I agree with Kevin that suspensions and expulsions should be used sparingly and only in response to the most serious infractions. A high school student who brings Tylenol to school should not be treated the same as a student who brings an illegal drug. Zero tolerance policies remove thinking from the discipline equation and rob students of educational opportunities.

Oftentimes suspensions are the result of less serious offenses that should be addressed in other ways. Schools frequently suspend students for disrupting class, for profanity, or for insubordination. I came across an article about Lincoln High School in Washington State, which is taking a different approach. Principal Jim Sporleder responds to acting-out not with strict punishments, but with one-on-one counseling that seeks to address the root causes of a child’s misbehavior. When a student talks back to a teacher, for example, Sporleder has a conversation with him to find out what anger or unhappiness lies behind the incident. Suspensions at the school have dropped 85 percent. This means more students are in the classroom learning, instead of at home doing who knows what. Discipline decisions, however, are not always left up to principals. Zero tolerance or other discipline policies are often set by school districts. It is important that district policies do not prohibit principals’ from implementing approaches like Sporleder’s or trying other models.

Aggressive discipline policies are not just out of control in high schools -- they are a problem in elementary schools, too. In the past year, a California school suspended a 6-year-old for brushing against his friend's groin while playing; a Florida 8-year-old with special needs was arrested and charged with aggravated-assault for throwing a piece of a pipe at his teachers; a school in New York City suspended a 9-year-old boy for two days for putting a "kick me" sign on another student; and in the Washington, DC metro area young children have been suspended or expelled for fighting, throwing tantrums and disrupting the class. These are just a few examples. Younger children often do not understand why they are being suspended. Instead, consequences should be directly connected to a child’s misbehavior. If children throw food in the cafeteria, they should be required to help clean up after lunch.

In a blog post for the Huffington Post earlier this year, I explain some of the damaging effects of suspension in the early grades. One finding I discuss is from a paper released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and The Equity Project at Indiana University. The authors state that suspended students are more likely to struggle academically and drop out of school because they are often the same students who need the most support from school. Missing multiple days or being suspended multiple times only drags these students further behind.

Discipline policies ought to be taken seriously by all schools, both private and government-owned. Failure to do so leads to anemic academic progress for even the brightest students.

The last thing federal-government officials, states or large districts should do is to try to invent or impose standard discipline policies.

Some parents prefer strict, academically focused schools for their kids. Other parents want schools where their kids are more free to “express themselves” through relaxed dress codes and fewer behavioral guidelines. Parents should be able to choose the level of behavioral expectation that, to them, is most appropriate for their own children.

The key is for schools to have clearly stated expectations. A great example of a clearly stated discipline policy is that of Liberty Common High School in Fort Collins, Colorado. The school lays out direct disciplinary policies and maintains well-understood behavioral expectations; and if they’re not enforced and upheld, parents can pull their kids thereby voting with their feet.

Schools that successfully maintain healthy behavioral decorum have common characteristics worthy of attention by school leaders and policymakers. These schools, by example, offer models worth emulating:

1. Offer a rich, ambitious, well-ordered and engaging curriculum that challenges all students.

2. Behavioral expectations should be clear, concise and plainly stated.

3. Students should be fully occupied with schoolwork, homework and edifying extracurricular activities.

4. From the earliest ages, students should be exposed to the timeless lessons of great literature, especially works accentuating morality, virtue and character development.

5. School instructors should be competent and skilled in pushing all students to higher levels of academic achievement.

6. Parents should be active and engaged in the school.

7. Most importantly, parents who find these standards are not being maintained by their child’s school should be free to move their kids to schools that do.

It is foolish for central administrators – other than those in small school districts – to believe they can have an appreciable positive impact on local school-management and leadership issues such as discipline. Attempts to impose a one-size-fits-all strategy would certainly be inferior to those asserted by competent building-level leadership.

Instead, the federal bureaucracy, the Congress and the states should scale up efforts to promote school choice. Empowering families to apply marketplace pressures on schools that fail to offer safe, focused learning environments is the fastest, surest way to improve them – or shut them down if they refuse to improve.

It is right for policymakers and school leaders to consider the profound negative impacts of poor student behavior. Bullying, cheating, plagiarism and behaviors defined by violence and self-harm have become emblematic of unionized, bureaucratized, government-owned, monopoly schools.

Reforming public education in the sensible direction of school choice, parental empowerment and truly professional educators is an imperative first step toward relieving the dreadful affliction of reckless student behavior in schools.

By stingily maintaining its monopoly status (always done at the expense of parental empowerment), academic monopolists and their political allies are themselves behaving in a way that disrupts the academic process that all American students deserve. And, like all scoundrels, these miscreants deserve the firmest resistance from Americans who still value freedom.

Keeping students away from graduation ceremonies and Disneyland days are not particularly troubling to me. But keeping students away from educational opportunities certainly is. And that’s what zero-tolerance policies do.

Suspensions and expulsions should be used sparingly, when students seriously assault one another or bring dangerous weapons or drugs to school. Normal adolescent misbehavior should be addressed with constructive approaches like restorative justice and PBIS (positive behavior intervention and supports). Simply put, discipline policy should be aligned with academic goals. Support and intervention – not punishment – should be the normal response to simple misbehavior.

Last fall, the National Education Policy Center published a comprehensive review of the research in this area, documenting how removing students from classrooms for minor disciplinary issues harms overall achievement goals and does not improve education for the remaining students. An accompanying brief offers statutory code changes to improve data collection and advance discipline alternatives that can be adopted by state and federal policymakers. NEPC also published a short fact sheet and a small set of federal policy recommendations. All of this is available at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/discipline-policies

After many years mired in a zealous attachment to zero tolerance policies, states are finally revisiting their laws and considering healthy alternatives. Keeping children away from school has the unsurprising effect of … keeping kids away from school. That’s not a particularly sensible educational goal.