Racial disparities in the way schools discipline students received new attention a decade ago during a national dealing with racial injustice.
Ten years later, change is slow to come.
In many schools across the country, black students are more likely to receive punishments that remove them from the classroom, including suspension, expulsion, or transfer to an alternative school.
Ten years ago, those differences became the target of a new lease of life reform movement spurred on by the same reckoning that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movementFor many advocates, students, and educators, pursuing racial justice has meant addressing disparate outcomes for Black youth beginning in the classroom, often through strict discipline And underinvestment in low-income schools.
The movement elevated the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” – the idea that being expelled from school, or drop outincreases the chance of arrest and imprisonment years later.
The Associated Press looked at discipline data in key states to see how much progress has been made. Here’s what reporters found.
There has been some progress in lowering suspension rates for black students over the past decade. But vast disparities remain, according to AP’s review of disciplinary data in major states.
In Missouri, for example, an AP analysis found that black students were suspended 46% of all days in the 2013-14 school year — the year Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in the state just days after graduating from high school. Nine years later, the rate had dropped to 36%, according to state data obtained through a public records request. Both numbers far exceed the share of black students in the student body, about 15%.
And in California, the suspension rate for black students dropped from 13 percent in 2013 to 9 percent a decade later. That’s still three times higher than the suspension rate for white students.
In Georgia, black students make up just over a third of the population. But they are the majority of students who receive discipline that removes them from class.
Students who are suspended, expelled, or otherwise kicked out of class are more likely to be suspended again. They become disconnected from their classmates and are more likely to become disconnected from schoolThey also miss out on learning time and are likely to have poorer academic results, including at work. numbers And percentages of graduation.
Still, some schools and policymakers have doubled down on exclusionary discipline since the pandemic. Calls for stricter discipline and more police involvement have resurfaced in recent years as Schools struggled with misconduct after months of closures due to the pandemic.
In Missouri, students lost nearly 780,000 school days due to in- or out-of-school suspensions in 2023, the highest number in the past decade.
In Louisiana, black students are twice as likely to be suspended as white students for the same offenses, and they receive longer suspensions for the same offenses, according to a Study from 2017 of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Yet This year a new law will come into effect which recommends suspending all high school students who are suspended three times in one school year.
Federal guidelines to address racial disparities in school discipline first came from President Barack Obama’s administration in 2014. Federal officials urged schools not to suspend, expel or refer students to law enforcement unless absolutely necessary, and encouraged restorative justice practices that did not push students out of classrooms. Those rules were rolled back by President Donald Trump’s administration, but federal and state civil rights regulations still require the collection of discipline data.
In Minnesota, the share of black students expelled and suspended from school fell from 40% in 2018 to 32% four years later. That’s still nearly three times the share of black students in the general population.
The state’s disciplinary gap was so egregious that in 2017, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights ordered dozens of districts and charter schools to submit to legal settlements over their disciplinary practices, particularly for Black and Native American students. In those districts, the department found, nearly 80% of disciplinary actions for subjective reasons, such as “disruptive behavior,” went to students of color. School buildings were closed for much of the settlement period because of the pandemic, so it’s difficult to judge whether the schools have made progress since then.
Black students often receive harsher punishments than their white peers for similar or even the same behavior, says Linda Morris, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Students of color are often not given the same benefit of the doubt as their white counterparts, and are even seen as having harmful motives,” Morris said.
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