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Is the National Guard a solution to school violence?
Every now and then, an elected official will suggest bringing in the National Guard to deal with violence that seems out of control.. A review of how the National Guard has been deployed to schools in the past shows the guard can provide service to schools in cases of exceptional need. Yet, doing so does not always end well.
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Educators say student misconduct has increased − but progressive reforms or harsher punishments alone won’t fix the problem
As a policy researcher who studies school safety and discipline, I have seen two camps form with polarized and politicized views on school discipline. On the one side are those who seek more restorative responses to misconduct that emphasize building relationships with students and discipline policies that keep kids in school. On the other are calls for greater use of exclusionary and punitive practices like suspension. In my view, making schools safe requires school leaders not to get caught up in this either/or debate. Instead, I believe it requires recognizing a shared goal of safe schools and the need for a comprehensive approach to achieving it.
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Arrests of 6-year-olds shows the perils of putting police in primary schools
When states like Florida pass laws to put more police officers in schools, the idea is to keep kids safe. But as the arrest of two six-year-olds in a Florida school in October has shown, sometimes one threat to the students is the officers themselves.
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The Need to Look at the Entire Disciplinary Code of Conduct and a Visual Way to Do It
Recently, Dr. Maida Finch of Salisbury University and I released a report in which we distilled each of Maryland's school districts' codes of conduct into a single visualization. Each is color coded to show alignment or misalignment with state recommendations. The visualizations allow for quick comparisons of disciplinary approaches across districts and to state recommendations.
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School Discipline and Safety Presentations at AEFP
The Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP)'s annual conference begins tomorrow. Ahead of the conference, I've compiled a listing of sessions and papers that pertain to school discipline and safety, based on a keyword search of the program for terms like "discipline", "suspension", "safety", "crime", and "violence". Let me know if I overlooked any other relevant sessions.
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Testimony in Support of MD HB950
Below is testimony I submitted in support of MD HB950, a bill set to increase access to school discipline data and to set a more ambitious target for reducing racial disparities in school discipline. The full text of the bill can be found here. Testimony for the House Ways and Means Committee HB 950 – State Department of Education – School Discipline – Data Collection February 28, 2019 Position: Support I write from the perspective of an educational researcher and as a former public school teacher. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the UMBC School of Public Policy where my research has led to presentations and…
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Just what are ‘zero tolerance’ policies – and are they still common in America’s schools?
When parents and educators discuss school discipline, one of the things that comes up most are “zero tolerance” policies. This term is often misused and misunderstood, according to new research I published recently. Zero tolerance policies are also thought to be widespread. But, my work and a recent report show they are actually less common than frequently thought.
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Restorative practices may not be the solution, but neither are suspensions
Proponents of restorative justice suffered a blow recently with the late 2018 release of a much anticipated RAND study of restorative practices in Pittsburgh schools. The study’s results showed restorative practices were not as effective as many hoped – or as they are sometimes portrayed by proponents and in the media. Unlike traditional disciplinary approaches, such as suspension, which remove students from school, restorative practices focus on repairing harm done by getting victims and perpetrators together to talk. The idea is to rebuild and restore a sense of dignity and community. As an educational researcher who studies school discipline, I think it would be misguided to use the study as…
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Recommendation to Give Teachers Guns Misses the Mark
The Federal Commission on School Safety, which was formed in the wake of several high-profile mass school shootings earlier this year, released its final report earlier this month. The report recommends, among other things, that school districts consider increasing the presence of armed school staff. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recommendation has been met with condemnation from both politicians on the left and public commentators. Detractors of the proposal contend that adding more guns to schools is not the solution to preventing violence. That said, the recommendation is not as universally condemned as the media may portray it. A recent poll by PDK suggests that half of the parents of primary and secondary education…
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Zero tolerance laws increase suspension rates for black students
The State Senate of Michigan is currently considering legislation that would scale back “zero tolerance” discipline policies in the state’s public schools. Zero tolerance discipline laws require automatic and generally severe punishment for specified offenses that could range from possessing weapons to physical assault. They leave little leeway for consideration of the circumstances of the offense. The bill, already approved by the State House, proposes to add provisions that would consider the contextual factors around an incident, such as the student’s disciplinary history, and would ask whether lesser forms of punishment would suffice.