A Discipline Policy That Works

I often compare the school I teach at to the school I went to--does anyone else do this? The two schools are very dissimilar--my alma mater boasted a 90+% rate of students that went on to four year schools, while my employer is a Title I school with a 75% graduation rate.

That graduation rate appears to me as the statistic that we base nearly all of our disciplinary (and other) decisions on. One girl at our school has been written up nearly 70 times, but is still at our school. Counselors and administrators seem to bend over backwards to get kids a diploma in June and get them out of here, no matter what they did (or failed to do).

My high school wasn't like this at all, and I'm beginning to see one of the reasons why. Besides the drastic socio-economic differences, the discipline policy has some teeth in it. In fact, the district superintendent had to spend time telling the media that the policy is not too strict. This after a 15-year-old committed suicide after he faced expulsion for an offense not publicized.

I wonder what would happen if we had a stricter discipline policy where I work. I believe that the graduation rate would go down, but the kids that were still in school would have less problems to deal with...