Are Suspensions Ruining Students’ Lives?
Why do we allow students to be suspended? What do they get out of it? What do they lose from it? Suspensions may have helped in the past, but times have changed. These students are different and suspensions work unsatisfactorily for them. Although suspensions may discipline a child through makeup work and such, suspensions should not be given to children because they demotivate the student, they increase miscommunication, and they give a child what they ultimately want, to go home.
When a student gets a suspension, they usually think it is short sighted and get aggravated and unmotivated. Brian Palmer, author of Why Do We Suspend Misbehaving Students? Don’t they want to go home?, says that “Students who have been suspended are three times more likely to drop out. Some researchers refer to a student who gives up on school after repeated suspension as a “push out” rather than a dropout.” He also says “In recent years, while Baltimore city schools have dramatically reduced suspensions, the dropout rate has been cut nearly in half. ” While it's plausible that suspensions may have a little positive effect on others rather than the person who got suspended, you cannot help everyone and you should try and help the most corrupt children. It stands to reason that giving a suspension will not
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David Bulley, author of School suspensions don’t work. It’s time for something better., Says “The rude whispering had nothing to do with her at all. Yes, the joke was dumb, but the anger from Cindy was based on a self-conscious and fear-based misunderstanding.” Students will get confused if principals just suspend them instead of having them understand and learn from it. Some may say that the reason doesn’t matter, but the action does. Moreover, students should be able to make corrections and fix their problems rather than just be wiped away from the
These kids don’t misbehave in the classroom for no reason. They are probably releasing those emotions that are bottled up from them at home in school. Not coming from a stable background can have quite the effect on trying to learn in a classroom. The problems that need to be fixed are trying to make schools feel more like a “safe haven” rather than a prison. Afterschool programs need to be put into place, to allow kids to stay at school for long so they don’t get involved in street life, or so they can just not have to deal with the outside problems of the world for a little bit longer. Also, school need to change. They need to try and make learning more fun, and more integrated with the children they are teaching. An easy an example of this is teaching these kids about their history, so they have many people to look up to besides just Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. Only teaching black and Latino kids about people that don’t even look like them or go through anything they have gone through, makes them bored and uneager to learn. Also, more rewards in to be into place to make kids feel more welcomed and wanting to do good in class. Even though it may seem out of the ordinary for some, suspension needs to stop. Allowing these kids to take a break from somewhere they already don’t want to be is ushering them towards a life of hating school. Suspension not only hurt the school district but also hurt the
They help keep schools and students safe and provide a positive learning environment. This has idea has just been taken too far by school administrators (Wison, 2014). We live in a society where more and more rights have been given to juveniles which have also back fired on us. In days past schools could hand out discipline as well as parents, which in turn could put an end to minor behaviors, where now they are often allowed to advance into things worse, where school administrators see no other choice but to suspend and expel (Wison, 2014). Likewise, we cannot be suspending and expelling students at the drop of a hat because what they did may fall into a gray area, yes there are times when it is needed, but school administrators need to take the time to step back and look at the situation and stop overreacting (Wison, 2014). Suspension and expulsion results in missed classroom time, causing some students to fall so far behind they stop caring about the school work and drop out. Other students are being forced into the criminal justice system ending up with records that can haunt them for life. Eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline will allow these students who are likely to fall into its trap to be able to have a change at a successful life (Wison,
Suspended children are missing out on valuable school time. These children often miss out on important exams and assignments. “Many of these children are missing out on the education their schools are providing, and they are learning far worse lessons away from those schools” (Henault 548).
White, Tanika. "Student Conduct Policy Studied; City Schools to Review Discipline Code, List of Possible Punishments; Use of suspensions criticized; Some Say Removing Child from Class Fails to Address Problem, May Be Harmful." Sun [Baltimore, MD.] 18 Aug. 2003, final ed., sec. local: 1.B. ProQuest Education Journals. ProQuest Information and Learning. Coll. of Southern Maryland Lib., La Plata, MD. 3 Dec. 2004 http://proquest.umi.com/login.
Is suspension or ejection excessively great? Numerous vibe these disciplines are excessively cruel and negative, making it impossible to an understudy 's future. The understudy pioneer of Generation Y remarks on the impacts of suspension and ejection, "You don 't learn. You fall behind. You get a negative state of mind about school" (Della Piana, Gordon, Keleher 2001). It is unexpected that educators could be harming the fate of their understudies when offering them some assistance with being their actual objective. This is the reason so much thought goes into discipline strategies.
