Reversing Broward County's School-to-Prison Pipeline
When, after a nationwide search, he was hired two years ago to serve as superintendent of Florida’s Broward County Public Schools, Robert Runcie began brainstorming ways to close the racial achievement gap. At the time, black students in the sixth-largest district in the country had a graduation rate of only 61 percent compared to 81 percent for white students. To find out why, Runcie, who once headed a management-consulting firm, went to the data.
“One of the first things I saw was a huge differential in minority students, black male students in particular, in terms of suspensions and arrests,” he says. Black students made up two-thirds of all suspensions during the 2011-2012 school year despite comprising only 40 percent of the student body. And while there were 15,000 serious incidents like assaults and drug possession reported that year, 85 percent of all 82,000 suspensions were for minor incidents—use of profanity, disruptions of class—and 71 percent of all 1,000-plus arrests were for misdemeanors. The last statistic, says Runcie, “was a huge red flag.”
Like most large school districts in the United States, discipline policies in Broward reflected the idea that the best way to maintain an orderly classroom is to get rid of disruptive students, an approach known as zero tolerance. Zero tolerance policies help explain why 81 percent of all suspensions in New York City Schools in the 2012-20 13 school year were for minor infractions and 70 percent of all arrests were for misdemeanors; why 67 percent of all school-based arrests in Florida in 2011-2012 were for misdemeanors; and why 97 percent of half a million suspensions and expulsions recorded in an eight-year Texas study published in 2011 were not required under state law. A 2008 survey from the American Psychological Association titled “Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in Schools?” found that “recent research indicates a negative relationship between the use of school suspension and expulsion and school-wide academic achievement.” While factors outside of school, like family income, matter most for academic success, “there’s a direct correspondence between the achievement gap and discipline,” says Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University. According to a nationwide study from UCLA 24 percent of black secondary-school students were suspended at least once during the 2009-2010 school year versus 7 percent of white students. That same year, the graduation rate for black students was 66 percent compared to 83 percent for white students.
Broward announced broad changes designed to mitigate the use of harsh punishments for minor misbehavior at the beginning of this school year. While other districts have amended their discipline codes, prohibited arrests in some circumstances, and developed alternatives to suspension, Broward was able to do all these things at once with the cooperation of a group that included a member of the local NAACP, a school board member, a public defender, a local sheriff, a state prosecutor, and several others. In early November, The Miami Herald reported that suspensions were already down 40 percent and arrests were down 66 percent. Yet these changes required years of advocacy. The hard scrabble road to Broward’s success also helps explain why zero tolerance policies have persisted.
http://prospect.org/article/reversing-broward-countys-school-prison-pipeline
