Obama, School Discipline, Demanding the Back Door No More

This summer I had the privilege of teaching a course for our university’s summer bridge program. This program aims to help entering freshman successfully make the transition to college by spending six weeks prior to the start of the academic year taking workshops on writing, reading, study skills, and personal well being. The students also enroll in a tuition-free academic course for credit. Students receive the help of tutors, peer mentors, program staff and faculty during their time with us.

Students ultimately enroll on a voluntary basis, although they are recruited from a pool of students who did not place at the college level in either math or reading on their placement exams. Many of the students who are identified as candidates for the summer program come from Chicago Public Schools, which is roughly 90% Black and Latino, with a majority of students receiving free or reduced lunch, an indicator of poverty. While our urban high school system has made some improvements in recent years, increasing graduation and college-going rates, a significant number of CPS graduates still arrive to college not fully prepared to engage in college-level work. The students themselves are motivated and hardworking, but they are often simultaneously working to deal with numerous challenges that are personal, familial, cultural, and societal. All of these combined make doing well in school quite hard. This is fairly typical of most large urban school districts-I’ve lived and worked in schools in New York City, Boston, and Oakland, and the story is similar across them all. 

While these deeply engrained patterns across many locales suggest that something systematic and structural is happening that prevents young people from getting the academic preparation they require to successfully attend college, the cultural narrative to which we hold on as Americans is individualistic. If someone is not doing well in school, the responsibility rests squarely on his or her shoulders. Sometimes, when we are in a generous mood, we will lay blame on the individual skills of parents or the individual dedication or intelligence of teachers. Rarely do we acknowledge broader patterns and societal problems such as the unequal funding of schools that makes teachers’ jobs harder, the lack of job opportunities in certain neighborhoods that force parents to send their children to school hungry, or the disproportionate policing and incarceration of certain groups that ultimately change how families look and what they can accomplish. And the looming cloud that hovers above all of this is race, as it is largely Blacks and Latinos who are affected by limited resources and chances.

During my summer bridge class, which was an Introduction to Latino Studies, I introduced the idea that social policies, capitalism, and international politics have a lot to do with who migrates to the U.S. and how they fare once here. If we as a nation had economic interests, like bananas, in a Latin American country such as Guatemala, we might protect those interests with military force, which in turn would destabilize a country by damaging infrastructure and also affecting work opportunities. This would lead people to leave the country to a place with more stability and opportunity, such as the U.S. Depending upon how these already damaged individuals were received by the U.S., either as legal migrants or refugees, or as undocumented individuals without legal status, would be how they fared once here.

Given that these were freshman, I stepped away from this large political and historical discussion for a moment. I tried to make an analogy to show how structural issues affect individual behavior. I turned to the issue of dropouts among Latinos in this class where 13 of the 14 students were Latino. My hope was to connect them to the idea of structuralism more directly. I noted how many Chicago Public Schools high schools have metal detectors, armed security guards or police, and very strict disciplinary policies. I asked the students whether these felt welcoming or whether in some ways those policies and practices could even encourage dropout rather than discourage disruptive behavior. After all, who would want to be in a place so unwelcoming, so prison-like? Better to be at home or on the street, where you could feel free. I brought my point home by arguing that education should be liberating and that it was ironic that schools could be so limiting. I then told them that I hoped college could be a place where they could regain a sense of freedom through learning. Inspiring, I thought.

A student in the front row seemed to be taking what I was saying in and then shared an epiphany she had while I was talking. “You know you’re right. They don’t have metal detectors or guards here.” “Exactly,” I said, thinking that I had helped facilitate that connection for her, but then she continued. “That is really crazy. How can they just allow us to wander around here without checking us?” An interesting piece of our cultural narrative of meritocracy, “you get what you deserve,” is that at the end of the day, we all believe it, even if we are on the receiving end of inequality.

Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech on disciplinary policies in schools. He emphasized that zero-tolerance policies, the use of police, and expulsions and suspensions are not effective means to deal with student misbehavior. He then called for approaches to discipline that are more in line with what is needed in schools, that would restore a sense of justice and fairness for students. I agree that when student behavior is problematic that it should be dealt with in this constructive way; however, I disagree with the premise that a primary focus of schools should remain about behavioral discipline and control. Keeping the focus of schools on exerting power, even soft power, over students does little to create schools that are places for true growth, learning, and enlightenment.  This will not create a space where inequalities that exist outside the school can be addressed.

When I was studying social work in California I did my internship at a special public school in Oakland for children identified as having behavioral problems. In my social work classes I was learning about the power of providing unconditional positive regard to clients, about redressing disparities in resources, and about using my knowledge and skills as a way of giving power to others. One day, a young African American boy who was nine years old refused to sit in his chair after feeling that a teacher had treated him unfairly. While I don’t remember the details, I do remember feeling that perhaps he was overlooked for whatever recognition he initially wanted. In a span of less than five minutes, two special education teachers, three master’s level social workers, and the principal were called into the room, all because he would not sit down. Once the principal arrived, he shouted at her, probably used an expletive or two, which I can’t remember for sure, but at no point did he threaten harm or raise a hand or object toward anyone. The principal had a two-way radio and commanded that her secretary call the police. Literally within seconds, a police officer arrived, barked some orders at this nine-year old, twisted his arm behind his back and handcuffed him to a chair. 

I remember being fairly new at this time and standing by feeling inept as an intern during this whole incident. In our social worker meeting later that day I mustered the courage to say that what I saw was not right that it just foretold the life that this young black person would have in West Oakland; that the behavior did not justify that type of force. We were social workers, after all, who should have been working against such an injustice. I was met with some sheepish stares, but the ultimate response from my supervisor, was that sometimes these things just happened this way.

I think my worry about the fanfare around Obama’s speech and the accompanying paper that was put out by the Department of Education and Secretary Arne Duncan, is that it takes for granted that behavioral problems in school “just happen” as a regular occurrence. They don’t rethink the stresses such as poverty, joblessness, homelessness and racism that might contribute to behavior problems. The paper and the speech really just say, “don’t be so harsh.”

An area for hope is that when you really engage students and offer them an understanding and caring environment with plenty of resources, you can remove all of the metal detectors and security guards and have no problems at all. As a matter of fact, with the right types of resources you can overcome huge challenges. Our summer bridge program does just that as it has retention and graduation rates that beat our averages for our general student body. And this is not only true at our school. Likely, it would not be only true for college students either. After all, our students were once CPS students, and treating them more human and with more respect, along with providing them a great education helps them achieve great things.