The following is an Op-Ed by By Jasmine Sarmiento and Julie Woestehoff published in today’s Chicago Tribune about how some schools are pushing students out:
If you don’t like it, you can leave.
That’s the line of defense that Noble Network of Charter Schools’ supporters have fallen back on in the wake of research showing that the rapidly expanding charter school network has made almost $400,000 in disciplinary fines imposed on low-income students and their parents.
Many Noble students leave the school before their senior year, some forced to choose between bus fare and their education by a discipline code that fines them for bringing chips to school or chewing gum. Students and their parents are coming to us with stories of financial hardship, of repeating an entire school year for discipline reasons, and of fines incurred for behavior like “running a pencil alongside the edge of a desk.”
As one parent shared with us, it was not just the harmful financial costs — as high as $280 for “behavior classes” — but the cost in self-esteem to her son who, because he had difficulty keeping his eyes on the teacher at all times, fell asleep in a three-hour silent detention or slouched in his chair, began to see himself as a “bad kid.”
Sadly, instead of teaching appropriate consequences — and investing in the success of the young people who most need support — Noble founder and CEO Michael Milkie simply delivers the same message Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave reporters last week: If you don’t like it, you can leave.
It’s a refrain that’s heard far too frequently by students across Chicago. And, in a warped twisting of the mission of public education, the students who hear it most are the ones public officials should be zeroing in on to put on a pathway to college: the poorest students, the students who are learning English, the students with learning disabilities.
Noble isn’t alone in pushing these young people out of school. Under increasing pressure to raise test results, schools are turning to other types of extreme disciplinary practices, such as multiweek suspensions, school-based arrests and forced transfers.
Read the rest here.
