Whether diversity really unites us shouldn't even be the question. Diversity is a fact of life and always has been.
If you can stomach it, check out this piece by retired Cal State San Bernardino professor, Dr. Edward J. Erler, as he is widely cited online for his disturbing views cloaked with an air of legitimacy given him as a member of the academy.
It's important to know and recognize what pseudo-scientific propaganda by the extreme right looks like so that we can know the ideas and ideologies that they use to justify what truly troubles them. Among these, diversity is king.
Despite voluminous scholarship in this area, Dr. Erler fails to cite in this tortured screed a single scholar or research study—yet writes as if he were an expert. Accordingly, his piece is ahistorical, power-evasive, and white supremacist—and involves binary thinking, meaning whites versus "the other," who by definition, are non-white, much less his equal.
Atrociously, in support of Trump's indefensible, abjectly immoral, zero-tolerance immigration policy that resulted in 2 1/2 thousand children or so getting separated from their parents, he spreads the lie that this "had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations (see my related earlier post on this)." Nor is he kind in this piece to George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan for being much too amenable to immigrants and immigration.
He argues that immigration policy should not at all be compassionate and thereby justifies separating children from parents and imprisoning them. It's unfortunate that a scholar like this has had a platform for such racist thought and teaching for many years at the university.
So that college students—and indeed, all of us—can know the enemy from within, I do think it's good to know the ideas that cycle, get recycled, and their origins These are the extreme ethnocentrists and hate mongers that masquerade as scholars.
As handmaidens to the extreme right wing politics that are responsible for so much harm and suffering in our country right now, do take note how individuals like Dr. Erler conceal their political ideologies and narrow-mindedness with high-sounding rhetoric and artifice.
-Angela Valenzuela
#FamiliesBelongTogether
#FreeTheChildren
Does Diversity Really Unite Us? Citizenship and Immigration
by Edward J. Erler. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 11, 2018, at a Hillsdale College
National Leadership Seminar in Colorado Springs.
President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers has provoked
a hysterical reaction from Democrats, establishment Republicans, the progressive-liberal
media, Hollywood radicals, and the deep state. What particularly motivated
the ire of these Trump-haters was the fact that the zero-tolerance policy would require
the separation of parents and children at the border. The hysteria was, of course, completely
insincere and fabricated, given that the policy of separating children and parents
was nothing new—it had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations as well.
Furthermore, where is the compassion for the thousands of American children who
are separated from their parents every year as a result of arrests and convictions for nonviolent
crimes? Many of those arrested are single mothers whose infants become wards
of the government until their mothers complete their sentences. No hysteria or effusive
compassion is elicited by these separations, confirming that the object of the hysteria
surrounding illegal border crossers is to force open borders on the nation under the guise of compassion for children.
Continue reading here.
Showing posts with label zero tolerance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zero tolerance. Show all posts
Monday, August 13, 2018
Fact check: Did the Obama administration separate families?
Hi Friends,
I've been away from the blog for awhile, successfully getting off the grid while away on a family vacation in Scotland and Ireland. I'll publish some of my thoughts and reflections on this later. We've had a great time and the trip has provided much-needed respite.
I must say that no matter how far away from home we are, not a day or night goes by that I don't feel a deep sense of concern for what is happening in our country, particularly the far-reaching ramifications of Trump's zero-tolerance policy.
It's disturbing to be across the ocean and to read presumably authoritative reports that Trump's immigration policy is no different from that of either the Obama or Bush administrations. Of course, their source for information is nothing more than Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's false statements to that effect in the context of a June 18, 2018 press briefing.
The USA Today piece below provides clarity regarding Trump's zero-tolerance policy and how it's simply not true (also see 5 ways Kirstjen Nielsen's press conference on family separation was a total disaster by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large, June 19, 2018).
Such false, blanket statements distort the truth, mislead the public, and justify cruelty.
And the suffering continues...
And the suffering continues...
-Angela Valenzuela
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| In this Nov. 29, 2016, file photo, President Barack Obama walks with his physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, right, towards a waiting Marine One as he leaves Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., after visiting wounded service members. |
Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP
In defending its “zero tolerance” border policy that has caused the separation of families, the Trump administration has argued that the Obama and Bush administrations did this too. That’s misleading. Experts say there were some separations under previous administrations, but no blanket policy to prosecute parents and, therefore, separate them from their children.
“Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we’re seeing under the current administration,” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, told us.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a June 18 press briefing: “The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families. … They did — their rate was less than ours, but they absolutely did do this. This is not new.”
Nielsen went on to explain that there is indeed something new, as we wrote in another article on this topic. Under a “zero tolerance policy” on illegal immigration announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in early April, the administration is now referring all illegal border crossings for criminal prosecution. By doing that, parents have been separated from their children, because children can’t be held in detention facilities for adults.
DHS told us that 2,342 children were separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9.
But DHS couldn’t provide any statistics on how many children may have been separated from their parents under the Obama administration.
Instead, when we asked, it pointed to numbers that show 21 percent of apprehended adults were referred for prosecution under President Barack Obama. From fiscal year 2010 to fiscal 2016, there were 2,362,966 adults apprehended illegally crossing the Southern border, and 492,970 were referred for prosecution, those figures show. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how many children may have been separated from their parents under Obama.
More: Trump's 'zero tolerance' immigration policy sparks outrage in Central America
More: Another chaotic week: How Trump scrambled to address border crisis
More: Trump berates Democrats as he begs for their votes on immigration bill
And we don’t have such statistics to compare the past to the present.
“We have not seen any data out of the current or prior administration on how many cases that were prosecuted were individuals who arrived with minors,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us in an email. “So we cannot make any guesses or assumptions about how many separations based on prosecution there were or are.”
Brown said that even though DHS says 2,342 children have been separated from their parents in about one month, we don’t know what percentage of those cases are due to prosecutions for illegal crossings, and how many are due to other policies that would require separations — such as suspicion of trafficking, another outstanding warrant or insufficient proof of a family relationship.
We asked DHS if it would provide such a breakdown, but we haven’t received a response.
