A progressive push to soften school discipline has caused student suspensions to plummet — and made city classrooms more chaotic and dangerous than ever, parents and teachers charge.
Suspensions of five days or more meted out by principals and superintendents plunged more than 42 percent from the fall of 2017 to the fall of 2021, from 14,502 to 8,369, Department of Education data shows.
As suspensions declined, taxpayer money allocated to “restorative justice” — a system that sends badly-behaving students to mediation, conflict “circle” meetings, and guidance counseling, rather than boot them from classrooms — soared. The city in February pledged to sink $1.3 million more into such programs.
“That’s the reason everything’s in the toilet,” one Queens educator, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “They were saying people of color were disproportionately affected by suspension, but to completely take [suspensions] away from everybody in every instance is doing more harm than good.”
Black and Hispanic kids are suspended more often than their peers, according to a 2021 report, and some advocates have cheered the drop in kicking kids out.
But fewer suspensions mean more mayhem in the classroom, according to educators and parents.
“We have teachers getting kicked at, spit at, cursed at, things thrown at [them] and the kid is back the next day like nothing happened,” said the teacher, who didn’t give her name for fear of retaliation. “And the teacher is asked, ‘What did you do to trigger the child?'”
The fact that educators now have little recourse emboldens misbehaving kids, said one teacher.
“Right now, with the way the discipline code is, it’s basically, ‘Stop doing that or else we’ll ask you again,” said Queens teacher Kathy Perez. “The kids know that there are no consequences.”
Kids who want to learn, the vast majority, get cheated.
“Everyone is so concerned with the rights of the two or three upstarts in the room, that the other 30 kids — their rights to get an education … to be able to sit in an environment that’s not intimidating, that’s not scary, that’s not filled with noise” don’t matter, said Perez, a reading specialist who won a $125,000 legal settlement from the city after she was hurt by out-of-control teens in class. “No one has ever had an answer to that.”
Olivia Ramos said her son was assaulted five times at Manhattan’s 75 Morton, a West Village middle school which pushed restorative justice.
“There’s no punishment to the kids who misbehave,” she said. “He was calling me from the bathroom, in seventh grade, scared because there were fights in the bathrooms, in the hallways, in the staircases, really bad fights.”
She eventually secured a safety transfer for her child, Ramos said.
The reasons for falling suspensions also include rising absenteeism and reduced enrollment since the pandemic. But the problem is only getting worse under the woke philosophy of “restorative justice.”
“The schools were out of control starting with de Blasio,” said Gregory Floyd, head of Teamsters Local 237, which represents the city’s school safety agents. “He decided to reduce suspensions by not suspending students for infractions they should have been disciplined for. This is part of the reason why we have what we have today.
“What you see is a result of ignoring the problem…I blame the last City Council, the last Mayor and restorative justice.”
Principals can levy a one to five day suspension, while superintendents can suspend students for up to a year.
Pressure from the DOE has prompted administrators to downgrade incidents or sweep them under the rug, educators charge.
“Those suspension numbers are going down because things aren’t getting reported or they’re getting downgraded,” claimed one anonymous Brooklyn teacher.
Another veteran educator who didn’t want to give her name said she finally left the job after years of stressful incidents, including being threatened by a student, and being inadvertently punched in the face during a student fight.
“They never reported that I was injured in the crossfire,” she said.
Adam Bergstein, a United Federation of Teachers chapter leader at Forest Hills High School, who started a petition two months ago to push for more discipline in city schools signed by more than 560 people, says administrators’ hands are tied.
“If you start suspending more kids, you’re going to be called on the carpet,” he said. “Schools that should be suspending children are leery because they don’t want to then have to defend their suspension to the DOE.”
Advocates who celebrate the suspension decrease say restorative justice works. Nonprofit Morningside Center for Teaching Responsibility has a nearly $5 million DOE contract to train school staffers on restorative justice practices and “social and emotional learning,” including “hands-on coaching” for teachers on what it calls “The 4Rs: reading, writing, respect and resolution.”
It claims that schools which use its program see graduation rates go up.
Betsy Combier, a paralegal who defends teachers and kids in disciplinary cases, said suspension procedures have stark racial disparities.
“I did suspension hearings for nine years for kids, and I was the only white face,” she said.
Restorative justice can work, said Combier and others — but only when school communities “buy in” to the program, and have enough staff to deal with problem kids one on one.
“I think it’s a good thing if and only if it’s implemented correctly. I don’t know how many schools are actually doing that,” she said.
Schools where problem kids are sent right back into the classroom without intervention aren’t using restorative justice, said Combier, who added, “that’s simply abrogating your duty to take care of the children in your building.”
Restorative justice is “well intentioned,” said Cardozo High School teacher Dino Sferrazza, a UFT chapter leader, “but there aren’t enough restorative justice teams — social workers, guidance counselors — and then you have kids who repeatedly get into trouble and nothing gets done.”
Restorative justice doesn’t work with “the persistent offender, with the violent offender, with the kid that you’ve tried other things,” Sferrazza said. “But everyone’s afraid of suspending kids because you’re back to, ‘Your numbers are up, your numbers for particular kids are up, for Hispanic, black and brown kids, are up.’ They don’t want that heat.
“The argument was made that that’s what it was — suspending kids based on what they look like. I will tell you my experience, that was never the case,” he added.
In the end, students who follow the rules often lose out on instructional time — or lose their way altogether, worried teachers said.
“They don’t see the benefits of following the rules and being decent,” the Brooklyn educator bemoaned, recalling a kid who told her, ‘I’m really just done with school.'”
The city DOE said it does not tolerate violence in schools and that principals are “empowered to swiftly take a range of disciplinary actions, including suspensions.”
“Serious incidents are down 12 percent this year – with both fights and threats down 27 percent and no increase in bullying. This is because students, educators, parents, NYPD School Safety Agents, social workers, and guidance counselors work together to make our schools sanctuaries for learning,” DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said.
But according to NYPD data, this school year is on track to be the most dangerous yet for school safety personnel, with 84 cops and school safety agents injured due to student misconduct through the end of March alone, 56 seriously enough to require hospital treatment.
That is a huge jump over the 49 reported student-caused injuries in pre-pandemic 2018-2019.
State Assemblyman Michael Reilly (R-Staten Island), a former NYPD lieutenant, said the problems in schools “correlates with what’s happening on the street.”
“The perception is there’s no consequences for anything any more. And for some students that’s feeding a belief that they can do anything they want,” he said.
Additional reporting by Susan Edelman, Dean Balsamini and Griffin Kelly
BAD APPLES
Fall reports (September-December) for students suspended by principals and district superintendents have plummeted:
2017: 14,502
2018: 12,461
2019: 9,997
2020: N/A (remote learning)
2021: 8,369
