When it comes to abject academic failure in the Midwest, few districts match up as well to the unenviable reputations of Detroit and Indianapolis Public Schools as the Normandy district outside St. Louis, whose alumni includes Michael Brown, the young man senselessly slain by a policeman in nearby Ferguson last month. Between 2010 and 2013, the district’s official four-year graduation rate has hovered around 60 percent, effectively making it a systemwide dropout factory; the percentage of fourth-graders reading Below and at Basic levels of proficiency as measured on Missouri’s battery of standardized tests declined by only two percentage points (from 77 percent to 75 percent) within that same period. Normandy has failed so miserably in providing high-quality education for kids that Missouri state officials took over the district in July, and in the past year, allowed more than 500 students to flee to better-performing school operations nearby. [The controversial school choice move, which has been fought by Normandy in courts and at the state board level, reached a fever pitch last month when a state court judge ruled that the transfers could continue.]
So it isn’t shocking that Normandy is blaming kids for a move last week by the principal of its middle school, GeNita Williams, to suspend 20 percent of of its kids. Why? Mostly on charges of disruptive behavior, the kind of issues high-quality teachers and school leaders can usually address through approaches that teach students to take responsibility and show how their misbehavior affects their schoolmates. Declared Williams in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: We will take drastic measures to ensure the school is a place where learning and teaching are occurring.”
But you can’t help kids learn if they aren’t in school. Especially when their misbehavior is often a consequence of the low quality teaching and curricula a district provides. This is clear in the case of Normandy. The academic data already shows that far too many kids in the district are struggling with literacy, a key factor in kids becoming discipline problems. Based on a Dropout Nation analysis of data submitted by the district to the U.S. Department of Education, it is clear that Normandy has a long history of suspending far too many of its kids into the abyss.
Shutting down Normandy and allowing the kids to attend public and private schools would do more to keep them on the path to lifelong success than keeping the district alive.
Normandy meted out one out-of-school suspension to 479 kids during the 2011-2012 school year. That’s 9.8 percent of the 5,087 children enrolled in the school that year. This includes 9.6 percent of the 4,942 black kids who make up the vast majority of enrollment, as well as a lower 5.5 percent of the 73 white kids who also attended the district’s schools. Normandy meted out multiple out-of-suspensions to another 975 kids; this meant that 19.2 percent of the district’s students were suspended more than once. This includes 19 percent of black kids attending district schools and 21 percent of their white schoolmates.
Altogether, Normandy meted out-of-school suspensions to 29 percent of kids attending its schools. This means that a black or white child attending one of the district’s schools has a three-in-ten chance of being subjected to the second-harshest form of school discipline (after expulsions). This is a worse than the 28.3 percent out-of-school suspension rate for the much-larger (though equally as abysmal) St. Louis, and the 13.3 percent out-of-school suspension rate for the notoriously high-suspending (of black children) Ferguson-Florissant district.
This is just for the kids who attend Normandy’s abysmal regular classes. The district meted one out-of-school suspension to 18.4 percent of the 527 kids (nearly all black) condemned to its special education ghettos. It also meted out multiple out-of-school suspensions to another 41 percent of kids in special ed. The good news is that none of these kids were referred to law enforcement or arrested on district campuses. But given Normandy’s out-of-school suspension rate of 59.4 percent — a level far above that of St. Louis (11.2 percent) and Ferguson-Florissant (25 percent) — a kid stuck in its special ed ghettos would be better off anywhere but in that district.
Normandy can’t claim that its latest round of suspensions is some unusual event. After all, this is data from three school years ago. Nor can the district claim that it has a record of not overusing school discipline. Normandy meted out one or more out-of-school suspensions to 18.7 percent of kids attending its schools in 2009-2010. Three years earlier, in 2006-2007, Normandy meted out-of-school suspensions to a whopping 31.4 percent of its student body. And back in 2004-2005, the district meted out-of-school suspensions to another 18.7 percent of kids in its care.
On average, over the past seven years, Normandy has suspended 24.5 percent of children attending its schools. That’s more than 1,200 kids a year regardless of socioeconomic background. This is blatant and unacceptable educational malpractice by a district that should do better by the children it serves. By overusing suspensions and in doing so arbitrarily, Normandy’s staffers are letting themselves off the hook while creating cultures of victimization in their schools in which kids only see themselves as helpless automotons subject to the whims of those who run the district. The teachable moments — both for the adults and the kids — are lost forever.
But none of this should be surprising. As I mentioned earlier, Normandy has been failing to provide children with high-quality education for years now. With three-quarters of fourth-graders either functionally illiterate or barely able to read, it is little wonder why so many kids are acting out. As Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles of Stanford University determined in a 2006 study, kids who are struggling with reading in third grade are likely to become discipline problems by the end of their days in grammar school classes.
Normandy’s overuse of harsh school discipline is just the way the district is dealing with its failures to provide kids with good and great teaching as well as intensive reading remediation. It is also a sign of the district’s failures (and that of the state) to provide clear and objective rules that reserve out-of-school suspensions for only the most-serious acts of student misbehavior.
This isn’t just the fault of Normandy’s laggard school leaders and teachers alone. While Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (along with its outgoing commissioner, Chris Nicastro) deserve credit for addressing the district’s failures, it has so far done very little to make the takeover a success. This would include implementing a school discipline approach that is geared toward restorative justice as well as diagnosing and treating the underlying causes of student behavioral issues.
The most-important move of all would have been to just shut down Normandy altogether and let all the kids transfer out of the district. This is something that the state education department has fought since it took over the district. This includes convincing the state board of education to give Normandy status as an accredited operation when its performance didn’t merit it in order to stop the transfers. [That the move was also illegal was a key reason why a state court judge ruled in August to allow the transfers to continue.] The fact that Gov. Jay Nixon threw an additional roadblock to kids leaving Normandy by vetoing a school choice bill is also inexcusable. Children should not be forced to stay in schools they must deal with the insult of harsh school discipline on top of the injury of educational neglect.
This isn’t to say that kids in Normandy schools should behave badly. Not at all. But in many ways, it is understandable that they may be a tad rowdy right now. A child may not be well-educated, but they can tell when the schools they attend aren’t serving them well. Perhaps what Normandy students are saying in action is that the district doesn’t deserve to stay in business.