School suspensions

There are things going on in the public schools that no one talks about and they are disturbing. In an effort to lower the dropout rate of black students, new procedures have been implemented. Based on the evidence that if students drop out they end up in poverty all the stops have been pulled out to keep them in school. Here is a situation that is all too prevalent. A high school student sits in the classroom and does nothing. He says he has no interest in the class and doesn’t know what is going on and doesn’t want to know. Sometimes this student will disrupt the class by talking with other students and sometimes they will do odd things like just lying down on the floor. A special teacher is assigned to this student and the two of them go to a special room where the teacher literally pleads with the student to do some small amount of work. It appears and have no evidence to back this up but if the student stays in high school for the full four years they somehow graduate. By using this procedure the school can show that they have reduced the dropout rate and increased graduation rates. I have been in algebra and chemistry classes where there are students, as many as one fourth of the class, who have no idea what is going on. How these students manage to graduate is something that should be looked into. The data collects both suspensions and expulsions and the difference is time. An expulsion is for a year but suspensions vary in time. Last year, Minneapolis Public Schools suspended or expelled 4,896 students: 3,801 African Americans, 372 American Indians, 292 Latinos and 328 whites. St. Paul excluded 4,418 students from class for a day or longer, the state’s threshold for reporting disciplinary data: 3,109 African Americans, 101 American Indians, 472 Latinos and 397 whites. It is easy to see why there is a tendency to avoid talking about this problem.