New California Bill Could Ban School Suspensions over 'Willful Defiance' and Disruptive Behavior
The California legislature is on the verge of instituting a new law that will drastically alter the way primary school administrators dole out punishment to uncooperative students, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Passed by the state Senate and Assembly in August, Senate Bill 419 will ban schools from suspending students for insubordination as well as disruptive behavior, with mild exceptions.
The legislation, which will only impact kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms, will take effect in both public and charter institutions.
Democratic state Sen. Nancy Skinner, the bill’s primary sponsor, says the bill is one of a number in the legislature’s recent attempts to drive statewide suspensions way down — particularly those for “willful defiance.”
“Our goal needs to be to keep kids in school and to have them be successful,” Skinner said.
The Berkeley Democrat believes suspensions should be a last resort for schools when correcting student behavior, adding that they are no more than “lost time,” setting the student back further and leading them to act out more in the future.
California schools saw approximately 363,000 suspensions in the 2017-18 school year, EdSource reported. And this is still a dramatic drop-off from previous years, where so many as 710,00 were reported.
“Willful defiance” or insubordination suspensions accounted for nearly 20 percent of these punishments with about 60,000 reported in the 2017-18 academic year.
Skinner also said, however, that the bill has social justice motives, with a primary goal being to address punishments that are said to disproportionately impact students of color.
This discrepancy often referred to as the “suspension gap” by the left, leads some lawmakers to believe minority students are unfairly discriminated against by school teachers and administrators when it comes to punishment.
According to The Blaze, state Department of Education reports show black students, who makeup 5.6 percent of enrolled students, account for 15.6 percent of all insubordination-related suspensions.
Meanwhile, white students, making up 23.2 percent of the statewide student body, account for 20.2 percent of such infractions.
David Turner of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a co-sponsor for the bill, went so far as to say these types of suspensions are a tool for marginalizing minority students.
“These particular kinds of suspension are being used to harm young people and especially black people in particular,” Turner told The Bee.
“When we talk about racial equity, this bill is racial equity,” he added. He also pointed out that when similar legislation was implemented in Los Angeles in previous years, suspensions went down and total graduations went up.
Whether or not this is cause for celebration, however, is disputed, as an increase in student populations nationwide has in and of itself led to a rise in total graduations from primary and secondary schools.
Eric Premack of the Charter School Development Center told The Bee he believes that the bill is a dramatic overreach by the state government. Preventing charter institutions from implementing such punishments to provide a more functional learning environment than many public schools “def[ies] the very reason why charter schools exist.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that school teachers from low-income, inner-city neighborhoods — who report higher levels of disruptive and defiant behavior from students — largely support maintaining suspension policies, according to survey data.
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