Firstly, a student was suspended over literally nothing. For example, Allen Abel, author for Calgary Herald, shares that a second grader was suspended because his vice principal thought he bit his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, when in reality it was supposed to be a mountain (Abel). Thus, students do not even need proof in order to be suspended. Secondly, another student was suspended for an absurd reason. The New York Times reported that a girl was suspended because it was her birthday and she brought a cake, along with a knife to cut the cake.
Students’ rights in schools are limited or just taken away. Kids are forced to do whatever the officials at their school, either the principal or the teachers, tell the students to do. One of the main right that gets taken away or limited is students’ first amendment rights, which is the freedom of expression. Students can gets suspended by just doing things the staff at the school does not like, including saying things that they don 't like or supporting a religion that the school does not support. Also, if something is said about the school or the people attending the school is said on social media that student can also get in a lot of trouble. Students should be able to have more first amendment
The increase in school shootings and violence by kids inside their own places of learning shows the validity of the studies. Schools are looking for a more positive way to enforce discipline. Suspension and expulsion are proving to be a far less effective way of invoking discipline for juveniles. Time away from school results in kids having more free time on their hands with nothing constructive or educational to do. This causes the juveniles to involve themselves in criminal activities that usually begin petty, but after time the offenses increase in magnitude.
Could you conceptualize how much mental damage is done to the elementary school student? Children are beginning to learn the concepts of all the rules and distinguishing what is appropriate and what is not, yet there are policies set up to where the child has no room for mistakes and to learn from them. There are various ways of disciplining a child that does not involve suspension nor does it involve arresting them. Students are being mentally and emotionally impaired by the school-to-prison pipeline. With all that has been said, this is only the beginning of the long list of problems with the zero-tolerance policy. How early this trend of “suspensions” begin could also affect students. According to an article, nearly 48 percent of African American children are suspended more than once while in preschool (justicepolicy.org). Suspension in preschool for one should not even be a part of their disciplinary action. Secondly, America has totally diminished the whole purpose of the
Suspending students from school sometimes is not the best thing for them. They sometimes need counseling instead. When the school sees an issue with a student it should be addressed right then, instead of waiting to see if anything else comes from it. But not only should schools keep an eye on the students but outsiders also. The best way to do this is through good security measures. Mass Media can cause people to want to follow in others footsteps and this can be an issue for future problems. Is there ever going to be an end to school violence? Probably not but we can do what we can to decrease the occurrences.
The director of the CSG Justice Center, Michael Thompson said, "Anyone who wants to make students feel safer in school, improve high school graduation rates, and close the achievement gap needs to have a plan to reduce the number of youth who are suspended from school.” (U.S News). Mr. Thompson made this statement with regards to the negative effects that “zero tolerance policies” is having on the public school system. The “zero tolerance policies” were originally a war against drugs, and other major issues that school’s faced in the early 80’s. Now, instead of creating a learning and welcoming atmosphere in schools, the enforcement of “zero tolerance policies” has increased the amounts of students who are suspended and expelled each year.
Exclusionary discipline is defined as any discipline strategy that excludes students from actual regular instruction—such as in-school suspension (ISS), when students are outside of the regular classroom; out-of- school suspension (OSS); and expulsion (Losen, 2011). Out of the estimated one million students in the study conducted by Fabelo, T., Thompson, M. D., Plotkin, M., Carmichael, D., Marchbanks, M. P., & Booth, E. A. (2011), 54 percent of students have reportedly have received ISS as a punishment, while 31 percent reportedly have received OSS as a punishment in their
Students who are disruptive in class and refused to do their work were sent down to discipline where they received the consequences for their actions. More often than not, in school suspension was the end result. The concept of in school suspension was new to me because it was not something that I had seen when I was growing up.
Imagine this, your child tells you about how a kid who brought a gun to school got suspended, you’d be happy right? Of course you would, because you know that student who brought the gun isn’t going to be around your child for at least a couple of weeks. So why in the world are schools wanting to stop suspending students? Although many people don’t agree with suspending students, suspension should still be practiced because kids won’t have to be around “bad apples”, suspending crummy students is easy and convenient, and there will most likely be disciplinary actions at home for the students. When a student gets expelled, it gives parents of other children peace-of-mind.