Fair and Just School Climate

The recent murder of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, has sparked anger and protests across the country. It has led to important conversations about the criminalization of youth of color, the militarization of the police and what we can do to end such injustices.

In a recent commentary for Education Week, Kavitha Mediratta of Atlantic Philanthropies writes about the problems in our nation's discipline system – and the cities and communities that are changing things for the better.

Across the country, students, parents, and educators are organizing to change their school districts’ zero tolerance policies – and they’re winning. At the 2014 Netroots Nation conference in Detroit last weekend, advocates and organizers discussed the victories and continuing challenges in the movement for school discipline reform.

On July 1, Massachusetts took a bold step forward in the national school discipline reform movement when its new Chapter 222 law went into effect. To help advocates in other states learn how they, too, might tackle the school-to-prison pipeline, here’s how our Massachusetts coalition came together, fought hard, and won reform.

Alongside recent victories in Los Angeles and San Francisco that limited out-of-school suspensions, in the past year Oakland, Pasadena and San Francisco have all made sweeping changes to their rules for school police officers.

The newly released School Discipline Consensus Report is a powerful catalog of promising strategies for reforming school discipline. The report draws on hundreds of experts from the fields of education, health, law enforcement and juvenile justice and offers a consensus framework to address the overuse and misuse of harsh school discipline.

Thanks to the organizing work of Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, the Illinois legislature has passed a new law requiring public reporting of school discipline data. SB2793 is a huge victory and a step toward ending the discriminatory use of suspensions and expulsions.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our nation's public schools are still separate and still unequal. On May 13, parents, students, educators and community members will rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court to demand that policymakers recommit to the vision of equity and opportunity embodied in the Brown decision.