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Hi. My name is Emily Davis and I am a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the U.S. Department of
Education. Today we are going to sit down with Secretary Duncan to discuss the new school
climate and guidance discipline which can be found at ed.gov/discipline. Something that
I am personally excited about is the guidance that has come out around school climate and
discipline. Personally, I think it's the foundation for our schools and creating those learning
environments where students feel safe, respected and trusted and they want to come to school
every day and the idea that after reading the guidance - I was reading a lot about building
relationships and listening to students. So I was wondering if you could explain first
and foremost what the school climate and guidance is and then also why it is important? For
so many of us we have known that historically far too many children, far too many children
of color, too many boys of color, have been disciplined more harshly, unfairly, relative
to other kids. We sorta knew that anecdotally but now from the data we have the evidence
is pretty overwhelming. When a child acts out that is always a symptom of the problem,
something is going wrong - whether it is at school, in the neighborhood, at home - the
easy thing to do is to expel that child or to kick him out of school, suspend him out
of school. But the right thing is to sit with that child and figure out what's going wrong,
what can we do to help you be more successful. It is fascinating to me there at Frederick
Douglass used to be a horrendous, violent school. HBO did a special on how bad it was.
They've come a remarkably long way - an amazing principal, great teachers and counselors and
social workers. Bus basically the put in place a peer jury system. The students themselves
are taking real responsibility and ownership for the climate. The more adults that are
listening, the more adults actually giving away some power and empowering young people
themselves and to hear the young people talk about how much pride they had in building
a safer supportive climate. That is what we want to see happen. To see so many schools,
districts, states look at themselves in the mirror and having a very honest and difficult
conversation with themselves - can we do better here? Many folks are saying yes we can do
better and hopefully our guidance will help them get to a much better spot. You mentioned,
and I love the idea of students being able to be a part of this conversation and a lot
of times as a teacher, I become concerned because I want to do the right thing. I feel
like I want to implement positive and effective strategies for students and I want to be proactive
with encouraging positive behavior in schools, but many times I personally might not have
the tools to do so. How would you suggest that teachers ensure that they are getting
the training and the professional learning they need to implement these types of strategies?
This is a difficult conversation that people don't always talk about. This classroom to
prison pipeline sadly is very real in some places. We have to challenge that and we have
to be deeply concerned about the number of young boys and boys of color who we start
to suspend, we start to expel and the next thing they are in the juvenile justice system.
Having teachers support each other, having teachers self-advocate and demand these supports
and the pd they need to be successful. Again people go into teaching with the best of motives
and we have to help them be more successful. I've worked in the inner city for a long time.
Kids come with some real challenges - some real issues there. So none of this is easy
or second nature whatever. Let me be really clear that this is not about lowering expectations
but having the highest expectations for student behavior, climate in the classroom, for climate
across the school building and where folks are able to do this, not individual teachers,
but all the adults in the building working in tandem with the students. That is real
courage. That is real leadership in action. We're in the class and we love this sort of
guidance that this is having a light shown on it to promote positive environments and
climates and many times unfortunately that's not what happens in the day to day world.
The suggestion sometimes to me is that if there is a serious incident in the classroom,
ultimately should I just keep the kid in the classroom just because I know that's the right
thing to do and I don't want them to miss class time or should I send the kid out and
risk them missing instruction. For me I thing that brings some hope to the situation that
people can sit down and reevaluate and look at what they're doing in the classroom with
their students. That's the goal and doing it with Eric Holder, Attorney General, where
he is saying we don't want to lock up people - we want to help them be successful. None
of this stuff is easy. It is complex. It is hard. It is difficult in the moment. The most
important thing a teacher can do is ensure their students' safety and their own safety
and to never ever jeopardize that. But the questions can we collectively come together
to create better environments and in many many situations where you have these brutally
honest, tough conversations very good things come from that for making ourselves, both
as adults and as young people, more vulnerable putting our cards on the table and coming
together. In many many places we can do a better job of helping teachers feel safe and
supportive but giving students a sense of I need to own the climate here and I need
to be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Finally this anecdote from
Frederick Douglass. This young girl said she basically used to be hell on wheels. She said
I like to fight. I used to work people all the time. Neither one of her parents went
to school and she said I had a teacher who basically just say you have this potential
and you're going to do better. She said it changed her life. She was sorta headed for
the streets. She was headed for being locked up and she had a teacher who saw something
in her that she didn't see in herself. Her parents definitely had those kinds of opportunities.
She now is a student leader in that school on the way to college. That's why we go into
education. That's what this is about. We need more stories like that. Thank you for your
time and having the discussion especially around school climate and discipline and also
for the exciting things in education that is going on right now. Thank you. Thanks for
the hard work.