MPI’s Pierce said that the likely reason information isn't available on child separations under previous administrations is because it was done in “really limited circumstances” such as suspicion of trafficking or other fraud.
“Previous administrations used family detention facilities, allowing the whole family to stay together while awaiting their deportation case in immigration court, or alternatives to detention, which required families to be tracked but released from custody to await their court date,” Brown and her co-author, Tim O’Shea, wrote in an explainer piece for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s website. “Some children may have been separated from the adults they entered with, in cases where the family relationship could not be established, child trafficking was suspected, or there were not sufficient family detention facilities available. … However, the zero-tolerance policy is the first time that a policy resulting in separation is being applied across the board.”
Jeh Johnson, DHS secretary under the Obama administration, told NPR earlier this month that he couldn’t say that family separations “never happened” during his tenure. “There may have been some exigent situation, some emergency. There may have been some doubt about whether the adult accompanying the child was in fact the parent of the child. I can’t say it never happened but not as a matter of policy or practice. It’s not something that I could ask our Border Patrol or our immigration enforcement personnel to do,” Johnson said.
The Obama administration faced a surge of unaccompanied children from Central America trying to cross the border in 2014. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times this month that a multi-agency team was considering “every possible idea” at the time, including separating families. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” the Times quoted Muñoz saying. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”
Brown told us that while the Obama administration “did separate some families,” it also tried to detain families together. In 2016, a court ruling limited how long children with their parents could be in family detention centers. That ruling confirmed that a 1997 settlement applied to both unaccompanied and accompanied minors, as we’ve explained before.
“At that point,” Brown said, “family detention dwindled and most families were released into the US, either on their own with a notice to appear or under Alternatives to Detention, which could be an ankle bracelet or a supervised monitoring provision where they had to check in with ICE regularly until their immigration court hearing.”
On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Nielsen to keep families in custody together “during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members” at least “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations.”
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Listen to separated moms beg for their kids in court. “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”
These are total due process violations. Judge Robert Powell at the Ft. Isabel Detention Center overheard these cases and spent only 10 minutes with each before rendering his judgement for deportation despite the mothers' please.
Put yourself in this judge's shoes. As judge, what would Jesus or King Solomon have done?
I read today in an essay written by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld that at the U.S. National Holocaust Museum and Memorial, one can find the message, “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”
Words. Cries. Pleas. Official discourses, in response.
Mothers' pleas for mercy to be able to stay in this country with their children where they can all be safe. Plus, don't we owe them so much for the turmoil and trauma our policies and practices have rained down upon them?
Regardless, it's a slippery moral and ethical slope for functionaries in systems—to normalize a lack of due process—and for the rule of law, that our country supposedly prizes itself on, to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Like Dr. Linda McNeil eloquently states continuously in her writings, "The children are watching." All of our children are watching us as a society right now.
Such actions, as covert and hidden away as they may be, never occur in a vacuum no matter how bereft these spaces are of soul and humanity.
Listen to their pleas. Such agony and trauma. When will this suffering end?
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
Put yourself in this judge's shoes. As judge, what would Jesus or King Solomon have done?
I read today in an essay written by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld that at the U.S. National Holocaust Museum and Memorial, one can find the message, “The Holocaust did not begin with killing; it began with words.”
Words. Cries. Pleas. Official discourses, in response.
Mothers' pleas for mercy to be able to stay in this country with their children where they can all be safe. Plus, don't we owe them so much for the turmoil and trauma our policies and practices have rained down upon them?
Regardless, it's a slippery moral and ethical slope for functionaries in systems—to normalize a lack of due process—and for the rule of law, that our country supposedly prizes itself on, to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Like Dr. Linda McNeil eloquently states continuously in her writings, "The children are watching." All of our children are watching us as a society right now.
Such actions, as covert and hidden away as they may be, never occur in a vacuum no matter how bereft these spaces are of soul and humanity.
Listen to their pleas. Such agony and trauma. When will this suffering end?
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
Exclusive: Listen to separated moms beg for their kids in court
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| https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/exclusive-audio-separated-parents-in-court/index.html
Washington (CNN) Newly obtained audio reveals the anguish of parents separated from their children, as it pours from them in immigration court while a judge finds them ineligible to stay in the United States.
In recordings of two court proceedings obtained by CNN, two women who have been separated from their children plead with an immigration judge to reunite them, as he asks them if they have any evidence to back up their asylum claims.
Their attorneys also ask the judge to give them another chance to make their cases, citing their mental health after the prolonged separation from their children.
In both cases, however, the judge denies the requests, and orders the women deported from the country. Both women were told they could speak with their deportation officer about being reunited with their children. CNN has received permission from the women to share the audio of their hearings, but is not identifying them for their protection.
While the hearings are just two of thousands of similar proceedings regularly held across the country, they are an indication of the struggles of parents who have been separated from their children for weeks or longer in their quest to stay in the United States. Thousands of parents were separated from their children at the border under the Trump administration's now-reversed "zero tolerance" policy that prosecuted all adults caught crossing the border illegally, including parents with their children.
Advocates for the immigrants broadly say the parents are being rejected for pursuing asylum at record numbers, in part because they are so distraught.
The hearings were conducted before Judge Robert Powell at the immigration court at the Port Isabel Detention Center on two separate days in July. During one of the hearings, the woman is audibly sniffling
and distraught, telling the judge she feels too ill to continue. Neither lasts as long as 10 minutes.
"I understand that, ma'am. Is there anything you want to say regarding your case?" the judge asks.
"I cannot continue with this anymore. What I want is to be with my son," she replies.
The judge then continues to read from the interview notes, asking her
to respond. "I feel really ill," was all she would say.
When the attorney asks the court to grant her a new interview "due to mental instability to due to separation of child," the judge declines to consider it, leaving it up to the asylum office at the Department of Homeland Security.
In the other hearing, the woman described the death threats she says
her brother, who is affiliated with a gang, made against her and her 7-year-old son. She also told the judge she was not fully able to understand her original interview, in part because she was so distressed about the separation from her child.
"Your honor, I want to say also that when I had the interview, some questions I did understand and others I did not. At that time I was
feeling very desperate because I was separated from my son. My son remained back at the ice box, he was on the floor, and I didn't know anything about my son at that time," she said, via the interpreter.
