Researchers Sound Alarm Over Black Student Suspensions
By Nirvi Shah and Lesli A. Maxwell
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.
August 7, 2012
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/08/07/01zerotolerance.h32.html?tkn=NWNFAxXnSt8u5bQ%2BZQoz52N447hxgou4YuED

Nearly one in six African-American students was
suspended from school during the 2009-10 academic year,
more than three times the rate of their white peers, a
new analysis of federal education data has found.

That compares with about one in 20 white students,
researchers at the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto
Derechos Civiles, based at the University of California,
Los Angeles, conclude. They use data collected from
about half of all school districts in the nation for
that year by the U.S. Department of Education's office
for civil rights.

And for black children with disabilities, the rate was
even higher: One in four such students was suspended at
least once that year.

In some districts, as many as one out of every two black
students was suspended.

"These numbers show clear and consistent racial and
ethnic disparities in suspensions across the country,"
said John H. Jackson, the president of the Schott
Foundation for Public Education, based in Cambridge,
Mass., which supports equity in schooling for all
students and efforts to improve outcomes for African-
American boys. "We are not providing [these students] a
fair and substantive opportunity to learn. Any entity
not serious about addressing this becomes a co-
conspirator in the demise of these children."

Suspension Gaps

Maisie Chin, the executive director of Community Asset
Development Re-defining Education, or CADRE, in Los
Angeles, helped form Dignity in Schools, a New York
City-based group focused on eradicating zero-tolerance
discipline policies and school "push out" of students
deemed difficult to deal with.

The real value of the data this report provides, she
said, is that it helps the public see suspensions and
the disproportionate ways in which they are handed out
as a systemic problem.

"We're thrilled that it's coming out on a national
level," Ms. Chin said.

The researchers decry not only disparities in how
suspensions are parceled out, but also their sheer
numbers.

In the report, "Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate
Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion From School," the
director of the Civil Rights Project's Center for Civil
Rights Remedies, Daniel J. Losen, and research associate
Jonathan Gilliespie analyze the 3 million suspensions
reported to the federal Education Department as part of
the biennial collection of civil rights data.

"That's about the number of children it would take to
fill every seat in every major league baseball park and
every [National Football League] stadium in America,
combined," they write in the report, released Tuesday.

Mr. Losen said when he was a young teacher, he
frequently sent students to the principal's office for
misbehaving. With training and time, he learned to work
on students' behavior in his own classroom, keeping
students from missing class.

"The bottom line is, we have to reject this frequent use
of suspension. We have to reject this as the status
quo," he said, especially considering that many
suspensions are not for major offenses, but minor
infractions. "There are alternatives."

Racial Gaps

This latest collection of civil rights data was the most
expansive to date, including information that accounts
for 85 percent of all public school students in the
country.

Florida and Hawaii were excluded because of errors in
the reported data. The study also does not provide
suspension estimates for New York state because New York
City's data on suspensions are being reviewed by the
office for civil rights.

This report provides the first large-scale analysis of
suspension rates in public schools across all states.
Previous research has flagged individual states' records
on suspension and expulsion.

The rates of suspension look starkest at the district
level.

Of the nearly 6,800 districts studied by the Civil
Rights Project researchers, 839 suspended at least 10
percent of their students at least once. In some
districts, including Chicago; Memphis, Tenn.; Columbus,
Ohio; and Henrico County, Va., 18 percent or more of the
students enrolled spent time out of school as a
punishment. Some 200 districts sent more than 20 percent
of students away at one point or another during the
school year.

The Pontiac, Mich., city school system, where about 64
percent of the 5,300 students are black, ranked first
for suspending the largest percentage of black students-
for every 100 black students, 68 were suspended at least
once during the 2009-10 school year, the analysis found.

In Fort Wayne, Ind., however, where only 25 percent of
about 32,000 district students are black, 56 out of
every 100 black students was suspended at least once.

"I am surprised that we would rank that high, but like a
lot of school districts, this is obviously something we
are looking at and something we have been addressing
over the last couple of years," said Krista Stockman, a
spokeswoman for the Fort Wayne district.

The district is implementing culturally responsive
positive behavioral supports and interventions, or PBIS,
an approach to discipline that involves increasingly
intensive interventions to change students' behavior,
she said. "We certainly realize that when kids come into
our schools, they often don't come with the same
background and home experiences that our teachers and
our staff may have come from."

The district in Hartford, Conn., has the highest rate of
suspensions for Latino students at 44.2 percent,
according to the report, meaning 44 out of every 100
Latino students was suspended at least once. The
district also ranks ninth for suspending African-
Americans, where 53 percent of all black students were
suspended at least once. Hartford, with about 21,000
students, is almost entirely a minority district.
Latinos represent the largest group, with 51 percent,
while African-Americans make up about 40 percent of
enrollment.

Illinois, in fact, had the worst record of 47 states
analyzed for the gap between the rates of suspensions
for black students and their white peers, at 21.3
percentage points, followed by Missouri and Connecticut,
where the black-white gaps were just over 18 percentage
points.

A report last year from the Council of State Governments
Justice Center in Bethesda, Md., and the Public Policy
Research Institute at Texas A&M University found that
more than half of students in Texas were suspended or
expelled at least once between 7th and 12th grades.

Of the students tracked by the Texas study's researchers
from 7th grade through one year past when they were
scheduled to be seniors, 75 percent of black students
were expelled or suspended, compared with 50 percent of
white students. In addition, 75 percent of students with
disabilities were suspended or expelled, compared with
55 percent of students without a disability.

The problem with suspensions is simple, yet devastating,
the authors say: The students-many of them already at
risk for low performance or dropping out-are not in
class, which leads to a litany of negative consequences.

