School Discipline Reform Long Overdue, Experts Say

By Edward Graham and Helen Yoshida As schools around the country have tightened their disciplinary policies to curtail the possibility of school violence, some experts caution that these measures are doing more harm than good. Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, has spent the past [...]

A National Call to Stop Using Out-of-School Suspensions

By Tim Walker Students, educators, parents, and community leaders have launched a national call for a moratorium on out-of-school suspensions and for schools to adopt more constructive disciplinary policies that benefit students, classrooms and communities. The Solutions Not Suspensions initiative, announced last Tuesday at an event led by the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) and [...]

Scrutiny Intensifies Around Zero Tolerance, School to Prison Pipeline

By Ava Wallace As suspensions and expulsions continue at an alarming rate across the nation, lawmakers are taking another look at decade-old zero tolerance discipline policies that are doing more harm than good. Civil rights advocates have long called out harsh disciplinary measures for the disproportionate effect they have on at-risk students and students of [...]

Study: Zero Tolerance Does Not Improve Learning

By Teal Ruland Bringing dangerous weapons or drugs into school accounts for about 5 percent of suspensions, but the other 95 percent is incurred by general “disruptive behavior.” Are these relatively small misdeeds justification for such a widespread use of zero tolerance discipline policies? That’s what a new report entitled Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and [...]