Does Suspending Students Work?: Article Analysis

If one young lady can wear shorts with a “four inch inseam” or a skirt “no more than three inches from the center of the kneecap” (Carroll High School Student Handbook 2010-2011 17) then why can’t the same girl wear a pair of jeans with a small hole in them below the kneecap? All eyes are turned towards the girl sporting the classy dress and no one even notices the small hole located in the shinbone area. The strict dress codes do teach the students to dress in a respectable manner that will be necessary in future job efforts, however high school students are not at work. A majority of students have jobs and comply to the job related dress code because they are being paid to do so however, they are not being paid at school and simply want to be able to express themselves while in the public eyes of their peers. The administration is exercising all of their power to prevent the wearing of what they believe to be as inappropriate clothes, when in reality it is not.

In the article “School Suspensions: Pros, Cons, and Ways to Improve”, it says a con is that the students don’t receive the days class work and will miss the lessons during class. Hearing someone explain something confusing and complicated will help them remember the correct way. All they get is a written explanation that can get confusing and they will end up doing the work wrong because they couldn’t get the right explanation of what to do. Even though most students do keep up with their work when they get suspensions, others think that it’s like a vacation from school and they don’t do their work on time or don’t do it correctly. The students’ education shouldn’t be affected even if they did break the rules, their lessons and classes are too important to miss that much

With a mission statement such as this, why would a school district continue to implement discipline to the students that harms the educational process? The answer is bureaucracy. School districts are a bureaucracy and they want to remain in power. Administrators, board members, and trustees stick together in hopes to preserve the bureaucracy. Regardless, out of school suspension is shown to be ineffective at remedying an insubordination student, used unfairly against minorities, and harmful to a student’s learning (Blomberg).

School dress codes have been around for an long time, but in some places schools have the dress code set in an different way in a lot of places. I'm sure one of the reasons schools have some clothes restricted is because of the clothes some people wear sometimes. Like clothes with rips in the jeans and skirts and shorts that raise above the people's knees. I would then understand why some schools would have put in that rule. Although schools give a dress code with limits and regulations, they just need to be less serious and you should be allowed to wear any non-noticeable.

Dress code is put into place to keep students from being bullied for how they dress and how some people may treat them different depending on what they wear. There is a lot of evidence that show students losing time in the class room because they are too worried about there personal apparel. David Brunsma, a sociologist who wrote Uniforms in Public Schools: A Decade of Research and Debate in 2005, says,

Out of school suspensions (OSS) are often enforced with the assumption that students receiving the suspension are less likely to repeat the problem behavior in the future. However, this has been proven to be false. Suspending a student for engaging in a certain behavior does not in fact serve as a deterrent from the behavior but as a deterrent from attending school instead. In actuality, receiving just a single suspension can increase the probability of a student experiencing academic failure, school dropout, and involvement in the juvenile justice system. Knowing this, some educators still believe that for many students, suspension can serve as an effective lesson. One of the greatest concerns that educators and administrators face is the matter of classroom management. It is part of their job to ensure a safe, productive and supportive classroom allowing students to learn and grow to their greatest potential. Though there are several strategies gauged towards managing a classroom, the most severe offences often lead to either in or out of school suspension. Some of the largest concerns faced with out of school suspensions is that they are often ineptly applied, used unfairly against students of color and seemingly ineffective at producing better behavior. Also known as exclusionary discipline, the majority of offenses that led to OSS have not been centered around violence but instead emphasised issues of classroom insubordination and defiance. In some rather extreme cases

Originally created as a discipline action of last resort for students who cause unsafe or threatening environment or substantive clear and present danger with threats of violence and are possession of weapons in the school, out of school suspension are now being used to address minor offenses such as disobedience, disrespect, attendance issues, or other general disruptions (Stinchcomb, Bazemore & Riestenberg, 2006). Suspension were used judiciously and cautiously as the impact on the student and the perceptions of that suspension by the community was understood to be socially debilitating and cast the student and the family in a bad light (Advancement Project, 2015). It was not until the move towards school reforms in the

I once saw a video where a kid was hiding weapons in his pants, there must have been at least 15 weapons. So not only not having dress codes is scary but it also is also very hazardous. Dress codes will take kids attention away from there clothes more so than their work.