She explained that she feared the gangs, her brother who was
affiliated with them, and the police who worked with the gangs.
"I am begging your honor, please, do not remove me from the country," she begged, crying. "Do it for me or for my son, I have nothing else
and I am a single mother, I'm begging you."
The judge determined she was not eligible for asylum and declined to consider her attorney's argument that she was not mentally fit enough for the interview. He ordered her deported.
The administration has been offering separated parents the choice to
be deported with or without their children.
"Well I'll tell you what, ma'am, what I can do, I'll put you on the back
side of the calendar today, give you time to compose yourself," Judge Powell tells her. "If you think you need to go to the medical unit, you can go to the medical unit. What do you want to do?"
"What I want is to be with my son," the woman replies, via an interpreter.
CNN has confirmed neither woman has been deported yet. A federal judge has ordered the reunion of all separated families barring safety concerns and has temporarily paused any deportations of reunited families.
CNN gave DOJ an opportunity to comment on the audio. At this time,
they have not provided any comment.
The proceedings were what's known as a "credible fear" review.
When immigrants express a fear of persecution in their home country, they are given an initial asylum interview by an asylum officer.
If the finding is "negative" -- meaning the officer concludes they do
not have a credible fear of persecution under the threshold -- the immigrant is entitled to a review by a judge within seven days.
According to data maintained by the Syracuse University TRAC Immigration Project, Judge Powell denies nearly 80% of asylum claims he hears, just slightly above the average for the Port Isabel Immigration Court where he hears cases. That is well above average nationally. The nationwide average is just over 50% of asylum claims denied.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recently made it much more difficult for immigrants fleeing gang violence to pass this threshold and qualify for asylum.
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Sunday, July 08, 2018
Southwest Border Data Shows ‘Zero Tolerance’ Didn’t Deter Migrants After All
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Monday, June 25, 2018
Whistleblower: Family Separation Is 'Recipe For Disaster' | All In | MSNBC
At the 3:38 minute mark, this is a must-listen to whistleblower account by Antar Davidson, who provides an insider perspective of the trauma to which the jailed children—some as young as 5 years old—have been subjected. Excuse me, the kids can't even hug each other?! And they had to sleep on the floor?!
All of this took place at the Tucson location of Southwest Key. They have several locations throughout the country, including the Casa Padre location in Brownsville, Texas, at the state's most southern tip.
This is a horrific narrative of "tired, under-trained staff" that purportedly treat these already traumatized children in a verbally abusive manner.
Southwest Key clearly has lacked capacity to address this humanitarian crisis of family separation resulting in the abuse recounted here.
Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman may have the most in-depth interview of Antar Davidson whose agonizing narrative transports the listener inside the facility at the point of contact with three traumatized siblings.
In this interview, Davidson shares how CEO Juan Sanchez asks staff to contribute from their $15.00 per hour salaries to make up for additional costs that imprisoning kids means for the nonprofit.
Such gall! Sanchez is a millionaire! Prior to this, he was already in the "accompanied minors business," taking our hard-earned taxpayer dollars from the federal government's Office of Refugee Settlement to mete out this injustice. Then came Jeff Sessions' "Zero-Tolerance" policy issued on April 6, 2018 that brought—and continues to bring—chaos, anguish, and unspeakable treatment and suffering that has the country in an uproar—except, of course, for Trump's cold, callous base.
As you can read from this story from USA Today titled, Housing immigrant kids is big business for a non-profit paying its CEO nearly $1.5 million, this business is massively, if disgustingly, profitable.
Antar is actually all over the Internet and one learns a little bit more of this dreadful tale from each narration. For example, this piece in Mother Jones titled, "I Worked at a Child Migrant Center. What I Was Told to Do Was So Inhumane That I Quit where he elaborates a bit more on the personal trauma and distress that he experienced.
Juan Sanchez is an Austinite, by the way, and he also runs a charter school here locally by the same name. Terrible optic. If I were a parent of a child in his charter school—yet another business that siphons precious tax dollars from the public—I would take them out.
Juan Sanchez likes to think of himself and Southwest Key as the "good guys" in this story.
This self-serving rationalization might only make sense if we think of evil as on a continuum with him being "less evil" or even a "victim" himself. Pobrecito! Poor guy!
Yeah, right. Rationalize all you want, Juan Sanchez. Like Antar Davidson, it could have made a massive difference for these children and their families if you yourself would have been a conscientious objector to draconian White House, obviously bigoted and hateful, policy.
I guess you, like Donald and Melania, can sleep well at night.
With parents in anguish...and their children who suffer beyond measure.
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Test, Punish, and Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School to Prison Pipeline
Check out the full report "“Test, Punish, and Push Out”" by Advance Project.
For those of you in the state of Texas, the local Texas Appleseed and the work of policy analyst, Erica Terrazas, put out a recent report titled "When My Child is Disciplined at School" that's written with parents of these youth in mind.
-Patricia
January 20, 2010
Advancement Project - The report shows that together, zero tolerance and high-stakes testing have turned schools into hostile and alienating environments for many youth, effectively treating them as dropouts-in-waiting.
Test, Punish, and Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School to Prison Pipeline
“Test, Punish, and Push Out” provides an overview of zero-tolerance school discipline and high-stakes testing, how they relate to each other, how laws and policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have made school discipline even more punitive, and the risk faced if these devastating policies are not reformed. The report explores:
* The common origins and ideological roots of zero tolerance and high-stakes testing;
* The current state of zero-tolerance school discipline across the country, including local, state, and national data;
* How high-stakes testing affects students, educators, and schools;
* How zero tolerance and high-stakes testing have become mutually reinforcing, combining to push huge numbers of students out of school; and
* Successful grassroots efforts to eliminate harmful discipline and testing practices.
For those of you in the state of Texas, the local Texas Appleseed and the work of policy analyst, Erica Terrazas, put out a recent report titled "When My Child is Disciplined at School" that's written with parents of these youth in mind.
-Patricia
January 20, 2010
Advancement Project - The report shows that together, zero tolerance and high-stakes testing have turned schools into hostile and alienating environments for many youth, effectively treating them as dropouts-in-waiting.
