Race, Class, and Punishment

Rationale 

The unit that I will create for the seminar, “Race, Class, and Punishment,” will connect the first sets of law codes in Ancient Mesopotamia to how we create laws, or rules to determine justice in our school. The enduring understanding that I want my students to gain from this unit is to look at what the significance of the law codes were in Ancient Mesopotamia, compared to the significance of our rules in our school. Hammurabi believed that justice should be served so that, “the strong might not oppress the weak.” However, he truly believed that justice should be served to protect each part of the daily lives of the citizens. The premise of the laws was to create justice for citizens, especially those that had already come from their own independent city-states with independent government systems.

School Discipline System

Students can connect this idea to what they are familiar with, which are rules at their own school. My students are 6^th graders, which is the first grade of middle school. This is a new school with a new system and set of rules. They all come from a variety of elementary schools, similar to the independent city-states in Mesopotamia. A big emphasis is placed on learning the rules, or Cobra Courtesies as we call them, at the beginning of the year. The Cobra Courtesies are based off of the Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS) discipline system, which are a school and district, wide initiative strategy for behavior. The Cobra Courtesies are unique to our school, and are a model for positive discipline that is practiced all throughout our district, the state of California, and other parts of the world. This unit is taught at the beginning of the year. I will use this as an opportunity to have students involved in the discipline system for our classroom, and hopefully for the larger school wide discipline system. I want them to critically analyze the Cobra Courtesies and the purpose that they serve for our developing a community in our school. We will also include previous data to look at the successes and areas of improvement for our school community.

Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS)

The goal of a PBIS system is to create a positive way to address behavior issues for the school, including all areas. At our school, the three outcomes that we expect of the students are be responsible, be respectful, and engage in learning. PBIS is displayed on a matrix and students are expected to adhere to this framework in the learning environment, hallways & commons, locker rooms, bathroom, bus, and assemblies & evacuation drills. Our mission statement reads, “In order to provide the highest degree of educational opportunities, the Castillero PBIS Team works to foster a positive and safe learning environment; we strive to increase happiness, healthiness, and productivity of our community while maintaining transparent and consistent behavioral expectations through explicit instruction on how to be respectful global citizens.”¹⁹ The best strategy to implement this type of system is to post the rules in all areas of the school, define the terms and how it applies to each area, and teach through engaging lessons of how to behave using the Cobra Courtesies. The main idea of this system is to provide incentives, rather than just issue punishments. By providing incentives, the hope is that we will not have to implement other measures to punish bad behavior. We can prevent this before it happens.

PBIS in Practice

At the beginning of the year we are asked to teach lesson plans on what the Cobra Courtesies are and what they look like in our school. The students who already had PBIS in their elementary schools might have had slight variations that are different than what they have at their new school. It is imperative that we teach these lessons at the very start of the school year, and typically after we come back from a long break. However, my rationale for this unit is that in order for the practice and ideas to solidify in students’ everyday lives at school, we need to constantly revisit them in a variety of ways. Hammurabi went through the same kind of process. He posted the laws on the stele for all citizens to see and he explained the laws and applied them to all areas of daily life. They would also have assemblies and events where people would orally share the laws for those that could not read. I am hoping that students can be part of the rules of school to create a climate that they can take ownership of their actions, by taking ownership of the system of rules in their new school environment.

Significance of Positive School Discipline

The purpose of this unit is to have students think about why they misbehave and what justice means to them. This is the rationale for developing a system of rules in a school or community, just as they saw in Mesopotamia. I would like this to be an opportunity for students to think about the significance of school discipline and what our school would be like without it. The shift towards a positive school discipline system is imperative for middle school. This is a crucial time for students who are learning about themselves. They will make mistakes and they will need to learn from them. If we continue to work with a system that allows for this area of growth, it will prevent students from being left out of the classrooms. Studies show that expulsion and suspension can have profoundly negative impacts on students, including an increase in behavioral problems. There is a higher risk of violence and substance abuse, and an even greater likelihood of academic failure.²⁰ If we can prevent students from getting suspended and expelled before it happens through positive and restorative measures, we can teach students how to maintain a positive school community.

