Karen Zapata, former elementary school teacher and now education director for Teachers 4 Social Justice, remembers walking into the center "pod" of her San Francisco school and seeing the halls lined with African American boys. They'd all been sent out of their classrooms.

"The discipline being used with these little kids was basically to ask them to leave," says Zapata, The early exclusion of children of color, especially boys, she says, foreshadows what happens later: African American and Latino students are suspended, expelled-and often sent to jail-in high numbers.

"It struck me," says Zapata, "that exclusionary discipline for kids of such a young age was really racist in nature." These children, who needed to be supported and supervised, were outside the classroom, "unsupervised, and acting crazy," recalls Zapata. "And then someone was getting mad at them for acting out."

Racial patterns

A racial pattern of discipline begins early-then persists-in California public schools. One study of the San Diego Unified School District during the 2000-2001 school year, for example, found that African American and Latino students made up 53 percent of the study body, but nearly three-quarters of the suspensions and expulsions. In Oakland, the district is under a federal court order to reduce the number of "minority" suspensions and expulsions-after a group of African Ameri-can parents filed suit in 1993.

"Unfair discipline practices are really a symptom of a larger problem," says N'Tanya Lee, project director for Youth Making a Change in San Francisco. It's a problem with multiple causes.

Poverty at school

While all California public schools are stressed by budget cuts, schools largely populated by Latino and African American students are more likely to be run down, poorly supplied, and staffed by inexperienced and uncertified teachers. "The environment in [such] schools is not conducive to learning, and the behavior is a response to that," says Tammy Johnson, director of Race and Public Policy at the Applied Research Center.

Teachers often feel "overstressed and under a lot of pressure," with little support from overworked administrators, Johnson says, so suspension and expulsion become the first line of defense instead of the last. And, she adds, "one way to make your test scores look better is to get rid of students who are not going to cut the mustard."

Different consequences

"Kids are smart," says Goldie Buchanan of the African American Parent/Community Coalition for Educa-tional Equity, who sent her three sons, now graduated, through Los Angeles schools. "Most of them believe there's a double set of justice and that's why they react the way they do."

Susan Sandler, of San Francisco's Justice Matters Institute, tells of a school where African American and Latino students are most often disciplined for "insubordination," often punished by suspension or expulsion. White students are most often disciplined for alcohol use, seen as a health issue and treated less harshly. "We need to look," says Sandler, "are we being fair about how we treat those offenses?"

A 2000 study by the Indiana Education Policy Center found that African American students are more likely to be disciplined for minor offenses subject to interpretation, such as "defiance," while white students were more likely to be disciplined for more serious offenses.

Attitude problems

"I'll see staff looking at kids and saying things like 'that one's going to end up in jail' or 'that one's going to end up a serial killer,'" says Sandler. These self-fulfilling predictions, she adds, are most often made for African American students, who are often seen as "bad" or hardened, rather then as children making mistakes.

"If you're in a classroom with people who look like you, you figure you understand each other because you come from the same culture," says Buchanan. "But when the kids don't look like you, and they do stuff that's not familiar, then it starts to matter what you believe about those kids."

Children also can misread teachers. Elizabeth Scarboro says in her first year teaching a diverse sixth grade in Berkeley, she tolerated comments that some students saw as undermining her authority. This year, she says, "I learned to be more firm."

Resources

Holistic programs that help schools develop equitable and positive discipline strategies:

• Child Development Project, 800-666-7270, www.devstu.org/cdp
• Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, 541-346-2505, www.pbis.org
• The National Coalition for Equity in Education, UC Santa Barbara, http://ncee.education.ucsb.edu
• Teachers4SocialJustice, www.teachers4socialjustice.org
• The Pacific Educational Group, 415-681-4575

Educational justice organizations:

• Justice Matters, 415-353-5735
• Applied Research Center, ERASE (Expose Racism and Advance School Excellence) Initiative 510-653-3415, www.arc.org
• African American Parent/ Community Coalition for Educational Equity, 323-291-5546

Fair and caring schools

Giving kids responsibility

Students in Jeremiah Jeffries' racially diverse first grade class at John Swett Alternative Elementary School in San Francisco's Western Addition know what to expect first each morning: it's calendar time-led by the "lead student" for the week. 

While the students find the day on the calendar, sing about days and months, and count in every student's language, the lead student has the authority to send misbehaving classmates back to their desks. Because those students will lose a part of recess, leaders do not act rashly, and students work to behave.

Students memorize a pledge: "If I can respect myself, I can control myself; If I can control myself, I can have self-discipline." His students, says Jefferies, "are given the power and the responsibility to manage themselves," and are rarely sent out of the classroom.

All students, says Jeffries, come to the classroom with feelings about how they'll be treated. If they have a history of being ignored, sent away, or not included, they will already have developed negative patterns of behavior.

"It takes emotional savvy and understanding to reach kids and help them perform regardless of how hard their lives are," says Jeffries, but "we need to help them succeed in spite of all that."

"We never stop trying"

At Emerson Elementary, a racially mixed school in Berkeley, students are rarely sent out of the classroom, hardly ever suspended.

"Teachers will send a student to another classroom before they send them to me," says principal Susan Hodge. "Sometimes kids just need a moment to pull themselves together, but the expectation is that they'll come back-they're not just being tossed out."

Then, if a child needs counseling or a mentor, Hodge finds one for her. "It doesn't mean we can fix every problem," says Hodge, "it's just that we never stop looking for solutions." She attributes Emerson's success to:

• Resources, resources, resources: Grants fund counseling, mentoring, tutoring, and after-school care.
  
  
• Dedicated, skilled staff and teachers. "Everyone talks to the kids, everyone's involved with the kids," says Hodge.
  
  
• Working together. If a fourth grader is having trouble, for example, the teacher might meet with the student's teachers from earlier grades to get ideas for how to help
  
  
• Clear and high expectations for behavior and learning. They work, says Hodge, "if, at the same time as having high expectations, you help the kids to meet those expectations."
  
  
• Student-focused learning. "We look at students as individuals and try to tailor instruction to meet their needs," says Hodge.

"All students have different levels of achievement, and they all have different stories," she concludes, "but we never stop trying with any child."