California’s Woke Legislation For 2020: Students Can’t Be Suspended

Among the dumbest of the state of California’s new ‘woke’ legislation for 2020 is that it’s set to ban all public and charter schools from suspending students for ‘willful defiance’ in this upcoming year: 

A California bill that passed the Legislature would prohibit schools, including charter schools, from suspending students for willful defiance.

That means if a student is acting up in class, teachers and school officials will not be able to suspend them from school.

As if California public schools weren’t already woefully behind national education standards, despite the state pouring $90 billion into the system this year alone, schools will now be forced to keep kids on campus no matter their level of constant defiance and disruption to the educational process of others.

Under the law, SB 419, the only exception for which a student could still be suspended suspended will be for bringing a weapon or illegal drugs to school.

And what’s the rationale? Because of course, racism. 

As a local NBC affiliate reported earlier when the bill was passed by the state House and Senate:

The bill by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would ban the suspension of students in grades K-8 for refusing to obey a teacher or administrator, a practice known as willful defiance.

“I’ve dealt with a lot of these cases,” said Berry Accius, founder of Voice of the Youth, a nonprofit mentoring program in Sacramento. “Unfortunately, I’ve had kids that have been suspended for sometimes three months.”

Accius said school suspensions are used disproportionately against students of color.

“African American males and females, they are suspended at a higher rate — especially the African American males,” Accius said.

No doubt the jobs of California school teachers and administrators just got immensely harder. It will take effect starting July 1, 2020.

Commenting at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher skewers the initiative and predicts the following outcome: “Now state legislators, in their wisdom, have condemned elementary school teachers and the well-behaved students — black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever — to the tyranny of brats.”

And more: “Progressives are dismantling the ability of a basic social institution — the school — to defend itself, and to maintain order sufficient to fulfill its function.” Further, Dreher notes the inevitability that “when the parents who can afford to get their kids out of the public schools do so, progressives will call them racist.”

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