The Tide Has Turned

It's a huge milestone in our efforts to eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline to have the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education
Arnie Duncan state, "Positive discipline policies can help create safer learning environments without relying heavily on suspensions and expulsions. Schools also must understand their civil rights obligations and avoid unfair disciplinary practices. We need to keep students in class where they can learn." In collaboration with the  Department of Justice, the Department of Education released a school discipline guidance package.

This has been a decades long journey to turn the tide of school-based discriminatory practices that excluded students from education. The Vera Institute’s new paper on the zero tolerance school disciplinary policy includes a great summary of our progress in dismantling parts of the school-to-prison pipeline. In fact, it’s so good that I’m just going to re-post the section, The Tide Has Turned from A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools by Jacob Kang-Brown, Jennifer Trone, Jennifer Fratello, and Tarika Daftary-Kapu. We still have a lot of work to do...but take a moment to celebrate that we have turned the tide.

Taken together, the research findings and other data on zero tolerance suggest that these policies – which have been in force for 25 years – have no real benefit and significant adverse effects. In August 2013 in a speech before members of the American Bar Association, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder talked about the need to confront zero tolerance policies that “do not promote safety” and called on those assembled to remember that educational institutions should be “doorways of opportunity. A minor school disciplinary offense should put a student in the principal’s office and not a police precinct,” the Attorney General said. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association have issued statements effectively condemning zero tolerance policies, given their harmful effects, and called instead for students to be disciplined on a case-by-case basis and in a developmentally appropriate manner. Clearly, youth advocates are no longer the lone or loudest voices for change. The tide is turning and it has been for some time.


There’s growing consensus that the most effective schools reinforce positive behavior and respond to behavioral problems on a case-by-case basis in ways that suit the individual’s circumstances and needs. That implies a return to discretion, but with some structure and guidance. There’s still not much research to support this approach, but a recent study showed that positive behavioral support in the classroom is associated with greater order and discipline, fairness, and productive student–teacher relationships, while exclusionary disciplinary strategies (i.e., out-of-school suspension and expulsion) are associated with more disorder overall. In July 2011 the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Education announced the creation of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative, which seeks to “promote positive disciplinary options to both keep children in school and improve the climate for learning,” among other goals.

Across the country, state departments of education and municipal school districts are moving away from zero tolerance policies. In 2012, legislators in Colorado revised the state law governing school discipline to encourage school districts to rely less on suspension and expulsion and also mandated and funded additional training for police officers that serve as school resource officers (SROs). While not every school district has revised its code of conduct, and SROs will not receive the mandated training until 2014, the state has already observed the impact with a 27 percent drop in expulsions and 10 percent decrease in suspensions statewide compared with the previous year.

Two years earlier, in 2010, the Boston public school system revised its code of discipline—renaming it a code of conduct—and also implemented restorative justice practices (see “Accentuate the Positive” on page 7) as alternatives to suspension and expulsion. As a result, the number of students suspended or expelled dropped from 743 to 120 in just two years. Officials in Buffalo, New York made significant changes to the school code for the 2013–14 school year, expanding their commitment to keeping students in school through a system of prevention, intervention, and promoting positive behavior, including both Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS for short, and restorative practices. And in California, where “willful defiance” accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of the more than 700,000 suspensions statewide in 2011–12, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board banned willful defiance as a reason for suspension or expulsion.

Thank you all—every student, parent, educator, superintendent, advocate, researcher, and funder that have worked to turn the tide, district by district, school by school.

The photograph is from the report Black, Brown, and Over-policed in L.A. Schools published by the Labor/Community Strategy Center.