Test, Punish, and Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School to Prison Pipeline
“Test, Punish, and Push Out” provides an overview of zero-tolerance school discipline and high-stakes testing, how they relate to each other, how laws and policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have made school discipline even more punitive, and the risk faced if these devastating policies are not reformed. The report explores:
* The common origins and ideological roots of zero tolerance and high-stakes testing;
* The current state of zero-tolerance school discipline across the country, including local, state, and national data;
* How high-stakes testing affects students, educators, and schools;
* How zero tolerance and high-stakes testing have become mutually reinforcing, combining to push huge numbers of students out of school; and
* Successful grassroots efforts to eliminate harmful discipline and testing practices.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Vermont’s juvenile-justice system bucks nationwide trend
Malone's approach is very similar to how correctional facilities operated prior to the formative era when the goal was about rehabilitation. The community took a responsibility for the [risk] factors that led to the "deviant" behavior, how to reintegrate the individual back into their community, and finally how to reduce and eliminate risk factors altogether.
Vermont's attempt to restore these practices sounds hopeful.
-Patricia
Julia Steiny
Sunday, June 21, 2009
This is the second of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.
In the late 1980s, communities frightened by the surge in national crime statistics pushed their state judicial systems to “get tough” with offenders. By 2000, “zero-tolerance” and “three-strikes” laws had stuffed inmates into U.S. prisons at world-record-breaking rates. Echoing this get-tough attitude, K-12 schools instituted their version of zero-tolerance, expelling and suspending students in droves. And today, the United States punishes its own people with a zeal unmatched by any other country.
But while the rest of the nation ramped up their punitive systems, leaders in Vermont searched for alternative ways to hold kids more accountable for their actions.
Many Vermonters credit Bob Becker with creating that state’s unique restorative juvenile justice system. Back in the 1980s, when he was the social-services supervisor for Bennington District, Vermont’s system was rehabilitative, focused strictly on treating bad behavior, as opposed to punishing it. Becker says that back then “we wanted the kids to be more accountable for what they had done, but to us that meant developing more competencies, more skills for being successful in the community.”
Vermont did not share the national lust for building prisons. “Kids may need to be temporarily removed from the community for public safety, but that should be part of a planning process, not just for punishment. Kids learn nothing from punishment.”
Becker and his colleagues were impressed with the work and ideas of Dennis Maloney, then the director of community justice in Deschutes County, Ore. So three districts each sent a social worker to a conference to study Maloney’s methods.
They came back totally jazzed about the potential of restorative justice. Over the next few years they began to implement a Vermont version of Maloney’s ideas.
In a video called People’s Sense of Justice (on YouTube), Maloney explains his approach with a simple scenario. I’m paraphrasing: You come home from work and a woman is lying hurt, surrounded by her frantic children. A shadowy figure is getting away. The natural impulse is to attend to the victim first, secondly to the kids — which is to say, the community. And then third and last to the one who did the harm.
But Maloney says, “From the standpoint of ... the criminal justice system, who do we deal with first? The offender. Who’s our customer? The offender. Who do we deal with second? Many people would say, the offender. One of the reasons we [criminal-justice professionals] have trouble with our public is that we do not attend to the victim’s needs first.” If at all. Essentially justice becomes revenge, with little or no healing power, even for the offender.
Maloney says of the victim-first focus, “When you travel the world, that’s their natural sense of justice. Some call it an ancient idea whose time has come.”
The key to Maloney’s ideas is to call together a mini-community to help the victim and offender figure out how to restore the harm. In Vermont, Becker and his colleagues fashioned “restorative panels.”
The state contracts social-service agencies to vet and train community volunteers, who meet with kids who admit to their crimes and want their records sealed. Offenders tell their stories and answer any clarifying questions. Panels strongly encourage victims to come to tell their side of the story. Victims who participate have the satisfaction of feeling heard, and they tend to receive restitution far more often than in the regular courts. Victims are integral players in the Vermont judicial process.
As are the parents who accompany their kids. Generally parents are cooperative and appreciate being included in a team approach to dealing with their kid’s misbehavior.
Becker tells the story of the miscreant who knocked over an old lady in the street and stole her purse. The kid felt like it was no big deal, because he was caught before he had a chance to spend the money. In the panel meeting, however, the old woman described what had been a horrible experience for her. She was now terrified to go downtown on ordinary errands. The kid totally got how much harm he’d caused.
Panel meetings are often very tearful.
Becker says, “I think we forgot that the kids themselves were victims of their own actions. Ironically, taking responsibility to make it right with the people you’ve harmed makes it much more conducive to moving on with your life in a positive way. Restorative justice is a very effective way of handling kids. It’s incredible when you see the lights go on in some kid’s eyes, in the middle of a panel. They may not be happy about it, but they get what they’ve done.”
As is the panels’ practice, the old woman, the volunteers, the kid and his parents worked out a restitution contract for him. It included doing community service in a home for the elderly. He completed his contract.
Becker says, “Some people think imposing community service is punitive. It is a consequence, but if done right, it gives a kid worth in the community. Community service is an opportunity to repair the harm they’ve done, to the extent possible, and move on. If there is monetary restitution, we strategize how to get it paid back. Not big money, but enough to make the point. If the kid likes animals and there’s no other obvious community service related to the offense, we’ll see to it he works with animals. The point is to make positive relationships. Build competencies. If they can actually learn a new skill on top of it, that’s a twofer. But this is not punitive. It’s to help your kid avoid future involvement with the system, juvenile or adult.”
In 1994, Becker moved to the state level where he began to introduce restorative practices statewide. In 1999, large federal grants helped his team implement the program comprehensively, with services to support restitution. Recently, he completed a three-year appointment as the juvenile justice director.
When the federal money dried up in 2004, the state issued a strong vote of confidence by assuming the full cost of the restorative panels.
The cost of the program helps Vermont maintain the lowest juvenile prison population in the nation. We’ll look at their one little locked facility next week.
Vermont's attempt to restore these practices sounds hopeful.
