were about 828,000 nonfatal acts of violence at school among students ages twelve to eighteen.
• Approximately 7 percent of teachers reported that they had been threatened with injury or physically attacked by a student from their school.
• In 2009, about 20 percent of students ages twelve to eighteen reported that gangs were present at their school during the school year.
As the CDC wrapped up in its report:
Not all injuries are visible. Exposure to youth violence and school violence can lead to a wide array of negative health behaviors and outcomes, including alcohol and drug use and suicide. Depression, anxiety, and many other psychological problems, including fear, can result from school violence. (Centers for Disease Control, 2013)
Among all these issues, bullying has been prioritized as a topic of urgent action. In fact, many states now require that each public school district have a bullying prevention program in place.
Concern also is growing about teenage suicide. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), teen suicide is the third-leading cause of death for young people ages fifteen to twenty-four, surpassed only by homicide and accidents. The CDC reports that each year, 20 percent of high school students seriously consider suicide, 14 percent make a plan, and 8 percent make a suicide attempt. What pushes certain kids over the edge? The APA offers an explanation:
The risk for suicide frequently occurs in combination with external circumstances that seem to overwhelm at-risk teens who are unable to cope with the challenges of adolescence because of predisposing vulnerabilities such as mental disorders. Examples of stressors are disciplinary problems, interpersonal losses, family violence, sexual orientation confusion, physical and sexual abuse and being the victim of bullying. (American Psychological Association, 2013)
Discriminatory Discipline Practices
Many traditional school disciplinary policies have now been shown to be unfair to some groups of students. Both governmental and private research studies have shown that minority students are disproportionately excluded from school through a wide array of disciplinary practices: corporal punishment, suspension, expulsion, and even referrals to police and arrests. For example, compared to white students, black students were twice as likely to face corporal punishment; 2.5 times as likely to be suspended in or out of school or arrested in a school-related incident; three times as likely to be expelled; and four times as likely to face out-of-school suspension multiple times. Similarly, Native American students were twice as likely as white students to be suspended from school several times, expelled, referred to law enforcement or arrested, or face corporal punishment (American Institutes for Research, 2013).
All these factors combine to keep minority students out of their seats in classrooms, losing instructional time, falling behind their peers, and becoming ever more likely to drop out of schools without the skills to support themselves, and thus feeding today's accelerated, school-to-prison pipeline. In response to these accumulating reports, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Howard University to pledge action:
Perhaps the most alarming findings involve the topic of discipline. The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than nonminorities, even within the same school. Some examples—African American students, particularly males, are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their peers. (Holland, 2012)
These data are not new. Reports about inequities in school discipline policies have been circulating for decades (Skiba et al., 2002). Some cities, like Baltimore, have been revising their suspension policies to keep kids in school and learning. Since 2000, Baltimore has moved to in-school discipline approaches, and therefore lowered its suspension rate by 58 percent (Cichan, 2012). Other districts and states are finally experimenting with a variety of fairer and less exclusionary discipline approaches, including restorative justice, teen court, and peer mediation.
Best Practice Instruction Requires Social-Academic Skills
Although the term best practice is often used with vague intent, decades of thoughtful research have yielded a clear consensus on what optimal classroom instruction looks like—and it doesn't look like kids sitting in straight rows of desks with their hands folded, listening to a teacher talk. Best practice teaching can only happen in a flexible, decentralized classroom where kids take action in a variety of configurations, assume responsibility, work with pride, hold themselves accountable, and support one another. In the fourth edition of their book Best Practice: Bringing Standards to Life in America's Schools (Zemelman, 2012), Harvey and co-authors Steve Zemelman and Art Hyde synthesize recent findings about the most effective pedagogies.
Drawing on the reports and recommendations from the whole range of education research centers, subject matter organizations, and standards-setting agencies, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde offer a model of powerful learning that is student-centered, cognitive, and interactive. This consensus vision of best practice can be summarized by looking at the following chart, which shows development from conventional toward more student-centered teaching.
As you can see, the interlocking conditions of good instruction cannot happen under the old command-and-control models of top-down school discipline. The new paradigm both requires and creates interdependence among everyone in the classroom. The characteristic structures and activities of state-of-the-art teaching require a pervasive climate of student self-awareness, autonomy, responsibility, collaboration, and reflection.
INDICATORS OF BEST PRACTICE
This chart illustrates movement from a teacher-directed to a student-centered classroom. Growth along this continuum does not mean complete abandonment of established instructional approaches. Instead, teachers add new alternatives to a widening repertoire of choices, allowing them to move among a richer array of activities, creating a more diverse and complex balance.
Classroom Setup: Promotes Student Collaboration
• Setup for teacher-centered instruction (separate desks) ►Student-centered arrangement (tables)
• Rows of desks ► Varied learning spaces for whole-class, small-group, and independent work
• Bare, unadorned space ► Commercial decorations ► Student-made artwork, products, displays of work
• Few materials ► Textbooks and handouts ► Varied resources (books, magazines, artifacts, manipulatives, etc.)
Classroom Climate: Actively Involves Students
• Management by consequences and rewards ► Order maintained by engagement and community
• Teacher creates and enforces rules ► Students help set and enforce norms
• Students are quiet, motionless, passive, controlled ► Students are responsive, active, purposeful, autonomous
• Fixed student grouping based on ability ► Flexible grouping based on tasks and choice
• Consistent, unvarying schedule ► Predictable but flexible time usage based on activities
Voice and Responsibility: Balanced Between Teacher-and Student-Directed