Has your child ever been suspended? Ever been friends with a kid who has been supended? If so you most likely know, it has no good affect. Schools have been suspending students seemingly forever, and it makes sense. It’s simple, cheap, and easy, whereas lunch or after-school detention can be problematic and difficult, and alternative options require money the school simply does not want to spend. Although students will not be able to see their friends everyday, and may feel left out from school activities, suspension is an ineffective punishment because students see it as a vacation, it increases dropout rate, and it makes students more hostile, or problematic.

Most schools have dress codes in place within reason: no crop tops, no short shorts, and no provocative clothing. Sometimes, the school's expectations of clothing cross the line. Some schools say that girls who wear leggings without a long shirt or a shirt that "doesn't fit them right" should have to change. Not every person

Thoroughly cons seems to play a bigger part, and concludes that suspension does not work. In the article, “Does Suspending Students Work?” by Christopher J. Ferguson, he states, “Giving students what amounts to a free day or two off doesn’t actually feel like punishment for most kids, especially those who may already be hostile towards school to begin with. ”Ferguson claims this for the reason that in today's modern society students sometimes feel the urge to skip school or go home early and getting a suspension won’t affect them as much as the school may think it will. It just adds on to another reason for students not to go to school, and financially that will hurt the school.

Thousands of students each year worry about whether or not they will get into college and a suspension will most likely harm those chances. Suspension gets put on a student’s permanent disciplinary record and will follow him to every school he goes. Honors students can also become victims of strict zero-tolerance policies, even for minor infractions. A mark of bad conduct can easily mar a perfect GPA or test score. Everything a student has worked for can go to waste in the blink of an eye with a suspension slip. At the Sojourner Truth Academy in New Orleans, school officials suspended a group of teenage girls for singing too loudly in the cafeteria (Carr). The November 2011 incident left seniors wondering why they could not have received a lesser punishment like detention. Students are learning their lessons of misbehaving at too high a price. They gain an infamous record and lose valuable class time. Some schools do not allow suspended students to make up the work they missed, and students will go on without the grade and without learning the material. However, not all students view suspension as a bad thing, believing it to be a glorified extra school holiday. Children can slack off and grades begin to drop with more suspensions. If zero-tolerance policies are supposed to help and protect a student, then they are not working. These strict guidelines are not helping students be

Suspensions hurt children by lowering academic achievement as well as widening the racial achievement gap between African American students and their peers. This is a growing topic across the country. Schools suspend students at a large cost to society as a whole. Every time a student is suspended for non- violent infractions they are being denied a learning opportunity (Townsend, 2000). It is the duty of educators to ensure that this does not happen. Suspensions can lower self- esteem, cause students to lose interest in school and drop out, and prevent students from participating in school sports, or clubs and many other negative scenarios. The goal of this report is to open educators’ eyes about the negative effects of suspensions on school children. It is said that, “Out-of-school suspensions is one of the most widely used disciplinary practices in American schools, with more than 3.3 million students suspended each year (Lee, Cornell, Gregory, & Fan, 2011, p. 166).

Students all over the country face the same “zero tolerance policy” as the students here.Students everywhere have heard about a fellow classmate being suspended for a ridiculous reason.Although suspension gets a student's attention suspension should be abolished in our school systems in order to improve dropout rates, improve student's GPA and improve the behavior of the students overall.

Imagine a high school that is filled with reckless, hormone-crazed teenagers that have no restrictions on how they should dress. Their “Outfits of the Day” are more of a concern than what they learn in school. Their clothing choices becomes an interruption to their education. This is the mindset of teenagers of schools that do not have any dress code implementation.