-Patricia
Julia Steiny
Sunday, June 21, 2009
This is the second of four columns in a series about the nation’s oldest and most mature restorative juvenile justice system.
In the late 1980s, communities frightened by the surge in national crime statistics pushed their state judicial systems to “get tough” with offenders. By 2000, “zero-tolerance” and “three-strikes” laws had stuffed inmates into U.S. prisons at world-record-breaking rates. Echoing this get-tough attitude, K-12 schools instituted their version of zero-tolerance, expelling and suspending students in droves. And today, the United States punishes its own people with a zeal unmatched by any other country.
But while the rest of the nation ramped up their punitive systems, leaders in Vermont searched for alternative ways to hold kids more accountable for their actions.
Many Vermonters credit Bob Becker with creating that state’s unique restorative juvenile justice system. Back in the 1980s, when he was the social-services supervisor for Bennington District, Vermont’s system was rehabilitative, focused strictly on treating bad behavior, as opposed to punishing it. Becker says that back then “we wanted the kids to be more accountable for what they had done, but to us that meant developing more competencies, more skills for being successful in the community.”
Vermont did not share the national lust for building prisons. “Kids may need to be temporarily removed from the community for public safety, but that should be part of a planning process, not just for punishment. Kids learn nothing from punishment.”
Becker and his colleagues were impressed with the work and ideas of Dennis Maloney, then the director of community justice in Deschutes County, Ore. So three districts each sent a social worker to a conference to study Maloney’s methods.
They came back totally jazzed about the potential of restorative justice. Over the next few years they began to implement a Vermont version of Maloney’s ideas.
In a video called People’s Sense of Justice (on YouTube), Maloney explains his approach with a simple scenario. I’m paraphrasing: You come home from work and a woman is lying hurt, surrounded by her frantic children. A shadowy figure is getting away. The natural impulse is to attend to the victim first, secondly to the kids — which is to say, the community. And then third and last to the one who did the harm.
But Maloney says, “From the standpoint of ... the criminal justice system, who do we deal with first? The offender. Who’s our customer? The offender. Who do we deal with second? Many people would say, the offender. One of the reasons we [criminal-justice professionals] have trouble with our public is that we do not attend to the victim’s needs first.” If at all. Essentially justice becomes revenge, with little or no healing power, even for the offender.
Maloney says of the victim-first focus, “When you travel the world, that’s their natural sense of justice. Some call it an ancient idea whose time has come.”
The key to Maloney’s ideas is to call together a mini-community to help the victim and offender figure out how to restore the harm. In Vermont, Becker and his colleagues fashioned “restorative panels.”
The state contracts social-service agencies to vet and train community volunteers, who meet with kids who admit to their crimes and want their records sealed. Offenders tell their stories and answer any clarifying questions. Panels strongly encourage victims to come to tell their side of the story. Victims who participate have the satisfaction of feeling heard, and they tend to receive restitution far more often than in the regular courts. Victims are integral players in the Vermont judicial process.
As are the parents who accompany their kids. Generally parents are cooperative and appreciate being included in a team approach to dealing with their kid’s misbehavior.
Becker tells the story of the miscreant who knocked over an old lady in the street and stole her purse. The kid felt like it was no big deal, because he was caught before he had a chance to spend the money. In the panel meeting, however, the old woman described what had been a horrible experience for her. She was now terrified to go downtown on ordinary errands. The kid totally got how much harm he’d caused.
Panel meetings are often very tearful.
Becker says, “I think we forgot that the kids themselves were victims of their own actions. Ironically, taking responsibility to make it right with the people you’ve harmed makes it much more conducive to moving on with your life in a positive way. Restorative justice is a very effective way of handling kids. It’s incredible when you see the lights go on in some kid’s eyes, in the middle of a panel. They may not be happy about it, but they get what they’ve done.”
As is the panels’ practice, the old woman, the volunteers, the kid and his parents worked out a restitution contract for him. It included doing community service in a home for the elderly. He completed his contract.
Becker says, “Some people think imposing community service is punitive. It is a consequence, but if done right, it gives a kid worth in the community. Community service is an opportunity to repair the harm they’ve done, to the extent possible, and move on. If there is monetary restitution, we strategize how to get it paid back. Not big money, but enough to make the point. If the kid likes animals and there’s no other obvious community service related to the offense, we’ll see to it he works with animals. The point is to make positive relationships. Build competencies. If they can actually learn a new skill on top of it, that’s a twofer. But this is not punitive. It’s to help your kid avoid future involvement with the system, juvenile or adult.”
In 1994, Becker moved to the state level where he began to introduce restorative practices statewide. In 1999, large federal grants helped his team implement the program comprehensively, with services to support restitution. Recently, he completed a three-year appointment as the juvenile justice director.
When the federal money dried up in 2004, the state issued a strong vote of confidence by assuming the full cost of the restorative panels.
The cost of the program helps Vermont maintain the lowest juvenile prison population in the nation. We’ll look at their one little locked facility next week.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Educators to file U.S complaint about DPS
The district says it'll strive to hire more African-Americans.
By Claire Trageser | The Denver Post
Posted: 06/17/2009
A group of 12 educators worried about the decline in the number of African-American teachers in Denver Public Schools decided Tuesday to file an official complaint about "systemic discrimination" with the U.S. Department of Labor.
Larry Borom, chairman of the Black Education Advisory Council, said discrimination has caused the number of African-American teachers in Denver to drop to 200 in 2008 from 324 in 2000. But according to the Colorado Department of Education, the number has dropped to 265, not 200, while a count by DPS shows 256 black teachers.
Borom said that whatever numbers are cited, there is still a decline.
"Whether it's 200 or 265, it's still a downward trend, and that's not what we want to see," he said.
"This is plain old discrimination based on race. They are not hiring enough new African-American teachers, not making new positions available, not providing support to new teachers and not renewing contracts."
The council, one of five groups that advises DPS on diversity issues, plans to file its complaint Thursday. It hopes the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs will investigate and give DPS a set of directions, which could include hiring someone with expertise in diversity and making job announcements to minority groups.
DPS already has taken those steps, said Happy Haynes, assistant to the superintendent for community partnerships.
