“I think school districts are trying to create a variety of different options so suspension is not the only thing on the list,” said Catherine Bradshaw, associate director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence.
In Indiana, a new law requires school systems to create plans to modernize school discipline, with positive-behavior support and a review of zero-tolerance. In Denver, a multiyear discipline reform effort was sparked by a community group, Padres & Jovenes Unidos (Parents and Youths United).
In Baltimore, it started with a new superintendent seeking to turn around the school system. Suspensions are now no longer given for attendance violations, and most consequences ratchet up gradually. Out-of-school suspensions were down 38 percent in 2009-2010, compared with three years earlier, said Jonathan Brice, executive director for student support and safety in city schools.
“It’s incumbent on schools to have a wide range of consequences, at the very end of which are suspension and expulsion,” Brice said. “Previously, the mind-set was very focused on suspension as a solution.”
Suspensions do not improve the behavior of students in trouble or their peers, said Dewey Cornell, a University of Virginia education professor who studies school safety. Many people assume that suspensions help students change, he said, “but they don’t.”
The American Psychological Association reported in a 2008 journal article that research has found no evidence that zero-tolerance policies have a deterrent effect or keep schools safer.
Over the years, “zero-tolerance” has described discipline policies that impose automatic consequences for offenses, regardless of context. The term also has come to refer to severe punishments for relatively minor infractions. Some schools boast of using zero-tolerance; others insist that they do nothing of the sort.
Skeptics of zero-tolerance say much remains to be done. “The tide is in some ways beginning to turn, but we have a very long way to go to see these reforms realized for all districts across the country,” said Matt Cregor of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
But even as change is visible, the country remains divided.
“We’re clearly beginning to see changes in thinking and practice,” said Russell Skiba, an Indiana University professor who has written extensively on school discipline.
Still, “there are apparently a lot of places where, when zero-tolerance isn’t working, it’s just applied more and harder,” he said. “So what we see are two different trends happening at once in school discipline: reform and change in some districts, and an increased use of suspension and expulsion in others.”
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