Education Department Poised to Fix the Obama Era "School Discipline" Fix

The Trump administration may be scrapping the Obama-era school discipline mandates--and liberals are furious over it..

A friend sent me this article yesterday afternoon from of all sources--the Huffington Post...


The article is about a subject of great interest to me, how Federal Bureaucrats under the previous administration were heavy-handed with local school districts and forced many districts to sign onerous "consent decrees" that tied these districts' hands in many respects as it pertained to discipline of students.

This all stemmed from the false notion of a school pipeline to prison, and it is/was reinforced by a very real phenomenon that occurs nationwide for many years running now.  This is the situation where black and hispanic students are often suspended in numbers that appear to be out of balance with white and asian students when examined on a percentage of the school population basis.  It is like a reverse achievement gap....and this phenomenon is well documented.  The previous administration took this to illustrate that administrators, teachers, and school districts nationwide were systematically "targeting" black and hispanic students for removal from school.  Believe it or not, there are actually people that believe that this nonsensical rubbish, ridiculously stupid notion is actually TRUE--they believe that large swaths of the public school system in the nation is filled with racists.  (ironically, these same snowflakes that believe the nation's schools are full of racists out deliberately targeting black and hispanic students for removal never talk about the underlying behavior(s) which resulted in  the discipline in the first place.  To these true believers, this simply is an irrelevant point...)

But now that there is a new administration in Washington--some of these failed policies are being looked at again, with fresh eyes. There is talk some of these Obama era "guidance documents" will be scrapped.  This would be a great thing, because these policies have been a disaster in practical terms, even as naive proponents have lauded the "lower numbers" of minority suspensions and expulsions.

Here is a newsflash:   Just because a rule is not enforced and a record is not created does not mean that the behavior just got better nationwide--it just means that terrified administrators scrambled to comply, and they told their principals to stop suspending certain students.  Voila, there was the fix.

 Better numbers and lower suspension and expulsion rates of minority students was achieved.....

But when you use heavy handed tactics to sweep a messy reality under the rug and ignore bad behavior to get better numbers, there will be side effects.

Escambia county was threatened with a lawsuit back in 2012, along with several other Florida Districts, because our "numbers" appeared to be too high, our numbers of black students disciplined as a percentage of our schools' populations when compared to white student suspensions and expulsions.

Some districts acquiesced, formally, to the Federal Government, SPLC, and ACLU and signed these consent decrees.  Escambia complied by changing discipline terminology (expulsions became disciplinary reassignment), watering down discipline (especially as it related to minority students) and doing in-school suspensions instead of out-of-school suspensions, and forcing teachers to not write referrals. etc.  The school board was never officially given the draft SPLC/ACLU/DOJ crafted consent decree for action--however I did see a copy of it at the time and I was eager to have a crack at that garbage document if and when it was put on an agenda for board action.

But that document was never brought, and slowly, over time, many of the tenets of that document were simply instituted procedurally without formal board action here in Escambia County. This way, there would not be any unrest in the press or at the board meetings, it would just be instituted and there would be no "bad publicity"

In the wake of that action over the last six years locally, two important things have transpired, two big outcomes...

1.  The number of suspensions and expulsions of minority students has become "lower" in Escambia County.....

But

2.  Behavior of students has actually become worse as fewer misbehaving students faced real consequences for their bad behavior and this has led to high teacher turnover in many schools and a stagnant/declining enrollment for Escambia as compared to our surrounding school districts.

Achieve Escambia Visits the BCC

Achieve Escambia is a local group working for positive changes in our community to foster greater achievement from “Cradle to Career” for Escambia County youth.  I listened with great interest as Jennifer McFerrin gave the BCC a presentation/update about this group at this past Thursday’s Committee of the whole.  When it was appropriate, I asked questions and chimed in with my view as a 10-year member of the local school board.  

I was cut-off at one point by my colleague Grover Robinson, and another counterpart disagreed with much of what I said.  But the fact of the matter is that much of what we are doing is not working and I strongly believe that we need to take a different approach. Once again we are loaded down with 5 “F” Elementary schools and a raft of “D” schools throughout our local public school district.  The point I desperately tried to make was that we must stop dumping money into the same programs over and over that do not work.  

We must stop demoralizing and beating up the teachers that are working themselves into early graves giving all they have in order to help students that have abysmal home-lives.  We must, in my opinion, take a different approach.  

Focus on Families.  Remove discipline nightmare students.  Apply for a school of hope grant for a public charter boarding school to help the students in our community that live in extreme social dysfunction. Eliminate social promotion. Focus on rigorous academic programs for reading in grades 1-3.  These are the priorities.  Because if we can get to the students who want to learn—we can make a difference.  But first we must have some difficult conversations…..

Social Dysfunction and Poor Choices Destroy Communities and Socially–Dysfunctional Communities Create Low-Performing Public School Districts

Whether we’re talking about facilitating neighborhood trash clean-ups, enabling neighborhood property improvements via low cost loans and grants, setting up summer work programs for community youth, building sidewalks and parks, or giving all students county library cards--a local government can do things to help make communities better.  Our County spends millions of dollars every year providing services that enhance our community.  But this, in and of itself, does not make a great community.

Our local public school district provides all students access to educational 

ACLU Gets it Wrong.....Again

Sara Latshaw, an employee of the ACLU of NW Florida, wrote a viewpoint that appeared  in the PNJ this Sunday.  In it, she chastises me for having the wrong plan on discipline; she regurgitates the same liberal talking points that I've heard over and over about school discipline, according to her, "leading the students on a pipeline to prison"

First things first:  The idea of a school to prison pipeline is a ridiculous myth!  It is a lie.  It should be labeled correctly for what it is--a HOME to PRISON PIPELINE!  blaming educators, administrators, deans and counselors that care about all kids for the horrible choices some students and their parents make is a cop-out and it places blame on the wrong people.  It all starts at home and everybody knows it.  If you live in a dysfunctional home, and you have a challenged upbringing, we are standing by to help you with all sorts of resources if you just reach out and take them.  Being stuck in Poverty does not make students misbehave and become abusive predators--their deficient home-lives do. So if you are living in a tough situation--let us help you!

But if you chose to use that as an excuse to destroy learning environments for students and teachers that are doing their jobs, that excuse holds no water with rational thinking individuals.  It's called personal responsibility, you have to chose to conform to school site expectations, otherwise it is your fault, and nobody else's.

And it is sad when students make horrible choices and end up getting in trouble at school;  if bad behavior escalates such students may very well end up in prison.  But I say again as loudly as I can-this is 100% up to the student and his parents to decide whether to do right, or do wrong.

If anything, as I correctly pointed out in my viewpoint about smashing the prison pipeline, we may be guilty of being too lenient on students in school---leading disruptive students to the false conclusion