A California Senate bill introduced last week would ban schools from suspending students who disrupt class or defy teachers—known as willful defiance suspensions.
Senate Bill 274, introduced by Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), said such suspensions lead to students dropping out and exacerbate learning loss at a time when many are still behind due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“SB 274 is based on a simple premise: students belong in school,” Skinner said in a Feb. 1 press release. “Instead of kicking them out of school, we owe it to students to figure out what’s causing them to act out and help them fix it.”
The new bill builds on Skinner’s 2019 now-passed legislation, which permanently banned willful defiance suspensions statewide for grades TK–5 and those for grades 6–8 until 2025.
The new bill would permanently prohibit them for all grades, TK–12, by the fall of 2024.
It would also ban the suspension or expulsion of students because of tardiness or truancy.
“The punishment for missing school should not be to miss more school,” Skinner said. “Students, especially those with behavioral issues, need to be in school where teachers and counselors can help them succeed.”
However, others argue that keeping students who misbehave in classrooms makes it hard for teachers to teach and other students to learn.
Davina Keiser, a retired educator who taught for 40 years in the Long Beach Unified School District, told the Epoch Times that disruptive behavior was “detrimental to the learning of everybody else in the classroom.”
“It’s almost like a license for the rest of the kids to go ahead and misbehave,” she said.
“As teachers, I wanted students to know that there are boundaries, and they have to stay within those,” she said.
The proposed policy reflects a nationwide trend of replacing disciplinary actions with what’s called a “restorative justice” approach—which focuses on mediation over punishment.
But such may encourage more defiance because students know there are no consequences for being unruly in class, said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center.
Disruptive students who are not disciplined may go on to “act out in larger measure later,” he told The Epoch Times.
“When these bills take away the tools for dealing with those who are willfully defiant, all they do is just move the violence to a higher level and escalate the violence,” he said. “[Y]ou cannot just throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of a discipline policy that works.”
The root of the issue, Christensen said, is often the student’s family and home life.
Students with disintegrated families, or families conflicted with other problems, often don’t teach their children to respect authority and how to behave in a classroom and participate in a positive way.
“That’s a whole set of social ills that would take more than a piece of legislation to fix,” Christensen said.
He additionally said if such legislation is being considered because of data related to race, that’s ill-guided.
“If a kid is willfully defiant, the race or the color of their skin shouldn’t matter at all,” he said.
Keiser agreed.
“I always felt like it didn’t matter if a student is an ethnic minority or not,” she said. “We’re supposed to provide equal opportunity for all students. And we’re supposed to treat them all with the same respect, care, and consequences.”
