Important New Publication from the US Department of Ed on School Discipline

This is huge.

The Department of Education just published this resource on confronting racial discrimination in student discipline.

And I have to say, this is one of the best publications I've seen from the Department of Education, which tends to kind of flip-flop as administrations change.

They'll give kind of conflicting guidance.

over the years and it's really made it difficult to have a consistent and balanced approach to school discipline.

But this guidance is really, really good.

What they've done here is they've shared case studies, about 14 case studies from different districts that they've investigated and reached settlements with about their discipline practices.

And I would encourage you to read these because on the one hand, they're kind of shocking that some of these things are still occurring, like disciplining students based on their haircut.

Like, come on, we've got to stop doing stuff like that.

And suspending students for tardies.

There are lots of things that are still being done that we need to stop doing.

But it's also really interesting to see how they're defining racial bias and discrimination in this.

They talk about different...

consequences for the same behaviors.

And one of my takeaways from this is it is probably a really good idea to start keeping data on your referrals, not just your consequences.

Like often as administrators, we get referrals and some of them are kind of junk.

You know, this teacher writes 90% of our referrals and a lot of them are bogus and they're kind of discriminatory.

So in order to fix that teachers problem with referrals, we're going to kind of just throw those in a drawer and they're not going to show up in our data.

But it turns out that the defense against accusations of discrimination really come down to how those compare, how the referrals compare to the consequences and some districts were able to say, hey, we can explain why we have this consequence for this kid because they did this thing.

When districts don't keep any data on what actually happened and they only keep data on the consequences, they're not able to defend their decisions and they're open to accusations of bias.

And when you can look at both the behavior data and the consequence data separately and compare them as the Department of Education does, you can see if there really is a discrimination problem and you can do something about it.

I think that's been the biggest change over the last 10 years is the scrutiny on this issue has really made a big difference and has prompted a lot of change.

in districts' approaches to discipline.

And I've said a lot about what I see as some mistakes that we've made in our approaches to discipline, but this is just chock full of valuable lessons about how we can eliminate discrimination in school discipline.

Check that out.

Just Google that title.

Resource on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline came out May 2023.

Hot off the presses from the Department of Education.

Let me know what you think of that.

Let me know what your district is doing.

And do you even collect data on student behavior?

Most districts don't, but I think you might want to start doing that.

Let me know what you think.