The decline in minority teachers "is exactly the opposite direction from where we wanted to go," she said. "If we're trying to be a more diverse workforce, we have to . . . reach out and go that extra mile. We haven't necessarily done that effectively in the past."
DPS will hire a diversity coordinator, who Haynes hopes will fix many of the concerns.
Haynes also said DPS will recruit teachers of color by working with organizations such as the Black Education Advisory Council and by using diversity hiring programs.
Over the past eight years, the number of American Indian, Asian and Latino teachers in the district has increased slightly, and a new trial program, The Denver Residency Program, recently hired 27 teachers, including five African- Americans, eight Latinos and one American Indian.
These new teachers will slightly improve a significant gap between the number of minority students and teachers.
According to the state Education Department, almost 78 percent of the 4,349 DPS teachers are white, 6.1 percent are black and 14.3 percent are Hispanic. By contrast, 17.2 percent of its students are African-American and 55.5 percent are Hispanic.
Borom said he is as worried about retaining black teachers as he is about hiring them.
"African-American teachers have had a very bad experience in Denver," he said. "There are all kinds of stories in our community about teachers not having the opportunity to have positive career experiences in DPS."
Haynes said that without specific examples of discrimination, she could not comment on that issue. She said the decline in numbers alone is not evidence of discrimination.
Borom said the trend has a negative impact on students.
"There need to be role models for the kids in our community," Borom said.
"Our kids need teachers that come from the same places as them, represent them, look like them and know something about them."
By Claire Trageser | The Denver Post
Posted: 06/17/2009
A group of 12 educators worried about the decline in the number of African-American teachers in Denver Public Schools decided Tuesday to file an official complaint about "systemic discrimination" with the U.S. Department of Labor.
Larry Borom, chairman of the Black Education Advisory Council, said discrimination has caused the number of African-American teachers in Denver to drop to 200 in 2008 from 324 in 2000. But according to the Colorado Department of Education, the number has dropped to 265, not 200, while a count by DPS shows 256 black teachers.
Borom said that whatever numbers are cited, there is still a decline.
"Whether it's 200 or 265, it's still a downward trend, and that's not what we want to see," he said.
"This is plain old discrimination based on race. They are not hiring enough new African-American teachers, not making new positions available, not providing support to new teachers and not renewing contracts."
The council, one of five groups that advises DPS on diversity issues, plans to file its complaint Thursday. It hopes the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs will investigate and give DPS a set of directions, which could include hiring someone with expertise in diversity and making job announcements to minority groups.
DPS already has taken those steps, said Happy Haynes, assistant to the superintendent for community partnerships.
The decline in minority teachers "is exactly the opposite direction from where we wanted to go," she said. "If we're trying to be a more diverse workforce, we have to . . . reach out and go that extra mile. We haven't necessarily done that effectively in the past."
DPS will hire a diversity coordinator, who Haynes hopes will fix many of the concerns.
Haynes also said DPS will recruit teachers of color by working with organizations such as the Black Education Advisory Council and by using diversity hiring programs.
Over the past eight years, the number of American Indian, Asian and Latino teachers in the district has increased slightly, and a new trial program, The Denver Residency Program, recently hired 27 teachers, including five African- Americans, eight Latinos and one American Indian.
These new teachers will slightly improve a significant gap between the number of minority students and teachers.
According to the state Education Department, almost 78 percent of the 4,349 DPS teachers are white, 6.1 percent are black and 14.3 percent are Hispanic. By contrast, 17.2 percent of its students are African-American and 55.5 percent are Hispanic.
Borom said he is as worried about retaining black teachers as he is about hiring them.
"African-American teachers have had a very bad experience in Denver," he said. "There are all kinds of stories in our community about teachers not having the opportunity to have positive career experiences in DPS."
Haynes said that without specific examples of discrimination, she could not comment on that issue. She said the decline in numbers alone is not evidence of discrimination.
Borom said the trend has a negative impact on students.
"There need to be role models for the kids in our community," Borom said.
"Our kids need teachers that come from the same places as them, represent them, look like them and know something about them."
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
School discipline tougher on African Americans
By Howard Witt | Tribune senior correspondent
September 25, 2007
AUSTIN, Texas - In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.
In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.
Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.
In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population. In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.
No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.
Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found. Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods and come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conform to behavioral expectations in school. While such socioeconomic factors contribute to the disproportionate discipline rates, researchers say that poverty alone cannot explain the disparities. "There simply isn't any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids," said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools. "In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."
Academic researchers have been quietly collecting evidence of such race-based disciplinary disparities for more than 25 years. Yet the phenomenon remains largely obscured from public view by the popular emphasis on "zero tolerance" crackdowns, which are supposed to deliver equally harsh punishments based on a student's infraction, not skin color.
That's not what the data say is happening. Yet the federal Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with investigating allegations of discriminatory discipline policies in the nation's public schools, has opened just one such probe in the past three years. Officials declined requests to explain why.
There's more at stake than just a few bad marks in a student's school record. Studies show that a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a strong predictor of future trouble with the law—and the first step on what civil rights leaders have described as a "school-to-prison pipeline" for black youths, who represent 16 percent of U.S. adolescents but 38 percent of those incarcerated in youth prisons.
Relatively few school districts scattered across the country have begun to acknowledge the issue of racial disparities in discipline and tried to do something about it.
In Austin, after administrators discovered that black youths accounted for 14 percent of the school district's population but 37 percent of the students sent to punitive alternative schools, they introduced a program in some schools based on encouraging positive student behaviors rather than punishing negative ones.
At one school, Pickle Elementary, which serves mostly Hispanic and black students, the results were dramatic—disciplinary referrals dropped from 520 in 2001-2002 to just 20 last year.
"I am not going to give up on a child and suspend him or send him to an alternative school," said Julie Pryor, who was the principal of the school when the behavioral program was implemented and is now a district administrator. "Washing our hands of a child will never change his behavior, it just makes it worse. These are children. It's up to us to be creative to find ways to help them behave."
But academic experts say many more school administrators, when confronted with data showing disparate rates of discipline for minority students, react like officials in the small east Texas town of Paris and strenuously deny accusations of racial discrimination.
