Based on national data, researchers have been able to create a general profile of the students most impacted by the pipeline. Black kids are most likely to be disciplined because of zero-tolerance policies — a trend that begins in preschool. Students who have disabilities are suspended two times more than students who do not, and account for one-fourth of students “arrested and referred to law enforcement,” per data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
LGBTQ youth are disproportionately sanctioned as well. Many are penalized because of harassment or assault by their peers, or punished for their sexual orientation and gender expression. According to GLSEN, 15.1 percent of the LGBTQ students it surveyed had been suspended. Forty percent experienced some form of discipline, including suspension, detention, or expulsion.
The Obama administration began slowly trying to encourage educators to rethink discipline and create a more supportive school climate that aimed to decrease suspensions and expulsions but all of this is likely to increase, rather than decrease, under DeVos’s watch. While we haven’t explicitly heard dear old Betsy say anything about it (how many times must we say that she is not at all qualified to have anything to do with educating young people?), that in itself isn’t particularly encouraging.
As Secretary of Education, DeVos has been quiet about the school-to-prison pipeline. But her comments about character development and her general desire to privatize public schools are setting off alarm bells. Advocates fear that biased discipline will become even more harsh in schools and further jeopardize marginalized students. [...]
DeVos’s push to enroll more students in public and private charter schools— which have freer rein to discipline students and less oversight than public institutions— is especially disconcerting to education policy experts. Those are the very types of schools that purport to be arbiters of character and values, [Karen Dolan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies said].
“Many Christian schools, private [schools], and charter schools bill themselves as a place for wayward teens,” she said. Such schools employ a “regimented, militarized” style of discipline and “take the same approach that many conservatives take with regard to poverty or any type of stereotyping of historically marginalized communities, where they say it’s a failing of character.”
This is really frightening. If the above data shows that black kids and LGBTQ are the most disproportionately disciplined in schools, we can only imagine what will happen to them if they are forced into private, Christian and charter schools per DeVos’s push under the guise of educational choice. It already appears that DeVos has no intent to improve public education and what will happen to the most marginalized of students now? Just exactly what kind of “character development” will they be forced to undergo? Will Mike Pence be in charge of the curriculum? Will this include conversion therapy? This is not to be trusted. Make no mistake, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
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