Rationale
My Elementary School is located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The Great Migration started in 1916 and eventually millions of African Americans left the agricultural South for the industrial North. Many African Americans settled in the neighborhood of Bronzeville which was home to numerous notable figures including Gwendolyn Brooks, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry. The community today has lost thousands of its low-income African American families as housing developments have been demolished or are being converted to condominiums. Traditional public schools like the one my eight siblings and I attended are being closed or transformed into charter or college prep schools. Neighborhood students struggle to make the top test scores for admittance to these reconfigured schools. District-wide we have experienced a high volume of school closings in low-income communities. As a result, public schools similar to mine are considered receiving schools. “It’s” mandated to accept transfer students who are often unwelcome at nearby high performing schools. Particularly due to their stigma of poor attendance and academic performance. A large number of these students transfer into classrooms without their academic records or IEP’s. These inefficiencies situate teachers at an instructional disadvantage. Thus when students are not performing on grade level or incapable of adjusting to the desired academic pace they risk being labeled “willfully-defiant”.
Administrator at Carter G. Woodson Elementary greeting students as they enter school building Source: Chicago Public Schools
In American public schools, “willful defiance” is a widely used, subjective and random category for student misbehavior. It can include everything from a student; having a verbal altercation with a teacher, refusing to remove a hat in school to incomplete assignments. It’s essentially a formalized way for schools to reprimand students who fail to follow orders. Willful defiance has been scrutinized for how often it is used to suspend students of color. In 2014, when California discovered that 43 percent of its suspensions in the 2012-13 school year were for “willful defiance,” the state became the nation's first to limit suspensions tied to this offense. However this category remains a fixture in many other states and educational systems nationwide. It’s the reason we find ourselves in the midst of an era of mass incarceration.
Today, a legacy of willful defiance remains in the Chicago Public School system. Suspension rates in “Chicago Public Schools have declined.” But they still remain very high, particularly among the system’s most vulnerable students. This is according to “Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR),” a new study by the University of Chicago Consortium. In the 2013-14 school year, 16 percent of CPS high school students received an out-of-school suspension (OSS), down from 23 percent in 2008-9. Still, 24 percent of high school students with an identified disability and 27 percent of high school students in the bottom quartile of achievement received out-of-school suspensions in 2013-14. Suspension rates for African American boys in high school remain particularly high with one-third receiving at least one out-of-school suspension.
A statement released by newly appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools states: “As CEO of Chicago Public Schools, we know the importance of maintaining safe, supportive schools. But to be effective, disciplinary practices must be equitable and contribute to the social-emotional development of our students. Since 2012, CPS has made a dedicated effort to reform disciplinary practices and better support students by working to align the district’s Student Code of conduct (SCC) with our values. As a result out-of-school suspensions have been reduced by 76 percent and expulsions have dropped 59 percent.” Janice Jackson CEO Chicago Public Schools
Colleagues from around the country who teach in public and charter schools -- which primarily service a large African American student population -- are always engaging in stories of how zero tolerance policies alienates them from their students. In addition, it hinders authentic instructional engagement. Some accounts are of how students are put out of classrooms because they don’t have pencils or are tardy to class. Students are suspended because they didn’t do their homework or don’t have the proper gym uniform. As someone who has taught for both Chicago Public Schools and the New Orleans Recovery School District, I realize the significance of students bringing supplies and being prepared for class. How assigning homework reinforces academic skills and accountability. I too have been forced to consider more creative classroom management alternatives. Those practices that build trusting relationships with my students. This unit is proposing that we put action behind Janice Jackson’s assertion that “disciplinary practices must be equitable and contribute to the social-emotional development of our students.
Yale Law Professor James Forman Jr. describes a circumstance in his book titled Locking Up our Own, “wherein” he and co-staff members were infuriated with local police who continued to harass students at their Maya Angelou School in Washington D.C.. The staff met to organize a strategy with police officers who eventually accepted an invitation to the school for a town hall conversation with students and teachers. The teachers explained that their students were recruited based on their previous struggles and had been arrested, or kicked out of traditional schools, but were determined to turn their lives around. The perpetual police searches, they explained, risked undermining the fragile work that was being done to restore their faith in the educational system. Students were encouraged to share their thoughts and expressed how dehumanizing it was to be stopped and searched without reason, made to feel defenseless, deprived of dignity and privacy, degraded in public view. I would assert that meetings like these that involve law enforcement and community stakeholders that are based in restorative practices fosters trusting relationships. It also signifies to students that the adults around them believe that they should have opportunities to become productive citizens.
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