Paris is the sole school district in the nation currently under investigation by the federal Education Department to determine whether higher discipline rates for black students there constitute institutionalized discrimination. The probe has been under way for more than a year.
"The school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations," Dennis Eichelbaum, the attorney for the Paris Independent School District, said in an interview earlier this year.
That perspective is not shared by the families of many of Paris' black students, who make up 40 percent of the school district's nearly 4,000 students.
"They say there's no racism here, but if you go inside a school and look in the room where they send the kids for detention, almost all the faces are black," said Brenda Cherry, a Paris civil rights activist who assembled some of the complaints that sparked the federal investigation. "Unless black people are just a bad race of people, something is wrong here."
Exactly why black students across the nation are suspended and expelled more frequently than children of other races is a question that continues to perplex sociologists.
Socioeconomic factors are certainly at play, researchers believe.
"Studies of school suspension have consistently documented disproportionality by socioeconomic status. Students who receive free school lunch are at increased risk for school suspension," according to "The Color of Discipline," a 2000 study by Skiba and other researchers in Indiana and Nebraska. Another study concluded that "students whose fathers did not have a full-time job were significantly more likely to be suspended than students whose fathers were employed full time."
But those studies and others have repeatedly found that racial factors are even more important.
"Poor home environment does carry over into the school environment," said Skiba, who is widely regarded as the nation's foremost authority on school discipline and race. "But middle-class and upper-class black students are also being disciplined more often than their white peers. Skin color in itself is a part of this function."
Some experts point to cultural miscommunications between black students and white teachers, who fill 83 percent of the nation's teaching ranks. In fact, the Tribune analysis found, some of the highest rates of racially disproportionate discipline are found in states with the lowest minority populations, where the disconnect between white teachers and black students is potentially the greatest.
"White teachers feel more threatened by boys of color," said Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a watchdog and policy group. "They are viewed as disruptive. What might be their more assertive way of asking a question, for example, is viewed as popping off at the mouth."
Nor has the decline of court-ordered integration across the nation and the gradual resegregation of urban schools in recent decades made much difference in disciplinary rates. Even in urban schools where most of the students are black, black youths are still disciplined out of proportion to their population, the data show. In Washington, D.C., for example, black students are 84 percent of the public school population but 97 percent of the students who are suspended. Other researchers believe that zero-tolerance policies, which encourage teachers and administrators to crack down on even minor, non-violent misbehavior, are exacerbating racial disparities. Some states, such as Texas, are so zealous that they have criminalized many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing or disrupting class.
The school security climate, in turn, can reinforce race-based expectations about which students are most likely to require discipline.
"Most suburban schools, where the students are more likely to be white, purchase security equipment that is meant to protect children—for example, hand scanners that make sure that the parent/guardian picking up the child is legitimate," said Ronnie Casella, an expert on the criminalization of student behavior at Central Connecticut State University. "In contrast, urban schools choose equipment such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras that are meant to catch youths committing crimes."
The new behavioral program being tried in Austin, and some 6,500 schools nationwide, seeks to turn zero tolerance on its head in a bid to slash the number of suspensions, expulsions and other punishments meted out by teachers.
Called "Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports," the intensive regimen requires a commitment from an entire school, including training of students in the behaviors that are expected of them and re-education of teachers and administrators in the use of positive motivational techniques.
The interactions of individual teachers with their students are minutely scrutinized by a team of experts to pinpoint communication breakdowns, and specialized counseling teams are deployed to work with students who present the most serious discipline issues so that classroom teachers are not left to deal with the problems on their own.
"Most schools use a get-tough, punish-the-kids kind of perspective, which results in the kinds of racial disciplinary disparities we see across the country," said George Sugai, a professor of education at the University of Connecticut who helped create the positive behavioral program. "We come at it from the other perspective: If you teach kids the behaviors that are expected, you have a greater likelihood of success. It's really more about changing how adults interact with kids than it is about changing the kids."
Schools like Pickle Elementary in Austin that are using the positive behavioral program often report sharp reductions in their disciplinary referrals. But Skiba, who is currently studying the effectiveness of the program, cautions that it does not always eliminate racial disparities.
"They've been very successful at reducing rates of suspension and expulsion while making schools function more effectively," Skiba said of the schools using the program. "But if you look at the data by race, what you find is that some discrepancies still exist. It's not enough to put this program in place and say, 'We are happy to reduce our rates of suspension,' because what we might have done is reduce our white suspensions and increase our African-American suspensions. There's just no silver bullet for this problem."
September 25, 2007
AUSTIN, Texas - In the average New Jersey public school, African-American students are almost 60 times as likely as white students to be expelled for serious disciplinary infractions.
In Minnesota, black students are suspended 6 times as often as whites.
In Iowa, blacks make up just 5 percent of the statewide public school enrollment but account for 22 percent of the students who get suspended.
Fifty years after federal troops escorted nine black students through the doors of an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in a landmark school integration struggle, America's public schools remain as unequal as they have ever been when measured in terms of disciplinary sanctions such as suspensions and expulsions, according to little-noticed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year.
In every state but Idaho, a Tribune analysis of the data shows, black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population. In 21 states—Illinois among them—that disproportionality is so pronounced that the percentage of black suspensions is more than double their percentage of the student body. And on average across the nation, black students are suspended and expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students.
No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. Hispanic students are suspended and expelled in almost direct proportion to their populations, while white and Asian students are disciplined far less.
Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found. Some impoverished black children grow up in troubled neighborhoods and come from broken families, leaving them less equipped to conform to behavioral expectations in school. While such socioeconomic factors contribute to the disproportionate discipline rates, researchers say that poverty alone cannot explain the disparities. "There simply isn't any support for the notion that, given the same set of circumstances, African-American kids act out to a greater degree than other kids," said Russell Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University whose research focuses on race and discipline issues in public schools. "In fact, the data indicate that African-American students are punished more severely for the same offense, so clearly something else is going on. We can call it structural inequity or we can call it institutional racism."
Academic researchers have been quietly collecting evidence of such race-based disciplinary disparities for more than 25 years. Yet the phenomenon remains largely obscured from public view by the popular emphasis on "zero tolerance" crackdowns, which are supposed to deliver equally harsh punishments based on a student's infraction, not skin color.
