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This policy brief documents how removing students from classrooms for minor disciplinary issues harms overall achievement goals and does not improve education for the remaining students. An accompanying brief offers statutory code changes to improve data collection and advance discipline alternatives that can be adopted by state and federal policymakers.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

If you don't like it, you can leave. That's the line of defense that Noble Network of Charter Schools' supporters have fallen back on in the wake of research showing that the rapidly expanding charter school network has made almost $400,000 in disciplinary fines imposed on low-income students and their parents.

A new study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center took a close look at how often students in Texas are disciplined by in- and out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Among the findings: Students with disabilities are especially likely to be punished by one or more of these methods. The researchers looked at records for close to one million students and found that 75 percent of middle and high school students with disabilities in the nation's second-largest public school system were suspended, expelled, or both at least once. That compares to about 55 percent of students without a disability.

In the decade since school districts instituted "zero tolerance" discipline policies, administrators have increasingly suspended minority students, predominantly for nonviolent offenses, according to a report released Wednesday. The National Education Policy Center found that suspensions across the country are increasing for offenses such as dress code and cellphone violations. Researchers expressed concerns that the overuse of suspensions could lead to dropouts and even incarceration.

Students packed the lobby of Chicago Public Schools headquarters Thursday to deliver a critical report on school discipline policies that contends the district spends more than 14 times as much on school security as it does on student counseling.

"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

Scapegoating is a powerful tool to sway public opinion. That's why I'm not surprised that teachers unions are consistently being singled out for the shortcomings of public schools ("Can Teachers Unions Do Education Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 3). After all, they are such an easy target at a time when the public's patience over the glacial pace of school reform is running out. The latest example was an essay by Juan Williams, who is now a political analyst for Fox News ("Will Business Boost School Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28). He claims that teachers unions are "formidable opponents willing to fight even modest efforts to alter the status quo." Their obstructionism is responsible for the one million high school dropouts each year and for a graduation rate of less than 50 percent for black and Hispanic students. Williams says that when schools are free of unions, they succeed because they can fire ineffective teachers, implement merit pay, lengthen the school day, enrich the curriculum and deal with classroom discipline. These assertions have great intuitive appeal to taxpayers who are angry and frustrated, but the truth is far different from what Williams maintains.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the escalating number of students who have been suspended since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the city's schools more than a decade ago. Some believe one contributing factor may lie in the growing number of the public charter schools created during his tenure that develop their own discipline codes and have higher than average suspension rates. Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that represents the legal rights of public school children, believe that the rise in charters (77 in 2008 and 135 in 2012) has gone hand in hand with the fact that a number of them exclude children-particularly those with special needs-at higher than average rates.

Achievement First's zero tolerance or "no excuses" model uses shunning and isolation to discipline its students. AF Brownsville describes this practice as being "put in the Den" by which it is, "in essence, isolating students from the rest of the school." The Achievement First Brownsville Family Handbook (included as an exemplar in the charter management organization's application to the RI Department of Education) describes how the school employs ostracism and isolation to manage student behavior.

Across the Washington area, black students are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, creating disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem.

"Would I send my child to this school?" This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

One of the highest compliments a teacher can get from a student is to be told that she or he is fair. When students believe their teacher is fair, they accept test grades, homework assignments, and discipline without drama. Teachers, like their students and like people in other professions, appreciate fairness and should expect it. With that in mind, I am not surprised by the pushback on new evaluation systems from teachers in Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, and many other state and local school districts. Using student test scores from flawed standardized tests as a measure of teacher evaluation does not meet the fairness test for teachers who have had to endure "reform du jour' for the last decade. It does not look like a fair deal for teachers, and fairness is one of the strongest core values of teachers.

As discussed in prior posts, high-quality analyses of charter school effects show that there is wide variation in the test-based effects of these schools but that, overall, charter students do no better than their comparable regular public school counterparts. The existing evidence, though very tentative, suggests that the few schools achieving large gains tend to be well-funded, offer massive amounts of additional time, provide extensive tutoring services and maintain strict, often high-stakes discipline policies.

The other day, I was walking to an appointment on East 125th Street in Harlem and saw an interesting sight outside the huge new building holding Promise Academy, the central institution of Geoffrey Canada's much celebrated Harlem Children's Zone. I saw a teacher marching about 20 children from one entrance in the building to another. All twenty children were black, dressed in uniforms of white blouses with blue trousers or skirts, and they moved through the street with discipline and purpose. This was the face of one of the city's best known charter schools I could not help but contrast with the scene I regularly see outside PS 107 on 8th Avenue between 13th and 14th Street in Park Slope when I drive by the school. There, on a typical late morning or early afternoon, I see groups of parents, virtually all white, taking their children to school or picking them up, their movements cheerful and often chaotic. The whiteness of the group never fails to stun me because in the 80's, when my friends kids went there PS 107 was one of the most multiracial schools in the city, with its student population well over 2/3 Black and Latino. This was the face of one of the city's high. performing public schools. The contrast between the two scenes struck me because of what it said about the direction of housing policy, education policy, and law enforcement in Michael Bloomberg's New York and how they contribute to maximizing segregation in the city.

"If you have heard the phrase "no excuses" charter schools but don't really know what they mean, here is an informative post about  them and the controversial philosophy under which they approach student discipline and achievement.  Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and director of the school's Teach For America program, explains her research on these charter schools to freelance journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire, who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts and who authors the EduShyster blog, where this Q * A originally appeared. Goodman is a former school psychologist whose article "Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?" appeared in the March 2013 issue of Educational Researcher."

"Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it's always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects. In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees - school counselors - affect both discipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school - i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school change from the previous year when a counselor is added to the staff."

Yes it is time to rethink teacher education. However, I recommend we start where future teachers take the bulk of their coursework -- in schools of arts and sciences and in schools of liberal arts. My fellow teacher educators and I can't spend an entire semester trying to reteach all the content from the disciplines and also help future teachers understand how this knowledge translates into material to be introduced to children in pedagogically powerful ways.

This summer, I attended my 50th high school reunion. My wife called my attention to the school's motto: Verum, Pulchrum, Bonum. I had no recollection that my school was devoted to "truth, beauty, goodness." Yet, 40 years after I graduated, I argued, in The Disciplined Mind, that the purpose of education, beyond acquisition of basic literacy, is to inculcate in students a sense of what is true and what is false; what is beautiful and what is boring or repugnant; what is good and what is evil. Our sense of truth comes from the scholarly disciplines-science, history, mathematics. Our sense of beauty comes from the arts and nature. Our sense of morality comes from reflection on the actions of human beings-historical figures, fictional characters, and contemporaries.

Opening its new term on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case challenging an Illinois law requiring a daily period of silent prayer or reflection. The appeal was one of hundreds that the justices turned away as their summer recess formally ended. Other education cases the court declined to take up involved the outsourcing of public school services to a private religious school, and discipline of students with disabilities.