Schools are focusing on new policies on equal opportunities with students who are back in school

Last spring, North Carolina’s Winston Salem / Forsyth County Schools decided it was time to revise their disciplinary policies in the face of staggering data showing that black students in the district were five times more likely to be suspended than white students.

Under the leadership of both a new superintendent and assistant superintendent, the vast county that serves 53,000 students, 29 percent of whom are black students, has partnered with Massachusetts-based nonprofit Engaging Schools, which helps schools promote fairer practices develop to craft restorative politics.

“A big part of our strategic plan for further development is equality and making sure we look at things within the district from an equality perspective,” said Jesse Pratt, the district’s deputy superintendent. “When we saw the disparity in suspensions among our students, we knew this needed to be addressed. We want to please these children. “

The district is in a year-long process and a final plan won’t be implemented until next school year, he said. Part of the process will be changing a code of conduct for students and training teachers on better ways to address disciplinary issues, he added.

The North Carolina County was part of a wave of institutions reaching out to engaging schools over the past year to revise punishment protocols in the face of racial justice, the organization said.

As children get used to face-to-face tuition again, disciplinary issues increase and the guidelines that govern them come to the fore, but this time, following the trauma of Covid-19 and a national movement for racial justice, many districts are evaluating the disciplinary protocols new taking into account equity.

Districts across the country, including Dallas and Iowa City, are removing punishment guidelines that disproportionately affect black students who have historically borne the brunt of suspensions, bans, and other severe penalties.

Instead of the old practices, many implement programs and guidelines that are more restorative, trauma-informed, and target less harsh punishments, especially for subjective violations such as disorderly behavior or disobedience. Some of these approaches will provide educators with more culturally engaging training, more classroom management skills to deal with misconduct, and will limit the use of suspensions, especially for younger students.

“From the moment you saw school systems integrate, you saw an unjust distribution of school lockouts, especially black children then and now Latinx children,” said Howard Henderson, founding director of the Justice Research Center at Texas Southern University.

A 2020 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies and the Learning Policy Institute that analyzed federal data from the 2015-16 school year found that black students lost five times as many days of class to suspension as white students.

This overuse of harsh disciplinary measures has had a myriad of negative effects on these children, he said. “You begin to see that these students are not doing that well academically, they are not doing that well in terms of civic engagement. You are not so involved in society. In terms of educational level, they simply do not achieve the same level of performance as anyone else who is not suspended, ”he said. “They’re more likely to end up in juvenile detention, which means they’re more likely to end up in adult prison later in life.”

The school-to-prison pipeline introducing mostly colored students to the criminal justice system has been well documented through solid research. According to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, students assigned to schools with high lockout rates are up to 20 percent more likely to be later arrested and detained, and are less likely to attend four-year college.

A 2021 study published in the journal American Psychologist found that “Among black students suspended for a minor violation in the first year of the study, both one and two years later, they had significantly lower grades than students who were not suspended became.”

The Obama administration tried to tackle racial differences in school sentences by issuing state guidelines on classroom discipline, but the measures were later lifted by then-President Donald Trump, who said the guidelines were presumptuous.

However, Henderson believes that the combination of Covid and the movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd has rekindled awareness and dynamism surrounding the issue, especially among educators and administrators.

“When you go through a pandemic and have to realize how to teach school and students online, you realize how many racial differences exist,” he said. “That’s definitely in your head.”

Richard Welsh, Associate Professor of Education Leadership and Policy Studies at New York University, works with districts to help them reduce racial inequality in school discipline.

He said behavior problems and struggles in schools increased with the return to face-to-face teaching. Many children have to relearn how to conduct themselves in the classroom, so school discipline is currently very much on the radar of district and school administrations, he said.

“Schools will recognize that many of the school discipline reforms that have shown positive benefits are very applicable to the school environment we have now in 2021-22 with the pandemic socialization of students returning to the classroom,” he said. “I think you will have a lot more districts that can sell school discipline reforms, not just to reduce interruptions, but to improve the general school climate and make sure we can improve academic outcomes as well.”

One important thing to note, Welsh said, is that while certain interventions like changing codes of conduct have shown that they will reduce suspension rates, there is still little evidence that they will reduce racial disparities as well. For this, classroom management by teachers and strengthening the cultural responsibility of educators are better solutions, he said.

It is also challenging to implement these programs, get approval and replace an established punitive mindset in schools, he said.

“There’s a dissonance because what you’re really uprooting is a punitive mindset, where educators relied on suspensions as the primary way to control behavior. So there are still these two mindsets in the same district, this kind of tension where alternatives like restorative justice are valued and demanded, but administrators can still feel they are using suspensions appropriately. “

Another emerging challenge to bridging racial differences is the all-consuming anti-critical racial theory movement that opposes every racial lens in schools, said Kaitlin Anderson, a professor at Lehigh University who focuses on equality and opportunity issues in educational organizations.

“I think it’s important to remember that no matter what some schools start, there are state lawmakers who are actively trying to stop schools in certain states,” she said. “Some have made it so difficult to even mention race in certain contexts that it is very difficult to really address the systemic issues that often with student discipline are race and disability status centered at the state level will some of these Really hinder efforts. “

Even so, Anderson said she has seen many schools progress, or at least begin to make, toward justice in the form of exams and plans. She said she also saw a clear interest in schools to use more trauma-informed approaches after the deaths of Covid and Floyd.

“There is a growing awareness, not just from talking about anti-racism, but just about the fact that we need to reintegrate children into a more supportive environment and that punishing them for their behavior in class will not be productive.”