Three law professors studied the discipline codes at Philadelphia charter schools and concluded that these punitive codes are used to push out students who are “non-compliant or challenging.”

 

The article, which will be published in “The Urban Lawyer,” was written by Susan DeJarnatt,  Temple University – James E. Beasley School of Law; Kerrin C. Wolf, Stockton University; and Mary Kate Kalinich, Temple University – James E. Beasley School of Law.

 

The authors found that: 38% of the Philadelphia charter school codes use the phrase “zero tolerance,” 74% specify offenses for which suspension is mandatory, and 38% of the charter codes mandate expulsion for certain offenses. Approximately three-quarters of charter schools have no-excuses policies in their codes. They learned that a student may be expelled “for repeated failures to recite the school pledge on demand in English by November of the 9th grade year and in Latin by the end of the 10th grade year, for having missing homework, and for failure to upgrade a failed test.” (p. 41) They found that students may be expelled for “failure to disclose on the application that a student is a currently enrolled special education student” (p. 41). One code permits expulsion for “inappropriate facial gestures” (p. 42)

 

You can read the article in full. Here is the abstract.
Exclusionary school discipline can steer students away from educational opportunities and towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems. As many public school systems have turned to exclusionary school discipline practices over the past two decades, they have also increasingly adopted charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools. This research is examines the student codes of conduct for the charter schools in the School District of Philadelphia to consider the role of their disciplinary practices and the potential effects on charter students.

 

We analyzed every disciplinary code provided to the Philadelphia School District by charter schools within Philadelphia during the 2014-2015 school year. Our goal was to examine the provisions relating to detention, suspension, and expulsion, along with other disciplinary responses, to determine what conduct can result in disciplinary consequences, what responses are available for various types of misbehavior, and whether the code language is clear or ambiguous or even accessible to students or potential students and their parents or caregivers. We conclude that too many of the codes are not well drafted, and too many follow models of punitive discipline that can be used to push out non-compliant or challenging students. Some codes grant almost complete discretion to school administrators to impose punitive discipline for any behavior the administrator deems problematic.

 

We hope that this work will spur future research on implementation of charter school discipline policies to illustrate how charter schools are using their codes. Further, we hope to see the charter sector develop model disciplinary codes that move away from a zero tolerance punitive model towards disciplinary systems based on restorative principles.

 

The question it implicitly poses for the reader is why it makes sense to run two public-funded school systems: one that accepts all students, the other with the power to exclude or expel those it doesn’t want. This question has strong pertinence in Philadelphia where the public school system has been stripped of funding and resources over the past decade, so that the two systems are separate and unequal.