Can We Do Away with Suspension?

Is there ever a reason to suspend or expel a student from school?

This is one of those things that we never want to do, right?

We never want to put a student out of school, but sometimes they're unsafe.

Sometimes students engage in behaviors that are just not compatible with the school environment, right?

Like if you are throwing furniture, if you are getting into fights, if you're assaulting people, we know that nobody can learn and we know that teachers will actually quit if we don't do something about the most extreme behaviors that we're seeing in our schools.

And we're seeing more of those behaviors than ever before.

And in years past, what we've always done is we've just said, okay, if you're gonna fight, if you're gonna be violent or do something else that's very extreme, we're gonna suspend you.

You're gonna get to spend a few days at home and things will carry on without you.

Things will get back to normal.

And hopefully when you come back, things will be more normal for you and you can learn and we won't have this continued problem.

And this idea has crept in over the last couple of years that that's actually bad, that that's actually harmful to the student to send them home.

And there've been all these policies and multiple states have passed these laws against suspending kids for things that in years past, it was pretty obvious that they needed to be sent home for.

And there's this idea that will send students down a bad path.

We might call it the school to prison pipeline, that if we send them home for fighting, then they will somehow get into worse trouble during the few hours that they were home, and we've just kind of ruined their life by suspending them.

And I think the logic of that doesn't really hold up super well.

I think I've seen some pretty poor reasoning in different stories.

I saw this NPR story where someone was quoted as saying that it's actually causing the problem.

The suspension is causing that student to go down the wrong path, and it's also causing other students to learn less.

And I thought, wait a minute.

I think you've got the correlation and the causation mixed up here.

If we have bad behavior that is interfering with learning, that is probably going to result in more suspensions, and it's also going to result in less learning for everyone else.

But the guest on the show was saying, no, no, it's the suspensions that are causing all these problems.

And that just doesn't make sense to me.

I think we've really got to get our cause and effect right and realize that when students are having major difficulties with their behavior in school, probably the reason for that is happening outside of school.

And if we're having conflict between students, obviously we need to have consequences for that.

And we need to have a lot of supports for students.

We need to have counselors and mental health support and different kinds of interventions for different issues that students may be dealing with.

But this idea that we can just take suspension completely off the table because it's so terrible and so harmful for students.

I think that doesn't really work.

I think this idea that it's actually harmful to go home for a couple of days just doesn't hold water.

And certainly we want to be reasonable.

We want to make sure that we're being fair and consistent in our application of school rules and discipline policies.

But I don't see how you can run a school and say in advance, No matter what you do, you're always going to get to be here and get to continue to do what you're doing.

I don't think we can just completely rule out any kind of exclusionary discipline.

And I think we've really got to ask ourselves, is this actually as bad as people are saying it is?

Is it so harmful to send a kid home for a couple of days if they do something really extreme that makes it unsafe for everybody else and impossible for them to learn?

Let me know what you think.