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October 14, 2023

California dangerously lowers the bar for student behavior

By Andrea Widburg

James Q. Wilson’s and George L. Kelling’s “broken windows” theory of policing is relatively simple: If a society shows that it has no interest in policing little crimes, it creates an environment that is a perfect petri dish for big crimes. In California, a new law will have the practical effect of breaking windows in schools across the state. That’s because the state now makes it impossible for schools to rid themselves of students who disrupt the classroom or openly defy the teacher.

From the Epoch Times:

It will be illegal for California public schools to suspend students for disrupting class or defying teachers—known as willful defiance suspensions—starting July 1, 2024.

“With Governor Newsom’s signing of SB 274, California is putting the needs of students first,” bill author Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) said in a statement a day after the governor’s signing Oct. 8. “No more kicking kids out of school for minor disruptions. Students belong in school where they can succeed.”

SB 274—an extension of the author's previous legislation from 2019 that banned willful defiance suspensions for TK–5 students permanently and for grades 6–8 until 2025—now broadens such policy to include all public-school grades from TK–12 across the state, with a sunset date of July 1, 2029.

[snip]

Under the new law, teachers can remove a student from class for unruly behavior, but the youth would not be suspended from school. Instead, school administrators would be responsible for evaluating and implementing suitable in-school interventions or support for the student, according to the senator’s office.

Additionally, the bill prohibits the suspension or expulsion of students due to tardiness or truancy.

It’s hard to imagine a more foolish law. We know by looking at what happened in Minnesota, which embarked on a similar scheme, how this will end: In violence and educational breakdown.

Back in 2016, in an article that’s since been removed from its original site in the Star Tribune, Kathy Kersten wrote about what happened in St. Paul schools when they stopped allowing teachers to discipline disruptive students in the name of equity:

A St. Paul Central High School teacher is choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury. A teacher caught between two fighting fifth-grade girls is knocked to the ground with a concussion. Police are compelled to use a chemical irritant to break up a riot at Como Park High School.

Increasingly, some St. Paul Public Schools resemble a war zone. Ramsey County Attorney John Choi has branded the trend of violence “a public health crisis.” Teachers threatened to strike over the dangers they face, and their safety was a pivotal issue in recently concluded contract negotiations. “We are afraid,” one told the Pioneer Press.

Though many — including St. Paul school officials — seem reluctant to acknowledge it, the escalating violence and disorder follow a major change in school disciplinary policies. In recent years, district leaders have increasingly removed consequences for misbehavior, and led kids to believe they can wreak havoc with impunity.

In the words of one teacher: “We have a segment of kids who consider themselves untouchable.”

[snip]

We’re talking about a powerful ideology that has gripped the imagination of Twin Cities school officials — and far beyond. That’s the notion of “equity” — a buzzword that is rapidly becoming the all-purpose justification for dubious policies not only in education but in many public arenas.

Equity, in today’s “newspeak,” is not about fairness — that is, the same rules for everyone. It means quite the opposite. The equity crusade regards people — not as individuals responsible for their own conduct — but, first and foremost, as members of racial and ethnic groups. If one group’s outcomes on social measures are not identical to all of the others’, the cause is presumed to be discrimination and the proper response to be government policies designed to ensure equal statistical results.

The dilemma for St. Paul Public Schools leaders is that the district’s black students are proportionately disciplined and suspended at much higher rates than students of other racial groups.

You can read the rest here, and I urge you to do so.

The bottom line: Because minorities are more likely to misbehave in schools, the leftist solution isn’t to work with the minority community to improve their young’ uns’ behavior. Instead, it’s to lower all behavioral standards.

I can show you exactly what happens when you do that:

When you give people permission to behave badly, they will. California has just done that in its schools. I’m incredibly grateful that my father, who had the misfortune to be shunted as a teacher into one of California’s worst high schools in the late-1970s, is long gone. Back then, he was simply disheartened by the students’ unwillingness to learn. Today, he’d be fearing for his life—and he’d be disarmed and unable to defend himself, too.

Behind all the racial “love” talk you get from the left, Democrats obviously despise minorities. You can tell because every one of their initiatives, rather than showing high expectations for minorities, panders to the basest instincts that lurk in all human nature. They don’t see blacks as humans; that is, aspirational beings who can transcend the caveman who lives in all of us. Instead, they see them as bestial, and they legislate accordingly.

Image by Andrea Widburg using school hall.

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