Public-school leaders must find a better way to discipline unruly students. Suspending them for anything less than the most serious infractions fails to teach the students anything and only heightens the likelihood that the youngsters will be a drain on society in future years.
The National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, ranks North Carolina fourth nationally for its percentage of school suspensions. Overall, about 10 percent of public-school students in the state are suspended from class for some time each year.
This is a cause for concern. Other statistics show a strong correlation between students who are suspended and those who struggle later in life. Suspended students are three times more likely to drop out and, when they do, far less likely to find jobs.
McClatchy Newspapers reports that Northeastern University determined that dropouts, especially black males, are far more likely to end up incarcerated than is the rest of the student population. The university showed that, on the average day, about one-fourth of the nation's black-male dropouts are incarcerated.
Statistics can be misread, and it would not be wise to say that a suspension is what leads a youngster onto the wrong course. But when schools suspend students, they forfeit one of society's chief tools in steering a youngster onto the right course. That tool is education.
With stakes this high, therefore, schools should be doing all they can to keep students under their control. Suspension should be a last resort, one implemented only if the youngster in question is a threat to others and has failed to respond positively to other disciplinary actions short of suspension.
But that is not the case in North Carolina, child advocates say. Some students are being suspended for issues as non-threatening as violating the school dress code.
Rep. Deborah Ross, a Raleigh Democrat, sponsored legislation this year that gave parents more access to suspended students' information. She says the schools are taking the wrong approach. "The punishment for misbehaving in school should be more school," Ross told McClatchy.
Public schools have a difficult job, one often made more difficult by parents who have not exercised the appropriate control over their children in the first place. But the schools do neither the child nor society any good when they take the easy course and suspend students for the kind of lesser infractions Ross described.
School suspension should be a last resort. Mechanisms for handling less serious cases must be developed so students are kept in school where they belong.
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