Clayton County, GA -- Luvenia Jackson knows students can’t learn when they’re in jail. During 40 years in education, the Clayton County Public Schools superintendent has seen that academic performance cannot improve systemwide under zero-tolerance discipline.
Instead of leading to safer buildings and higher achievement, the strict policies cause excessive suspensions, lost instruction time, and students to be needlessly traumatized by criminal charges—all over behavior that can be better managed by teachers and administrators, she says.
“You cannot increase graduation rates if children are out of school,” says Jackson, who retired in 2010 as a special assistant to the superintendent but returned in 2012 as interim superintendent of the suburban Atlanta district in which she had spent her entire career.
“To reduce arrests, we had to have that belief that children really matter,” says Jackson, whose efforts at discipline reform were among the reasons she was named permanent superintendent of the 50,000-student district in 2014.
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Jackson began her career as a special education teacher in 1976. But her concern for struggling, disadvantaged and neglected students goes back farther, to her childhood during the segregation era of the 1950s and ’60s. She was raised by her grandparents in one of the poorest areas in southern Georgia. She too was poor, but says she had a small advantage, in that her grandparents owned land.
“They promoted getting an education and treating people right,” she says. “They said you have to finish school, and you can do better than we have done.”
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