That's not what the data say is happening. Yet the federal Education Department's Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with investigating allegations of discriminatory discipline policies in the nation's public schools, has opened just one such probe in the past three years. Officials declined requests to explain why.
There's more at stake than just a few bad marks in a student's school record. Studies show that a history of school suspensions or expulsions is a strong predictor of future trouble with the law—and the first step on what civil rights leaders have described as a "school-to-prison pipeline" for black youths, who represent 16 percent of U.S. adolescents but 38 percent of those incarcerated in youth prisons.
Relatively few school districts scattered across the country have begun to acknowledge the issue of racial disparities in discipline and tried to do something about it.
In Austin, after administrators discovered that black youths accounted for 14 percent of the school district's population but 37 percent of the students sent to punitive alternative schools, they introduced a program in some schools based on encouraging positive student behaviors rather than punishing negative ones.
At one school, Pickle Elementary, which serves mostly Hispanic and black students, the results were dramatic—disciplinary referrals dropped from 520 in 2001-2002 to just 20 last year.
"I am not going to give up on a child and suspend him or send him to an alternative school," said Julie Pryor, who was the principal of the school when the behavioral program was implemented and is now a district administrator. "Washing our hands of a child will never change his behavior, it just makes it worse. These are children. It's up to us to be creative to find ways to help them behave."
But academic experts say many more school administrators, when confronted with data showing disparate rates of discipline for minority students, react like officials in the small east Texas town of Paris and strenuously deny accusations of racial discrimination.
Paris is the sole school district in the nation currently under investigation by the federal Education Department to determine whether higher discipline rates for black students there constitute institutionalized discrimination. The probe has been under way for more than a year.
"The school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations," Dennis Eichelbaum, the attorney for the Paris Independent School District, said in an interview earlier this year.
That perspective is not shared by the families of many of Paris' black students, who make up 40 percent of the school district's nearly 4,000 students.
"They say there's no racism here, but if you go inside a school and look in the room where they send the kids for detention, almost all the faces are black," said Brenda Cherry, a Paris civil rights activist who assembled some of the complaints that sparked the federal investigation. "Unless black people are just a bad race of people, something is wrong here."
Exactly why black students across the nation are suspended and expelled more frequently than children of other races is a question that continues to perplex sociologists.
Socioeconomic factors are certainly at play, researchers believe.
"Studies of school suspension have consistently documented disproportionality by socioeconomic status. Students who receive free school lunch are at increased risk for school suspension," according to "The Color of Discipline," a 2000 study by Skiba and other researchers in Indiana and Nebraska. Another study concluded that "students whose fathers did not have a full-time job were significantly more likely to be suspended than students whose fathers were employed full time."
But those studies and others have repeatedly found that racial factors are even more important.
"Poor home environment does carry over into the school environment," said Skiba, who is widely regarded as the nation's foremost authority on school discipline and race. "But middle-class and upper-class black students are also being disciplined more often than their white peers. Skin color in itself is a part of this function."
Some experts point to cultural miscommunications between black students and white teachers, who fill 83 percent of the nation's teaching ranks. In fact, the Tribune analysis found, some of the highest rates of racially disproportionate discipline are found in states with the lowest minority populations, where the disconnect between white teachers and black students is potentially the greatest.
"White teachers feel more threatened by boys of color," said Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a watchdog and policy group. "They are viewed as disruptive. What might be their more assertive way of asking a question, for example, is viewed as popping off at the mouth."
Nor has the decline of court-ordered integration across the nation and the gradual resegregation of urban schools in recent decades made much difference in disciplinary rates. Even in urban schools where most of the students are black, black youths are still disciplined out of proportion to their population, the data show. In Washington, D.C., for example, black students are 84 percent of the public school population but 97 percent of the students who are suspended. Other researchers believe that zero-tolerance policies, which encourage teachers and administrators to crack down on even minor, non-violent misbehavior, are exacerbating racial disparities. Some states, such as Texas, are so zealous that they have criminalized many school infractions, saddling tens of thousands of students with misdemeanor criminal records for offenses such as swearing or disrupting class.
The school security climate, in turn, can reinforce race-based expectations about which students are most likely to require discipline.
"Most suburban schools, where the students are more likely to be white, purchase security equipment that is meant to protect children—for example, hand scanners that make sure that the parent/guardian picking up the child is legitimate," said Ronnie Casella, an expert on the criminalization of student behavior at Central Connecticut State University. "In contrast, urban schools choose equipment such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras that are meant to catch youths committing crimes."
The new behavioral program being tried in Austin, and some 6,500 schools nationwide, seeks to turn zero tolerance on its head in a bid to slash the number of suspensions, expulsions and other punishments meted out by teachers.
Called "Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports," the intensive regimen requires a commitment from an entire school, including training of students in the behaviors that are expected of them and re-education of teachers and administrators in the use of positive motivational techniques.
The interactions of individual teachers with their students are minutely scrutinized by a team of experts to pinpoint communication breakdowns, and specialized counseling teams are deployed to work with students who present the most serious discipline issues so that classroom teachers are not left to deal with the problems on their own.
"Most schools use a get-tough, punish-the-kids kind of perspective, which results in the kinds of racial disciplinary disparities we see across the country," said George Sugai, a professor of education at the University of Connecticut who helped create the positive behavioral program. "We come at it from the other perspective: If you teach kids the behaviors that are expected, you have a greater likelihood of success. It's really more about changing how adults interact with kids than it is about changing the kids."
Schools like Pickle Elementary in Austin that are using the positive behavioral program often report sharp reductions in their disciplinary referrals. But Skiba, who is currently studying the effectiveness of the program, cautions that it does not always eliminate racial disparities.
"They've been very successful at reducing rates of suspension and expulsion while making schools function more effectively," Skiba said of the schools using the program. "But if you look at the data by race, what you find is that some discrepancies still exist. It's not enough to put this program in place and say, 'We are happy to reduce our rates of suspension,' because what we might have done is reduce our white suspensions and increase our African-American suspensions. There's just no silver bullet for this problem."
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