"Suspensions matter because they are among the leading
indicators of whether a child will drop out of school
and because out-of-school suspension increases a child's
risk for future incarceration," they write.

The study from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA
recommends that states and districts be required to
report suspension data, by race, each year, and that
suspension rates be used to measure states' and
districts' education performance.

The authors also want more federal enforcement of civil
rights laws to address the disparities in discipline
they and others have found. And federal efforts should
invest more in systemic improvements to approaches to
school discipline and teacher training in classroom
management, they argue.

Some may hypothesize that students of color are more
likely to exhibit inappropriate behavior in the
classroom, said Russell Skiba, a professor at the Center
for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana
University, in Bloomington, but research doesn't support
that.

But there is evidence that African-American students are
punished more severely than other students for minor
infractions.

Policy Changes

Some districts are taking steps to change suspension and
expulsion policies, including Baltimore, which has been
working for years on alternatives to suspension.
Officials there call the strategies ineffective and say
such practices often punish students for multiple minor
infractions.

Other efforts are in earlier stages. Earlier this year,
the Chicago school board voted to eliminate automatic
10-day suspensions for the worst school-based offenses,
the publication Catalyst Chicago reported. Principals
can still order five-day suspensions, but they have to
justify additional time out of school.

And in places where change isn't happening on its own,
civil rights groups are pushing for it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed civil rights
complaints with the federal Education Department against
five Florida districts for what it says have been
discriminatory disciplinary practices against black
students, compared with their white peers.

Stephanie Langer, a staff attorney in SPLC's Florida
office, said the complaints focus on a range of
disciplinary practices, including out-of-school
suspension, expulsion, alternative placements, and
school-based arrests. The districts, she said, enroll
relatively modest percentages of African-Americans, but
the numbers of black students who are targeted with
tough disciplinary practices are "egregious."

The five Florida districts are Bay, Escambia, Flagler,
Okaloosa, and Suwannee counties, where, she said, SPLC
found that individual administrators were often
violating their district's own policies when meting out
discipline for relatively minor infractions.

Ms. Langer said a combination of zero tolerance policies
and giving "administrators and principals unfettered
discretion to act as they choose in the moment" was
behind the high rates of discipline for black students.

Aware of a growing chorus of voices criticizing the
disproportionate rates of punishment, some states are
also taking steps to change their policies.

For example, the Maryland board of education has been
working on policy changes for more than a year to curb
suspensions and expulsions, state education department
spokesman William Reinhard said.

"The belief of the board was ... too many kids are
spending too much time out of the classroom, where they
don't get the educational services they deserve under
Maryland law," Mr. Reinhard said.

"They end up being dropouts or not progressing the way
they should," he continued. "And there was some concern
about students from particular ethnic backgrounds being
overrepresented in the suspension data. This is their
way to say, `Hey, we can do better than this.' "

The Maryland board has given preliminary approval to a
policy that would eliminate zero-tolerance discipline
policies with automatic consequences and require schools
to adopt an approach to discipline that focuses on
improving students' behavior, not just meting out
punishment. Suspensions and expulsions would be allowed
only as a last resort.

But changing policies and practices or banning
suspensions isn't universally popular. Local school
officials in Maryland, for example, told the state board
about their concerns with the proposed policy shift.

And sometimes, suspensions are simply a necessity, said
Sasha Pudelski, the government-affairs manager for the
American Association of School Administrators in
Alexandria, Va.

"We support evidence-based alternatives to out-of-school
suspension and expulsions, but when the safety of other
students, teachers, and school employees is at risk,
suspension can be an appropriate choice, particularly if
a student's behavior is beyond the capacity of a school
to address," she said. The group does support examining
policies and practices when disproportionate numbers of
one group of students are represented by suspension and
expulsion data.

"Where school or school district policies and state laws
increase the number of out-of-school suspensions," Ms.
Pudelski said, "administrators, school boards, and state
policymakers must look for alternatives."


Black students are suspended at a higher rate than white
students in 39 of the 47 states studied. But the gap
between black and white students' suspension rates
varies widely from state to state.

State 	Black-White Percentage-Point Gap
IL 	21.3
MO 	18.4
CT 	18.1
TN 	16.4
MI 	15.9
WI* 	15.3
MN 	15.3
DE 	14.4
NV 	14.4
OH 	14.0
NE 	14.0
IN 	13.6
AR 	13.2
SC 	13.2
PA 	13.2
KS 	12.8
OK 	12.5
TX 	12.3
GA 	12.2
CA 	12.1
VA 	11.6
MS 	11.2
IA 	10.9
AL 	10.7
NC 	10.2
WV 	9.9
CO 	9.7
KY 	9.3
NJ 	8.7
RI 	8.6
LA 	8.3
AZ 	7.8
WA 	7.8
OR 	7.6
MA 	7.1
AK 	6.4
MD* 	6.1
NH 	5.3
SD 	4.9
UT 	4.2
ME 	4.1
WY 	3.8
VT 	2.2
ND 	2.0
NM 	1.7
ID 	1.0
MT 	-0.3

*MD and WI each had a large district removed from the
sample so the size depicted on the right is no longer
accurate and their estimates should be reviewed with
caution.

NOTES: Florida and Hawaii were not analyzed in the
report. Errors in Florida's enrollment figures led to
the exclusion of 217,000 suspensions in that state.
Hawaii's data "contains serious flaws" the researchers
said.

New York City was excluded because the district is
disputing its data with the office for civil rights, so
that led to the removal of New York.

The District of Columbia was not included in the
analysis as a state, but a district.

SOURCE: Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles

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