Criticisms

From our data, we can see that while the PBIS system has it’s benefits, we are still seeing constant behavior problems, and a shocking statistic that our Hispanic and Latino students are having more issues with discipline than the other races in the school:

2016-2017 Demographics Data

White (38.6%)

Hispanic or Latino (33.6%)

Asian (16%)

Two or more races (5.7%)

Filipino (2.3%)

African American (2.1%)

American Indian or Alaska Native (0.2%)

2016-2017 Suspension Data by Race

Hispanic or Latino (58%)

White (26.1%)

Two or more races (4.3%)

Asian (8.7%)

Filipino (2.9%)

African American (0.0%)²¹

If our goal is to improve the test scores and supports for our Hispanic and Latino students, especially those classified as English Learners, then we need to critically analyze this data and ask why this is happening. Why are they being suspended at such a higher rate? If our reward and punishment system is based off of the Cobra Courtesies, then we need to reevaluate who benefits and who suffers from this type of system. I want my students to critically analyze this system and take ownership of how it affects our school, and ultimately themselves as individuals.

Last year, we had many referrals to the office and teachers, and administrators, were at a loss for how to deal with the overflow on a daily basis. However, there are serious implications in the long run that we may not be able to see right away from our discipline system, especially for our students of color. For example, in our school, discipline typically follows a process where a student breaks a rule, the teacher writes a referral, and the administration decides what the consequences will be. This can include trash duty at lunch, Saturday School, suspension, or in extreme cases expulsion. When attending meetings for the PBIS committee, we could see which grades had higher referral rates, and at what time or location these issues were occurring the most. However, I challenge my school, and all schools, to look at who this affects the most in our schools. Which students are referred to the office or suspended the most and why? I believe that part of this teaching unit not only brings awareness to the staff, but also for the students to ask the same grappling questions. Why are certain students disciplined at a higher rate than others?

The School-to-Prison-Pipeline

The larger unintended consequences of a school discipline system are that they can lead to the school-to-prison-pipeline. From research, we know that, “beginning in the 1990s, schools across the United States began to change how they conceptualize, detect, and respond to student misbehavior in significant ways; collectively, these changes are often known as the school-to-prison-pipeline.”²² The students that face the most pressure and are at-risk include students with disabilities, students of color, English Language Learners, undocumented students, and students who are homeless or in foster care. The school-to-prison-pipeline in the schools can occur, “through inadequate resources in public schools, discrimination, a failure to provide required services for students with special needs, draconian discipline policies, substandard alternative schools, and overzealous policing of school hallways.”²³ We know that, “Zero tolerance policies that mandate suspension or expulsion for a wide range of disciplinary violations, said Zweifler, are ‘sweeping uncounted numbers of our most vulnerable and needy children into the streets, and there they remain, uneducated, un-served, and unsupervised.’”²⁴In orders to dismantle the school-to-prison-pipeline we can start by making improvements based off of data that these policies are not working. We now know that students, especially marginalized students, need more support and tools to send them on a path to possibilities.

Improvements

We as schools can make a difference in dismantling the initial stages of the school-to-prison-pipeline, especially through how we implement our school discipline system. PBIS is a step in the right direction, if implemented in the way that it was intended. We should teach students the proper behavior in all areas of school. However, as another aspect of this unit, I also challenge us as teachers and administrators to follow through with restorative practices when having to deal with a behavior issue before it leads to a suspension or expulsion. A combination of a positive behavior system and restorative practices can help alleviate the suspension rates, especially for students of color. Ultimately, we want our students to be in school, to be in our classrooms, and to receive the highest quality of education that we can provide. This type of system can eliminate students who are sent out of class for entire class periods at a time, sometimes the entire day if also in other classes in addition to your own. It can especially remove the disparity among students who are suspended at a higher rate that is not representative of their population in the school.

