Over the course of creating a critical reflective journal there is one experience that stands out. It was a visit to George Washington Community School, an urban school in Indianapolis Indiana, to observe the role of teacher preparation. During this visit my intent was to observe the concept of formal, common, and frozen registry for communication between teachers, students, staff, and community. During this exposure I was able to see discipline in a school setting in new and revealing way. I would like to present this experience and the interplay of registers of communication regarding discipline of students during a school day. I entered the school around 11:30 am on a typical school day. Lunch was ending for some and beginning for other students. I discovered the concept of frozen registry, or as defined as language to remain fixed/unchanged. I saw this in forms of school institutional laws of how to manage the safe and orderly entry into classrooms, halls, state standards, and student classroom behavior expectations. The language was clear for all reading the messages. Then I was introduced to formal registry in meeting personnel and teachers through out the building. Formal registry was defined as professional greetings, proper language exchange and communication that was contextual for academic exchanges. During this experience I was also exposed to students who spoke both formal and common registry. The observation exposed that the students choose to speak to one another in common or informal register. Common register included slang and coded words that only students used. There was clear interplay of exchange between professionals who use formal registry and students who speak in common registry. My observ... ... middle of paper ... ...ivil Rights Project. (2000). Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero tolerance and school discipline policies. [Report from a National Summit on Zero Tolerance.] Cambridge, MA; Harvard Civil Rights Project. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED454314). Devine, J. (1996). Maximum security: The culture of violence in inner-city Schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Feld, B. C. (1999). Bad kids: Race and the transformation of the juvenile court. New York: Oxford. Gorski, P. C. (2009). Cognitive Dissonance: A critical tool in social justice teaching. http://www.EdChange.org Skiba, R. J., Horner, R. H., Chung, C. G., Karenga-Rausch, M., May, S. L., & Tobin, T. (2011). Race is not neutral: A national investigation of African-American and Latin disproportionality in school discipline. School Psychology Review, 40, 85-107.
Tackett, J. L., Lahey, B. B., van Hulle, C., Waldman, I., Krueger, R. F., & Rathouz, P. J. (2013).
Suresh, G., Horbar, J., Plsek, P., Gray, J., Edwards, W., Shiono, P., & ... Goldmann, D. (2004).
Nowicka, P., Santoro, N., Liu, H., Lartaud, D., Shaw, M. M., Goldberg, R., Guandalini, C.,
Segal, E. A., Cimino, A. N., Gerdes, K. E., Harmon, J. K., & Wagaman, M. (2013). A
Harvey, P. D., Moriarty, P. J., Friedman, J. I., White, L., Parrella, M., Mohs, R. C., & Davis, K.
Wynn, D., Kaufman, M., Montalban, X., Vollmer, T., Simon, J., Elkins, J., I Rose, J. W. (2010).
A science teacher in Mississippi asked her students to take a picture with their completed DNA Lego model. John Doe took his picture with a smile and a hand gesture in which his thumb, index, and middle finger was raised. This was enough to earn him an indefinite suspension with a recommendation for expulsion because his school administrators believed he flashed a gang sign although he was simply putting up three fingers to represent his football jersey number. (NPR Isensee, 2014). This kind of criminalization of young people contributes to suspension, dropout, and incarceration, and too often pushes students into what is referred to by many education scholars and activists as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term that refers to “the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems” (ACLU 2013). The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in education today. This paper will focus on the following circumstances and policies contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline: 1) resource deprived schools, 2) high-stake testing and 3) zero-tolerance discipline policies. However, it is important to note that the school-to-prison pipeline is a broad problem not limited to these three components and has been influenced by historical inequities (segregated education), concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement (NAACP, 2005). They have each served to isolate and remove a massive number of people, a disproportionately large percentage of whom are youth of color, from their communities and from participation in civil society (NAACP, 2005). I argue for attention to the school-to-pr...
In all grades of education, from kindergarten to college, there is a form of discipline known as a zero tolerance policy. While the exact wording is different from school to school, basically a zero tolerance policy means that a student is immediately suspended, asked to attend an alternative school, or expelled if they are suspected or caught doing certain things. These policies are in place to hopefully deter students from doing drugs or being violent, but the ethics behind them are questionable. Some research has shown that these policies may not even work, and other forms of discipline would be better suited to help students. The three main activities that result in the zero tolerance policy are being caught with drugs or alcohol, being caught with a weapon, and bullying.
Zhang, Y. B., Harwood, J., Williams, A., Ylänne-McEwen, V., Wadleigh, P. M., & Thimm, C.
Who hasn’t heard of the Columbine shooting, where in the spring of 1999 in Littleton, Colorado over a dozen people where killed and many others were wounded at the hands of two students? Or even more recently, who does not know about the Virginia Tech massacre where a single student killed thirty-two people and wounded over twenty more? University of Texas, California State University, San Diego State University, the list of school violence is long and heart-breaking. Students and teachers have lost their lives by the dozens to gunmen that carried a grudge for some reason or another. These are extreme cases, for sure, and there is without a doubt a need for discipline in schools every where. However, zero-tolerance policies are not the answer to school discipline unless they can be reformed to have fewer gray areas and kept from being too strict, be less disruptive to the education process and allow teachers to keep their voices, and figure out how to correct claims of racial discrimination, regardless of claims that they are effective.
Ottenberg, A. L., Wu, J. T., Poland, G. A., Jacobson, R. M., Koenig , B. A., & Tilburt, J. C.
Kobau, R., Zack, M. M., Manderscheid, R., Palpant, R. G., Morales, D. S., Luncheon, C., et al.
Zero Tolerance is a no nonsense approach to school delinquency and minor infractions. It was the approach school and government officials instituted due to the high crime rate within schools during the 1980s and 90s. Students were being robbed in school, assaulted, killed etc. Officials began expelling, suspending, even turning kids over to police authority for punishment, in order to regain a proper structure, due to their concern that the violence within the schools were placing a strain on education. Zero Tolerance can be seen in institutes of learning till this day.
Whelan, R., Conrod, P. J., Poline, J., Lourdusamy, A., Banaschewski, T., Barker, G. J, Bellgrove, M. A.,
Barker, V., Giles, H., Hajek, C., Ota, H., Noels, K., Lim, T-S., & Somera, L. (2008).