Nobody goes to the principal's office—they go right out the door.
Californian school
suspension rules are involved to say the least. In recent decades they have been employed by many states around the nation as a punishment for all kinds of acting out by students under section "k":
Disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials, or other school personnel engaged in the performance of their duties.
[bold my emphasis]
Read that again and then wonder whether or not there would have been anyone like that in your school during your elementary and high school years—because yes, these rules apply to all children above grade 3 in California schools.
The good news is that, at least, in Oakland Unified's school district, the willful defiance suspension rules no longer apply.
Oakland has been criticized for the disproportionate suspensions, leading to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and a 2012 voluntary agreement that required the district to employ a range of practices that reduced suspensions. Among them are the district’s Manhood Development classes for African American males as well as restorative justice, which requires victims and offenders to talk about the behavior and ways to address it.
Willful defiance suspensions for African American students in Oakland declined from 1,050 incidents in 2011 to 630 in 2014, according to district officials. That number is expected to drop significantly this school year as well.
Just so you understand how brutally vicious and idiotic these rules are, here is one of numerous examples of
its deployment:
“We got upset at each other again, and it was over some work also,” recounted Hernandez outside a recent hearing he attended at the state Capitol with other youth advocates. “I just said, ‘can I go outside? Because I’m feeling kind of upset.’ I raised my hand and he completely ignored me, so I walked out.”
When Hernandez returned to the classroom after a couple of minutes, according to the student, the teacher suspended him for three days – during finals week.
Other reasons for suspensions—sleeping in class, interrupting teacher, going to the bathroom without asking. And these suspensions are also
crazy racist in practice:
A district-by-district analysis by EdSource showed that African American students also were overrepresented in suspensions for willful defiance in all but two of the 30 largest districts – Montebello Unified and Santa Ana Unified. Latinos were overrepresented in willful defiance suspensions in 19 of the largest districts.
Some districts, such as San Francisco Unified and San Jose Unified, had a low number of suspensions for willful defiance, but African Americans and Latinos were still overrepresented compared with white and Asian students. For example, in San Jose, white students accounted for 26 percent of enrollment but only 9 percent of willful defiance suspensions in 2011-12, compared with Latinos, who made up 52 percent of enrollment and 79 percent of willful defiance suspensions.
The middle and late 1990s saw "zero tolerance" policies take hold from criminal law all the way down through into our school systems. Now, everybody says our schools are terrible and we have more people in prison than a science fiction dystopian future novel. Slowly, people are coming around to the fact that progressive educators have been saying and proving for years—stricter schools rules are never successful and rarely do they have anything to do with the education of the student body.