The federal government provided guidance last week on improving school climate and ending the school-to-prison pipeline. We hope Georgia lawmakers were listening.
Georgia schools issue more out-of school suspensions than 41 other states. In 2011-12, our school systems assigned more than 325,000 suspensions, at a cost to public school students of approximately 1.7 million days of instructional time.
Systematically removing kids from the classroom is not sound practice for improving our schools or increasing student achievement. In fact, schools with the lowest suspension rates tend to have the highest graduation rates. Overly punitive discipline is a considerable hindrance to Georgia’s desire to run a first-class public school system. Although our graduation rate has increased to 71.5 percent, Georgia still lags most states in education.
A parent trigger bill currently before the Georgia Senate threatens to exacerbate this trend. The “Parent and Teacher Empowerment Act,” passed by the Georgia House last year, allows parents and teachers to convert existing traditional schools into charter schools or remove school personnel. We applaud the Legislature’s attempt to involve parents and communities in fixing our education system. However, parent triggers are the wrong solution for Georgia students.
Research shows charters often use extremely punitive discipline policies, such as suspensions, expulsions and school-based arrests, to reject the students they consider undesirable, without significantly increasing student achievement. Charter schools in Chicago and Washington, D.C., expel students up to 16 times the rate of traditional schools. Recently, parents of New Orleans charter students pulled their children out of school amid concerns of overly punitive discipline practices.
It is a little harder for educators to work with kids who are struggling. It seems easier to just remove them from the classroom. However, we owe it to our children, especially to our most vulnerable, to make the extra effort. We should use exclusionary discipline as a last resort, only for serious infractions that truly threaten school safety.
This does not mean we lower our expectations. We can hold students to high behavioral and academic standards and minimize disorder and disruptiveness in school without diminishing their opportunities for success.
We must invest in smart strategies. The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice recommended last week that schools engage both parents and the community as one of the first steps in creating positive school climate. Parent trigger laws do not lead to genuine engagement. Instead, what we have seen is a dilution of parental power and an undermining of relationships between schools and the communities they serve.
Georgia lawmakers should invest in programs and policies that will unite parents, teachers and others to create the best schools possible for our children. Effective local school councils are such a strategy.
Established in 2000 by the “A+ Education Reform Act,” LSCs were intended to help local school districts bring parents and community members together with teachers and school administrators to share strategies for school improvement. In their current form, LSCs serve as policy-level advisory bodies.
The local school council model is based on years of research and decades of lived experiences. Studies show the more parents participate in schooling through proven vehicles such as LSCs, the better students tend to do in school. To note, Georgia charter schools are not required to implement a local school council.
Rather than implement failed policies like parent triggers, Georgia should sharpen the tools it already has by funding the LSC mandate and strengthening its role in school governance.
That’s how to really empower parents.
