Monthly Archives: June 2012

Article by Jane Ellen Stevens

Take a short walk on the dark side of our public education system, and you learn some disturbing lessons about school punishment. First. U.S. schools suspend millions of kids — 3,328,750, to be exact. Since the 1970s, says a National Education Policy Center report published in October 2011, the suspension rate’s nearly doubled for white kids, to nearly 6 percent. It’s more than doubled for Hispanics to 7 percent, and to a stunning 15 percent for blacks. For Native Americans, it’s almost tripled, from 3 percent to 8 percent.

Read More …

Article by Jane Ellen Stevens

Since at least 2005, a few dozen individual schools across the U.S. have adopted some type of trauma-sensitive approach. But the centers of gravity for most of the action are in Massachusetts and Washington. These two states lead the way in taking a district-wide approach to integrating trauma-informed practices, with an eye to state-wide adoption.

Without a school-wide approach, “it’s very hard to address the role that trauma is playing in learning,” says Susan Cole, director of the Trauma an Learning Policy Initiative, a joint project of Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children.

Read More …