Kudos to the Maryland State Board of Education for its careful study of school discipline practices and for its plan to require Maryland school systems reduce out-of-school suspensions over the next three years ("State wants to curb student suspensions," Jan. 25).

In effect, the state board is urging local school systems to use nonviolent transgressions as teachable opportunities, not suspendable ones.

The state board's actions will guide principals who regularly face thorny discipline questions. For example, what should they do when a middle-schooler regularly loses his temper, shouting at his teacher and frightening the class with his outbursts?

Too often, this kind of behavior results in suspension because school administrators believe that a suspension will teach the misbehaving student a lesson.

But education researchers have long known that the evidence doesn't support the use of suspensions as a behavioral teaching tool. Suspensions interrupt a student's education, fail to show students why the behavior is not acceptable, and don't teach more appropriate ways of behaving.

When we punish students by kicking them out of school for nonviolent infractions, we've lost the opportunity to instruct them. That can include offering the student the chance to talk with an adult about what is making him so angry, requiring him to attend after-school detention or an "in-school-suspension" class with anger management instruction, and, last but not least, having the student apologize to the teacher and his classmates for disturbing their lessons.

Firm, reasoned approaches to misbehavior, such as these, take time and are often not easy. But they are, in fact, a much more effective way to teach misbehaving students a lesson.

Jane Sundius, Baltimore

The writer is director of the education and youth development program for Open Society Institute-Baltimore.