Schools in Maryland and Connecticut are rethinking suspension policies and practices. They are finding that promoting positive behavior choices rather than punishing the negative is leading to higher graduation rates, especially among students of color. In the 2003-2004 academic year, Baltimore City Public Schools recorded 26,000 suspensions. Six…

Over the past decade, many schools have adopted zero-tolerance policies to curtail negative student behavior. Such policies persist although "there is as yet little evidence that the strategies typically associated with zero tolerance contribute to improved student behavior or overall school safety." Suspension and expulsion result in…

Significant numbers of students are being pushed out of school as a result of "zero tolerance" school discipline policies. While nobody questions the need to keep schools safe, teachers, students, and parents are questioning the methods being used in pursuit of that goal. Zero tolerance policies were initially aimed at making schools safe. The…

In this article, the author discusses the effects of zero-tolerance policies in schools and depicts how the policies no longer make schools safe, even though many educators see them as the backbone of school discipline. A 2000 study by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) confirms that stringent zero-tolerance policies, though…

In this article, the author focuses on the issue involving zero tolerance in the Texas district whether the dress code policy is reasonable. In a small Texas school district, over 700 students were suspended in a single month for violating a zero-tolerance dress code policy. This suspension, which attracted national attention and threats of…

This article focuses on the three kinds of school safety: (1) physical; (2) emotional; and (3) intellectual, and details how to determine if a school is safe. Excellence in schools demands that schools be physically, emotionally, and intellectually safe for students, while "good enough" schools are simply physically safe. Here, the…