60 percent of students in Texas study were suspended or expelled

Peg Myers, the president of Chula Vista Eductors, and former teacher at my school, Castle Park Elementary, would come in to the teachers lounge in the first week of school and identify several new students as troublemakers. Here's the problem. She complained about those same kids for the entire school year! I don't think she realized the implications of her unchanging complaints: she was implicitly admitting that she was not able to help a single one of those children improve their behavior. This also seems to be the case in Texas:


How do school discipline tactics affect children?
Florence Shapiro and John Whitmire
Statesman.com
July 18, 2011

..."Breaking Schools' Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement" found that 60 percent of students studied were suspended or expelled based on an examination of records of nearly a million public secondary school students, spanning their six years of middle and high school. About 15 percent of students studied were disciplined 11 or more http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftimes; nearly half of those students were involved at some point in the juvenile justice system...



This isn't "No Tolerance." It's More Like " Mo Ignorance!"
Half of Texas' Students Suspended, Study Finds
By Nirvi Shah
Edited by I, Praetorian; MA, PPS, PVC, ATM
Disenfranchised-Educators
July 20, 2011

...“We hope other states will follow Texas’ lead and put their systems under similar scrutiny,” said Michael D. Thompson, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Justice Center. He raised a key question he said state education leaders should ask themselves: “Is our state’s school discipline system getting the desired results?”
The study found that the average number of days on which students missed at least some class time due to a disciplinary incident was two days for out-of-school suspension, 27 days for a placement at an alternative school, and 73 days if they were placed in a juvenile justice program.

While the numbers gleaned from analyzing student discipline in Texas may be shocking, the state’s rate of expulsions and out-of-school suspensions, at 6.9 percent, is lower than that of some other states, including California, at about 13 percent, and Florida, at about 9 percent.

Repeat Offenders

One statistic uncovered by the analysis of Texas discipline and juvenile justice records was that 15 percent of students were punished by suspension or expulsion 11 or more times. Those repeat actions make the effectiveness of those types of punishments questionable, Mr. Thompson said...