Why MNEA Opposes HB0016 - “Teacher’s Discipline Act” (and you should too)
The following statement was passed by the MNEA Board of Directors on 03-12-21
On its face, this bill appears to offer relief to teachers who feel frustrated and ignored by administrators and districts when they are left largely to fend for themselves regarding discipline problems in the classroom. The bill will make it much easier for teachers to have students removed from the classroom, and for those students to be suspended or expelled.
However, this bill does nothing to solve the root problems it claims to address. In Tennessee, just like in the rest of the country, Black, Brown, and LGBTQI students and students with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by suspensions and expulsions. Making it easier to kick kids out of classrooms will only exacerbate that problem and intensify the school-to-prison pipeline. Ultimately, this bill will create many more problems than it solves.
If we truly wanted to support teachers struggling with student behaviors, we would have a different plan of action:
Reduce class sizes.
Ensure high-quality mentoring programs for new teachers.
Increase social and emotional supports for students, including providing mental health professionals and dedicated restorative circle facilitators and spaces.
Provide high-quality PD on de-escalation, restorative practices, cultural competencies, and eliminating implicit bias and white supremacy culture from the classroom for all educators.
Provide an engaging and culturally relevant curriculum that affirms students’ identities and developmentally-appropriate assessment that educators can use to guide instruction instead of high-stakes testing.
All of these steps would require increased investment in our public schools, an action that lacks only political will. Currently, Tennessee is in the bottom five of per-pupil investment while simultaneously having the largest rainy day fund in the country. Increased funding to our schools wouldn’t even require raising taxes. Unfortunately, our state leaders are much more interested in giving our tax dollars to private companies like Chancelight, a private “behavioral health, therapy & education solutions for children and young adults”, also a major donor of the Professional Educators of Tennessee (PET), the organization leading the charge for the bill’s passage. A key provision of the bill states that once removed from the classroom, teachers can ask that principals “(remand) the student to an alternative school or to an alternative education program for a specified period of time.”
Many educators do need more support with managing behavior in their classrooms, just like our students need more support to help them with the trauma, poverty, violence, prejudice, and learning difficulties that can lead them to act out. This bill accomplishes neither of these objectives and will inflict great harm on too many of our students while fueling more privatization of our public schools.