Policymakers Who Think Schools Don't Need Suspension for Violence Have Never Worked in a School

I think everyone who is telling schools how they should handle behavior without using progressive discipline should come sub.

I think we should invite people to come and substitute in our schools when they say things like, well, you shouldn't suspend students.

Students have the right to be in classrooms.

They need to be there learning no matter what they're doing.

Like, really?

I think we've got to push back on this and say, why don't you come show me exactly how you would do that?

How you would tolerate violence in the classroom, fights between students, just really unsafe behavior.

Like, If you think you have a plan, please come and demonstrate for me, because I honestly don't know.

I am hearing what people are saying, and I don't see how it works to not have consequences, including suspending kids when they are violent.

And sometimes the policies are actually not as strict as we think they are.

We hear through the grapevine, oh, we're not allowed to suspend kids anymore.

Oh, we have to do all these interventions and all this paperwork to suspend kids.

Well, people were saying that about Massachusetts recently on my two videos about Brockton High School and the chaos and violence there.

And I looked at the state policies.

This document, maybe this is not the only one people are looking at, but this is from October, so pretty recent.

And everything in there seems very reasonable to me.

It's just basic due process stuff that kids have the right to appeal and parents should be notified and there should be some limits on long-term suspension.

And basically we have to have a good reason to suspend a student, especially for a long period of time.

All that seems very reasonable, but I'm concerned that we're getting a message that's a little bit distorted.

We're getting the message that you can't suspend at all.

So school districts are responding in ways that just cannot work, right?

Like perhaps somebody at the district office misinterpreted that messaging from the state and made that decision.

We can't suspend kids at all.

think what we've got to do at all levels is look for ourselves look at the policies ourselves and if they're not viable we need to say so and we need to say to the people who pushed for them or the people who are responsible for enforcing them hey if you think this can work please come show me how it can be done because i've been an educator for a long time and to me it does not seem possible to run a school where no student can be suspended no matter what they do so if if If that's the actual message that's being sent, we've gotta push back on it, but I'm not even sure we need to go that far if that's not the actual message that is in the policy.

So I think there needs to be more communication between frontline educators who are actually responsible for working with students, and people who make policies.

And what you have to understand about policy at the state level is that there are people who are very good at influencing policy without much real obligation to find research or to actually prove that their ideas work.

If you get the the opportunity to influence the right person at the department of education or in the state legislature sometimes you can make pretty dramatic things happen without a lot of evidence in your corner and without a lot of input from educators and we saw this happen very dramatically across the country with discipline policy over the last few years and i think in some cases as educators we participated in these changes because they sounded good and we were promised that they would work and now we're having to deal with all these consequences of these policies that say We really have to not suspend kids from school for violence.

So we've got to maintain the tools that we need to keep students and staff safe.

And the primary tool, the load-bearing wall in education is progressive discipline.

We have to be able to impose consequences, and those consequences need to be able to get more severe if the behavior is more severe so that we can respond to it.

and not just throw up our hands and say, well, what are we gonna do?

We've got to keep this kid in class.

No, we have to have policies that allow us to keep kids safe.

So we've got to make sure that people are giving us policies that are actually viable.

And when we are getting messages about what those policies say, we have to make sure that those are actually accurate and see for ourselves.

Let me know what you think.