FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE!
White House Report: The Continuing Need To Rethink Discipline
December 9, 2016
Washington, DC — Today, the White House released a new capstone report with updates about projects launched and local progress made in response to the Administration's Rethink Discipline efforts. Rethink Discipline was launched as part of President Barack Obama's My Brothers' Keeper initiative and aims to support all students and promote a welcome and safe climate in schools. The full report is available here.
The White House will also convene stakeholders and leaders to discuss the progress made and the work ahead to encourage and support local leaders as they work to implement supportive school discipline practices. Today's meeting in the Roosevelt Room will include remarks by Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, Cabinet Secretary and Chair of the My Brother's Keeper Task Force Broderick Johnson, Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Muñoz and Secretary of Education John B. King Jr.
As noted in a joint Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services Policy Statement, suspension and expulsion can contribute to a number of adverse outcomes for childhood development in areas such as personal health, interactions with the criminal justice system, and education.
The 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) reveals that out-of-school suspensions decreased by nearly 20 percent compared to the 2011-12 school year. However, 2.8 million students received out-of-school suspensions in the 2013-14 school year, representing approximately 6 percent of all students enrolled in elementary and secondary schools.
The application of exclusionary discipline practices is especially significant for students of color and students with disabilities, who, in general, are disciplined more often than their classmates. As stated in the Department of Education's First Look brief about 2013-14 CRDC data, in preschool, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white children. In K-12, black students are 3.8 times more likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions compared to white students. Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions as students without disabilities.
Addressing these disparities and rethinking discipline have remained top priorities of the Administration, which has focused attention on the importance of school disciplinary approaches that foster safe, supportive, and productive learning environments in which students can thrive.
Announcements made as part of this comprehensive effort include:
•Supportive School Discipline Initiative: In 2011, the Departments of Education and Justice announced the launch of a collaborative project to support the use of school discipline practices that foster safe, supportive, and productive learning environments while keeping students in school. A cornerstone of this Initiative is the School Discipline Consensus Project, managed by the Council of State Governments and supported by various philanthropic organizations. The Consensus Project brought together practitioners from various fields to develop consensus recommendations to dismantle the "school-to-prison pipeline."
•Joint Federal Policy and Legal Guidance: Education and Justice jointly released a School Climate and Discipline Guidance Package in 2014 to provide schools with a roadmap to reduce the usage of exclusionary discipline practices and clarify schools' civil rights obligation to not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin in the administration of school discipline.
•#RethinkDiscipline Convening and Public Awareness Campaign: The Departments of Education and Justice launched Rethink Discipline at the White House in July 2015, convening school district teams, including superintendents, some law enforcement practitioners, and justice officials from across the country, and sparking a national dialogue around punitive school discipline policies and practices that exclude students from classroom instruction and targeted supports.
Read and learn more HERE!:
http://www.ed.gov/…/white-house-report-c...
Posted By: agnes levine
Friday, December 9th 2016 at 1:53PM
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