The "disciplinary removal," a three-day suspension for misbehavior, has gone the way of the hickory stick in city schools.
Superintendent Walter G. Amprey ended the practice Dec. 1, calling on principals and teachers to fashion "alternative ways of dealing with students without removing them from education."
The "D.R.," as it is known throughout the system, has been practiced in city schools for at least 30 years, but Dr. Amprey said no other metropolitan district has such a short-term suspension. Long-term suspensions of five days and longer are xTC not affected, Dr. Amprey said.
Dr. Amprey likened the suspension to "telling a man who can't stand oranges that you're cutting off his orange supply as punishment. . . . We've got to focus on what we're doing that makes a difference for kids in school, not just on getting the knuckleheads out of school. I'm not advocating loving these kids to death, but most kids want to do right."
The order did not sit well with the Baltimore Teachers Union. Noting that the Board of School Commissioners has lowered the passing grade in city schools from 70 to 60, Irene Dandridge, BTU president, said, "Amprey is taking away every weapon the classroom teacher has. It's all public relations so he can claim more kids are passing and we have fewer suspensions. It's nice to talk about alternative programs in school, but we don't have the resources for in-school suspensions."
"In-school suspensions" -- in effect, keeping disciplined students in a detention room all day -- require classroom space and staff to supervise the students.
Dr. Amprey said the alternatives to the disciplinary removal "will be left up to the school, within reason. Most of these are cases of acting out, and we have to find ways to deal with them. These kids aren't going to disappear."
The city suspended 1,592 students last year, the majority of them D.R.'s. To be reinstated, suspended students must return with their parents for a conference with school officials.
The superintendent said he would also like to end the practice of passing misbehaving students from one school to another. "It's just passing the problem along, the dance of the lemons," he said.
The lowering of the passing grade reversed a policy adopted 11 years ago, when city schools raised the passing grade from 60 to 70. That change came in response to "A Nation at Risk," a federal report that described a "rising tide of mediocrity" in American education and called for sweeping reform.
"The change didn't achieve its purpose," said Maurice B. Howard, assistant superintendent for instruction. "It was designed to motivate students to study harder in more difficult courses, but merely changing the grading scale neither adds rigor nor raises academic standards."
But Dr. Amprey said the old grading policy made it harder for city students to compete with students from other Maryland districts, all of which use letter grades.
A "D," or passing grade, in other districts corresponded with a 60-to-69, or failing grade, in the city, and students at some citywide academic schools complained that they had lost college scholarships because they failed courses they would have passed in the suburbs.