Seeing the toll, schools revise zero tolerance — from nytimes.com by Lizette Alvarez
Excerpt (emphasis):
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.
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Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.
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“We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”
From DSC:
Some thoughts immediately come to mind:
Hal Plotkin’s Keynote at the 19th Annual Sloan C conference addressed this same idea of being pushed out — we should get rid of the words/phrase “drop outs” he said. Paraphrasing Hal:
We shouldn’t use the phrase “drop outs.” Instead we should use the phrase “pushed outs.” It’s like walking by someone drowning and yelling at them to get out of the water — but not throwing them a lifeline. If we used the phrase pushed outs instead of drop outs, people would better understand what’s going on.
Students are being pushed out. They’re disengaged.
From society’s standpoint, what’s better? To have an engaged student being able to pursue his/her passions, while staying out of trouble and actually enjoying learning — or — have a youth walking the streets for a time before ending up with criminal records and being locked away? This seems to be true for the individual’s standpoint as well.
Lastly, my hunch here is that the Common Core State Standards and the enormous push for standardized testing is hurting us here — not helping us. In fact, I’ll bet we will see a direct relationship between the amount we press these initiatives and the number of youth we push out of the system.
Let’s try some new strategies and experiments — at least to a small degree; what have we got to lose?
From one of my early coaches:
Always change a losing game.
Never change a winning game.