Back in April, Mike Petrilli criticized the way that the U.S. Office of Civil Rights (OCR) investigates racial disparities in school suspension rates. Mike seemed to support the use of data to inform policy making, though he opposed the OCR’s form of data-driven accountability. That is constructive, but his charge against the OCR—blaming it for problems that have been decades in the making—is not.
For support, Mike cites an OCR complaint against Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) that was recently settled. He writes:
At the heart of the federal case was the fact that African American students are 62 percent more likely to be given in-school suspensions in Oklahoma City than are white students.
That was it. As far as I can tell, nobody found instances of black youngsters being penalized more harshly than white kids for the same infractions….In Oklahoma City, African Americans are three times likelier to live in poverty than are whites. We should be surprised that Oklahoma City’s racial disparity in school discipline rates isn’t larger.
So now Oklahoma City will suspend fewer students, putting student learning and safety at risk, because nobody was willing to challenge the federal government’s questionable assumptions. Oklahoma politicians were up in arms over the feds’ heavy-handedness on the Common Core; why are they so willing to be pushed around on student discipline?
Unfortunately for OKCPS’s students, Mike’s prediction has already come true, though the reasons for that are more complicated than he indicates. When the disparity data was revealed by the OCR during the middle of the 2014–15 school year, the district rushed to reduce suspensions. A new code of conduct produced a 63 percent reduction of suspensions during the first few weeks of the 2015–16 school year—as well as various negative collateral effects. In one raucous school board meeting it was reported that 45 percent of the disruptions at a high-poverty middle school with 778 students were attributable to thirty-five students. A teacher said, “When these students have to stay in our classes because the administration won’t suspend them, they are a constant disruption.” Now at the end of the year, it looks like the resulting decrease in suspensions will be modest.
In some ways, my experience in the inner city is consistent with Mike’s stance on data-driven discipline policy. I entered the classroom in the early 1990s when the OKCPS spent $1,526 per student in schools that were 80 percent African American, compared with $1,461 in schools that were less than 10 percent African American. It was unrealistic to expect the district to provide safe and orderly schools for that amount of money. Hence it lacked the capacity to do anything more than pressure teachers to not write disciplinary referrals, thereby pushing the disorder to the fringes of the schools’ property. Due to the budget reductions since the Great Recession, with huge cuts being imposed for next year, the OKCPS is as underfunded as it was twenty-five years ago.
Schools cannot succeed without enforcing appropriate codes of conduct. My school flourished when administrators did this over the course of my eighteen-year career, and it faltered when they didn’t. In 1997, for example, our school improved dramatically when the code of conduct was enforced for a full year, sending the message that the administration had teachers’ backs. The same thing happened from 2000 to 2002—administrators adopted site-based management, and our principals agreed to enforce both the disciplinary code and absenteeism rules in a credible manner. We attracted the best team of educators I’ve ever seen. Most of us completely devoted ourselves to our students, and almost all of the kids reciprocated. And our school improved more than any other high school in the district. Within two years, we posted student performance metrics comparable to those of the best OKCPS neighborhood high school.
Yet sandwiched in between those success stories was the 1997–98 school year, which our principal dubbed “the Year from Hell.” She was forced to abandon the school’s code of conduct because the district feared that the school was suspending too many students. The OCR was not in the picture at that time.
The result? Our school of about 1,300 students suffered through five funerals for current and former students. By spring, several hundred students cut class daily, often clustering in the parking lots after lunch. Out of morbid curiosity, I sometimes walked the halls during my planning period, searching almost completely in vain for a class that was under control. Often screaming would erupt, and hundreds of students would pour out of classes to roam the halls. In a last-ditch effort to curtail the chaos, we studied the records of the ninety-six students with the worst history of disruption; thirty-six of them would have been subject to long-term suspension if the school enforced its official policy. It didn’t.
Fear of OCR action isn’t the only thing preventing the faithful enforcement of codes of conduct. Overregulation can have the same effect. My school experienced this firsthand under No Child Left Behind, when meeting the law’s impossible targets became the district’s top priority. OKCPS schools faced an irresistible pressure to reduce suspensions, using the “credit recovery” fig leaf to make absences disappear from the computer system. The little money that might have been available for student supports—which were necessary for improving school climate and increasing attendance—was devoted instead to remediation for tested subjects. In a development eerily reminiscent of the Year from Hell, a high-profile murder involving alumni led to increased violence in the school just as we lost the ability to enforce our code of conduct. By Thanksgiving, we’d lost all gains we’d achieved in the early aughts. Fourteen of our best teachers and principals left the school, and the collapse continued throughout the next decade.
If I learned anything in eighteen years of experience, it’s this: Our failure was not caused by “bad” teachers or “bad” kids; it was caused by a cash-strapped system's predictable responses to the reform policies that focus on using tests to sort, reward, and punish teachers and schools. Many high-poverty schools, like the one I taught in, lack resources. They are forced to devote inordinate amounts of time to maintaining their funding, whether by jumping through NCLB loops or taking steps to avoid OCR scrutiny.
Whether we engage in data-driven (rather than data-informed) efforts to cut suspensions or raise test scores, the effects are the same. We cannot intimidate timorous, underfunded systems into bold, expensive actions, either to improve student performance or reduce suspensions. When such systems are told to meet unattainable targets, they will do what they do best—juke the stats in order to survive. Continuing these sorts of policies will hurt poor children of color more than it helps them. To paraphrase Mike, the result will definitely put student learning and safety at risk.
John Thompson is an award-winning historian, award-winning teacher, a blogger, and the author of A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids.