Discipline Gets the Boot While zero-tolerance policies come into question, urban districts are trying alternatives—and seeing considerable success. By Ron Schachter January 2010

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Students at John F. Kennedy High School in Denver walk through the hallways in between classes. Since the district changed its policy, students are taking more responsibility and respecting others.

For the past 15 years, zero-tolerance policies for violence in schools have been the driving force behind many—80 to 95 percent by some estimates—of school discipline policies around the country.

Starting in 1994 with the requirements of the federal Gun-Free Schools Act and propelled by the shootings at Columbine High School five years later, districts began implementing zero-tolerance policies not just on possessing weapons but on a variety of student behaviors—from bringing in drugs and alcohol to cursing, disrupting class or even violating the dress code. Along the way, student suspensions and expulsions multiplied, not to mention the number of referrals to principals’ offices across the nation.

But the disciplinary landscape is starting to change in a growing number of schools, especially those in urban districts, where administrators have taken their cues from high-profile reports questioning the effectiveness and fairness of zero-tolerance practices. “Up until three years ago, the trend in most large urban districts was going in a more punitive direction,” says Jim Freeman, the project director of the Ending the Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track Project in Washington, D.C.

Freeman, who has worked with districts in Denver, Chicago, Baltimore County and Florida to change discipline codes, points to a landmark study in 2006 by the American Psychological Association that helped turn the tide. “While the standard claim was that zero-tolerance policies would improve school safety, the schools were no safer than before zero tolerance,” he explains. “What the report showed was that zero-tolerance policies turned schools into inhospitable environments that didn’t promote school safety. Now the movement towards alternatives is really picking up in a significant way. There are more bills being introduced and passed, and more districts are rewriting their policies.”

Texas enacted the latest legislation last spring, requiring school authorities to consider mitigating circumstances in applying zero-tolerance policies. And nationwide, more parents and elected officials want schools to revisit policies, in part due to a recent high-profile case involving a 6-year-old Delaware boy who was suspended after he brought to school a camping tool that included a knife.

In large cities such as Denver, Los Angeles and New York, meanwhile, school districts have been replacing those policies with the Positive Behavior Support (PBS) program, an approach to student behavior that emerged in the 1980s and pays careful attention to the social and emotional circumstances that can lead to bad student behavior, as well as interventions to prevent it, and with Restorative Justice (RJ), a more recent approach to discipline that offers a more flexible and creative way of dealing with behavioral incidents. Both methods emphasize that the offenders understand the impact of their actions and make appropriate amends.

Author and educator Ross Greene, who believes zero-tolerance policies are ineffective, also created the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) approach, which has helped schools to respond to behaviorally challenging students more effectively, and which has dramatically reduced rates of detention, suspension and expulsion. In his guidelines Bill of Rights for Kids with Social, Emotional and Behavioral Challenges, Greene, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, strives to ensure students with challenges are understood and treated compassionately.

Denver Public Schools officially changed its discipline policy in August 2008, after years of discussions with school and community stakeholders, including the police department and district attorney’s office. “We had extremely high numbers of school suspensions compared to the other districts in the state,” recalls Cheryl Karstaedt, executive director of the district’s Division of Student Services. “And those suspensions were being disproportionately meted out to minorities. That really was the impetus for us to look at doing something different.”

The new discipline policy embraced PBS and RJ practices, which had already been used for several years at seven pilot schools. Each school has its own RJ coordinator, who mediates conflicts between students or between a student and teacher; works with students, parents, teachers and administrators to devise alternative punishments to suspension; and monitors the aftermath of behavioral incidents.

“Restorative Justice creates an environment in which students take more responsibility,” observes Nicole Veltzé, principal of Skinner Middle School, one of seven with an RJ coordinator. “Today when I reinstated one student, I said, ‘Did you think when you cussed out your teacher the effect it would have on the teacher?’ We walk them through the [feelings of] other people it affects.”

A police officer visits Cienega Elementary School in Los Angeles to support students participating in a “Race to Read” program, which requires students to read five books within the first quarter and write a book report.

The teacher met with the student and the RJ coordinator to mediate how to restore the classroom environment, and the student wrote a speech to the class about how his poor choice affected that environment, she says.

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