Op-Ed Assignment Suspension: a tradition and a travesty

Our public schools mirror prisons, on the outside and the inside. Aside from similar aesthetic architectural negligence, public schools use a system of consequences. In the same way criminals are sent to jail, schools remove the bad apples through the practice of suspension. But the purpose of school is to educate, not to exclude. Too often, the punishment addresses the outcome, not the root of the misbehavior. Suspension is a school tradition that needs to be reexamined and replaced.

In case you have no first-hand knowledge from being sent to the principal’s office, a suspension is a period of time in which a student is barred from attending and participating in school due to disruptive behavior. This means receiving no academic instruction during this period of punishment. None. While intended to encourage safety and order, the widely accepted practice of suspension makes two glaring assumptions.

First, it assumes students want to be in school. The graver the infraction, the more days out of school awarded as punishment. Save extreme cases like concealing a weapon, acts of disobedience in school are often caused by boredom. You might act out too if you had to sit in the same place for hours and engage in drill and kill math problems to pass the standard MCAS. Mandating absence for a student who does not want to be in school and expecting their behavior to change wouldn’t fly with Pavlov.

Second, suspension assumes that mere time and distance from the classroom will cure a student from their wily ways. In serving a suspension, children spend more time outside of school; time that is likely unsupervised, unstructured and unproductive. Think of all the enticing ways to get in trouble outside of school. There are myriad opportunities for misdemeanor, many of which have grave consequence to society.

Teachers will say that one bad apple ruins a bunch so they often resort to extricating the students who are behaving poorly. With 31 students in a classroom, teachers can say they have no choice when a student acts up and affects others learning. While a student is suspended, the seductive experience of a disruption-free classroom reinforces teachers’ beliefs that suspension works. It works for the teacher, but not for the student. When the student returns, so do the same problems including their underlying causes. Often the problems multiply because serving a suspension means missing class, so the student returns to a class where he/she is now behind. Because they are falling behind, they often act out. According to Pedro Noguera, an urban sociologist from New York University, students who have been suspended are more likely to be suspended again. Students can internalize the reputation of “bad kid” that they are handed after a string of suspensions. Suspension is an undeniable downward spiral with no hope for rehabilitation.

How can an institution designed for teaching and learning ignore the futility of this practice? To continue to engage in suspending students, knowing it is ineffective is nothing short of a travesty. The bottom line is that suspension does not provide incentive or strategies for behavior change. If a child makes a mistake and receives punishment without correction, will they ever get it right? Instead of taking the time to find out what is really going on with a child, the school points a firm finger toward the door.

There’s no time to waste. Schools suspensions and zero-tolerance policies are on the rise, affecting in particular, the students most often neglected in public education: low-income males of color, students with special needs, English Language Learners and students with social or emotional challenges. Every day, more students are being sentenced to fail.

If “closing the achievement gap” is more than rhetoric, we need a new approach. Instead of jumping to suspend, schools must take the time to examine what is behind the misbehavior. The school counselor should be involved in looking for patterns of behavior so that students can avoid the revolving door of suspension. On a programmatic level, schools could work to make classes more engaging. It is not a coincidence that effective teachers have few classroom management issues.

In conversations about education reform, people throw around phrases like “the achievement gap” and “proficiency” and “differentiated instruction,” but the word “suspension” is habitually left out of the equation. I urge you to examine the absurdity of suspension as a viable practice. Schools must take responsibility to keep students out of the prisons and to keep the prison out of the school.

Mara Schanfield of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a school guidance counselor-in-training.