This is where I hope to bridge the gap from what we are learning in our curriculum, to something that affects their everyday lives. The more that I can make these connections, the more students will understand the content, and the significance of the Hammurabi Codes from the standards. More importantly, I want them to learn the skill of historical interpretation. The California Standards wants students to “understand and distinguish cause, effect, sequence, and correlation in historical events, including the long-and short-term casual relationships”, as well as, “explaining the sources of historical continuity and how the combination of ideas and events explains the emergence of new patterns.”²⁵ This is where I want students to bridge their understanding of how justice was served in Mesopotamia and the significance of the law codes, to how justice is served in our school and the significance of our Cobra Courtesies, especially for preventing behavior issues. We often just teach students information and tell them what rules they should follow, but just as Hammurabi did, I believe that we should include student input when either developing, or implementing the Cobra Courtesies. Hammurabi listened to the people of Mesopotamia to establish his law code. Most of the time it was because people felt that they were being treated in an unjust way. If we give students the platform to advocate for themselves we can hopefully understand why students of color are disciplined at a higher rate than the other students in the school.

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice is a way to have students involved in the discipline system in school. One solution, and prevention of the school-to-prison-pipeline is to implement restorative justice. Typically this is after an incident occurs, but if the PBIS system in place is used correctly it should prevent them from occurring. Nonetheless, restorative justice can be used after a behavior incident, and will hopefully prevent and alleviate issues from happening in the future.

In the past, restorative justice has been a response to alleviating zero tolerance policies that unjustly push students out of school and into the school-to-prison-pipeline. If we were to implement restorative justice practices into our schools and eliminate zero tolerance policies, students benefit by simply just being in school. Restorative justice practices not only addresses the issue at hand, but also prevents issues from occurring in the future because students are more equipped with the practices and tools to help them understand why they are making bad choices and what the consequences will be. As educators we must remember that our students are adolescents and are still learning. Students that are at-risk and who have experienced trauma in their lives need restorative practices to heal. Studies show that stress from trauma can affect the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotional and cognitive activities. If the message that they receive from school is that they do not belong because they are pushed out, then we can cause even more detriment to their brain development. Fortunately, we know that interventions are beneficial, even after a student has experienced trauma. With the right interventions, the prefrontal cortex stays flexible, even in adolescence to adulthood.²⁶ Students in our class who grow up in stressful environments have more of a difficult time concentrating, sitting still, following directions, and recovering from disappointments.²⁷ It is difficult for some of our students to even come to school, let alone perform the necessary tasks to learn. By implementing restorative justice circles, it also gives students an outlet to learn how to express and manage their emotions. Restorative justice can bring “persons harmed by crime and the person who harmed them, along with affected family and community members, together in a dialogue that aims to build understanding, explore how the crime has impacted those involved, including the community, and develop agreements for what will be done to make things right.”²⁸ Essentially it is a way to hear multiple perspectives on an issue, especially if it is unresolved.

Currently, some of the ways in which we discipline students, is directly modeled from the criminal justice system. We focus on punishing those that do something wrong and enforce behaviors that are safe and non-disruptive. When this does not work, “misbehaving students may be excluded through suspension or expulsion, with possibly serious long-term harmful consequences to them and society. There is little or no opportunity for social and emotional learning.”²⁹ With this unit, students can explore ways in which they can use resources, staff, and their peers to help alleviate some of the reasons why they misbehave.

Restorative justice circles can be practiced in the classroom with all students so that they can become more familiar with them. There are specific elements that should be included when conducting a restorative justice circle. There should be a ceremony that marks the beginning and end of the circle. There should also be guidelines that are promises that each person makes with each other on how they will behave in the circle. Next, there should be a talking piece in order to have one voice at a time. You will also need a keeper to facilitate and find solutions for the group. Finally, there should be consensus decision-making where all participants agree on the decision.³⁰

This can be connected back to Hammurabi and how justice was served. The elements that are included in a restorative justice circle (ceremony, guidelines, talking piece, keeper, and a consensus decision), determine how justice is served as a community. Hammurabi intended for his codes to be just for everyone, yet their consequences differed depending on their social status. School discipline and a positive behavior system should be just for everyone, yet we see from data at a local and national level that students of color are disproportionately suffering more consequences for their actions. If we can work through a positive system that includes students and the community, then we can dismantle the school-to-prison-pipeline beginning with our schools.