In a recent article, President Obama and congress have signed the Every Student Succeeds Act which has an additional clause that is designed to eliminate discipline practices that lead students down the school-to-prison pipeline. It has been determined that the school-to-prison pipeline has become detrimental to the productivity of minorities in America. Schools can use two primary strategies that will enable them to met the Every Student Succeeds Act discipline requirements.
According to the article,Education Law a tool for ending school-to-prison pipeline, the Every Student Succeeds Act supersedes the No Child Left Behind Law by encouraging school districts to evaluate their discipline polices that will meet the standards set forth by the act. Schools are now required to reveal that they are taking steps to curb discipline practices that displace students out of the classroom. The new act requires that school districts adopt researched based practices that will keep children in schools and develop discipline policies that are inclusive of the “long-term goal of prison reduction through opportunities, mentoring, intervention, support and other education services”. The Every Student Succeeds Act will require the total cooperation of teachers and students.
How have schools contributed to the need for the discipline reduction emphasis in the Every Student Succeeds Act?
Schools encompass cultural expectations that present challenges for Black students. Schools and Black student conflict result from expectation differences. The lack of cultural consistency and negative teacher expectations has resulted in hidden and often unintended conflict between teachers and students.
Teachers who are culturally different from their students have a greater challenge creating a trusting environment when cultural diversity and race factors are not put on the table by the school and students perceive these factors as important to their identity and school success. School leaders must stop operating on the assumption that the primary reasons for Black children’s failures and challenges with school rest with the children or parents and accept the fact that much of the responsibility rests with the school system and the personnel who dominate the school culture.
Many school social codes are unfamiliar and opposed to culturally diverse student home codes. Blacks have difficulty with school instructional concepts and ideas that are absent in their community, culture, or economic environment that ignore or misrepresent their present condition. School instructional procedures include cultural values, orientations, and perceptions that differ from those of Black students.
The majority of elementary and secondary school curriculum are oriented towards White middle-class children. Public schools continue to have culturally based philosophies and curriculum that focus on White European and Judeo-Christian values. Instructional materials and instructors who work well for European students do not necessarily work well for culturally diverse students, and to believe that they do is to assume Black, Latino, American Indian, Asian, Arab and African immigrants, and European-origin students have identical personal, social, cultural, historical, and family traits.
School instructional procedures include cultural values, perceptions, and orientations that differ from those of Black students. Students who are not interested in school may meet teacher demands for compliance with resistance. Blacks acquire cultural values, attitudes, and learning styles that conflict with values, attitudes, and learning styles needed for success in public schools. Exposing minority students to conditions such as limited parental access to economic and educational resources, conflicting ideas about cultural transmission and primary language use in the home, and interaction style that does not prepare students for typical teacher-student interaction patterns prepare students for school failure before they begin to attend school.
Individuals who accept school cultural orientation values expect passivity by the learner, authoritative transmission of information by the teacher, individual effort aimed at completing assigned tasks, performance recognition, avoidance of confrontations, and minimal antagonisms. In school, students become passive informational recipients while in their culture they are involved in a learning experience that is give and take, and in one situation, they may be the learner and in another situation, they are the teacher.
Schools can achieve the disciplinary standards set forth in the Every Student Succeeds Act by utilizing the Raccelerate Racism Formula and promoting positive racial teacher student classroom relationships (Properateasclaships).
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Dr. Derrick L. Campbell, Ed.D. www.positiveracialrelationships.com PO Box 4707 Cherry Hill, NJ 08034
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Author of Promoting Positive Racial Teacher Student Classroom Relationships and Promoting Positive Racial Teacher Student Classroom Relationships: Methodology
“The model that you use to analyze teacher-student relationships is a good one for most school districts”.
~ Joe Vas ~ Perth Amboy Mayor
“Dr. Campbell’s Cultural Relationship Training Program is comprehensive, informative, and should be required training for all schools”
~ Darrell Pope ~ Hutchinson Kansas NAACP President