Nebraska lawmakers approved a Feb. 27 allowing schools to for violent behavior. Schools will be required to provide a plan to parents whose young children are suspended that describes available resources and how the student’s behavior will be handled in the future. Gov. Jim Pillen said he intends to sign the bill into law.

In the rural Nebraska panhandle, elementary teachers at Kimball Public Schools have watched students as young as 5 throw furniture, bite staff and attack classmates. 

Until a few years ago, in- and out-of-school suspensions were one way that Nebraska schools dealt with this type of behavior. But in 2023, state lawmakers for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless they brought a weapon to school. 

It was billed as a move to protect children with disabilities and prevent the disproportionate suspension of students of color. But now, Nebraska lawmakers are trying to reverse the ban. Educators say suspensions are needed to stop severe or violent behavior — which has gotten worse since the pandemic — and to get parents’ attention about how their children are acting in school. 

“We will have a student physically assault another student, or fight staff members. And then it happens repeatedly. The parents’ support is not there. What are we going to do in Kimball, Nebraska?” asked Superintendent Trevor Anderson. “The only solution that we really have is that they’re still in the building and now it’s essentially one of the staff members babysitting all day long, because (the student) is not able to handle being in the regular classroom setting.”

Nebraska is one of a handful of states, including Minnesota and Texas, that have sought to repeal suspension bans in the last year. At least 18 states prohibit suspensions for students in prekindergarten through second or third grade, according to the most recent published in 2020.

A rise in student misbehavior post-COVID, combined with inadequate funding for special education, has left districts struggling with how to address behaviors — sometimes violent — in the classroom. But research that suspensions disproportionately impact students of color and children with disabilities or from marginalized backgrounds, including those in early grades. 

While Black children made up 18% of U.S. preschoolers during the 2021-22 school year, they represented 38% of students who received at least one out-of-school suspension, according to the latest federal . About 23% of U.S. preschoolers received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during that time and represented 41% of those who were suspended.

One found that “receiving a suspension serves as a key turning point toward increased odds of incarceration” for students later in life.

“I don’t … think it works to suspend pre-K students (through) second grade‬ students at all. I was‬ ‭suspended at that age and, quite frankly, I don’t believe it helped. I went home and watched cartoons. I don’t think that changed my behavior‬ ‭at all,” said Nebraska state Sen. Terrell McKinney when he in 2023. “I believe it prepares‬ kids — especially kids that look like me — for the juvenile justice system, the child welfare system and then the‬ ‭criminal justice system.”

Discipline that might be appropriate for older students can be harmful for young children’s development, said Luis Rodriguez, a New York University professor who school discipline. 

“Young children are still learning. They probably are still developing social skills — especially when we’re talking about kindergarten, first grade — and it might be the first time that some of these children are around other children and away from home,” he said. “Exclusionary disciplines such as suspensions at that age can interrupt foundational learning.”

Since the pandemic, some policymakers have focused on ways to combat in schools to protect teacher and student safety, while others have tried to reduce disparities in school discipline and ensure children don’t miss out on learning, said Zeke Perez, assistant director of the nonprofit . 

Maryland was one of the first states to for early grades, in 2017. It prohibited the practice for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless there was an “imminent threat” to staff or students.

A published in 2024 found that the law reduced the probability of K-2 suspensions from 1.9% in 2017 to 0.8% in 2018, while rates remained steady around 3% for grades 3 to 5 following the ban. But disparities still remained in suspension rates for students who were Black, low-income or had disabilities.

Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association, said the law has been beneficial for schools.

“We’re always trying to avoid removal from school, especially for our youngest students,” he said. “Everywhere there’s challenging behavior. It comes with the territory. This hasn’t made the job more difficult. It’s the right thing to do for these really young kids.”

While Maryland’s law allows suspensions for violent behavior, Nebraska’s only exception is for bringing a weapon to school. Some educators and lawmakers said revisions are needed to expand the exceptions to protect students and teachers.

Nebraska state Sen. Dave Murman, who proposed in January, said he’s heard from school districts that the same students act out repeatedly and can’t be removed from the classroom. 

“I don’t believe this law is working. Suspension should never be the first option, but what happens when a student behaves in a violent manner and students or staff get hurt?” he said at a Jan. 27 . “I’ve heard stories from teachers and administrators about students biting, hitting, throwing desks and chairs, stabbing with pencils and even kicking the stomach of a pregnant teacher. How can children learn in that environment?”

Murman said suspensions might be the only way administrators can get a parent’s attention to address their child’s behavior. He said some schools aren’t able to make contact with families until they have to physically remove their child from school after a suspension.

These challenges have become more common for Kimball Public Schools since the pandemic, said Anderson. The district is located near the Wyoming and Colorado borders and serves nearly 400 students. About half are enrolled in elementary grades.

Anderson said he had never seen the level of aggression and violent behavior from young elementary students in his eight years as an administrator until recently. He said classroom management has been more difficult since the suspension ban went into effect in 2023.

Small, remote districts like Kimball don’t receive the same resources as metropolitan schools that provide , such as behavioral supports or trauma-informed interventions. A licensed mental health practitioner visits the district once a week. Anderson said he recently filled a behavior specialist position that had been open for a year and a half.

Before the ban, Omaha Public Schools used suspensions in kindergarten through second grade on rare occasions to get a behavior plan in place for a struggling student, said Kathy Poehling, president of the Omaha Education Association. 

“We’re not forced to suspend preschoolers or kindergartners. But if that’s what we need to do in order to get people together, to put a plan in place, sometimes you need 24 hours to do that,” she said. “I don’t really support the idea of repealing the entire ban, because I think then we’re not really looking at the situation and saying, ‘What does the child need?’ We don’t want to suspend just to suspend.”

Omaha’s Education Rights Counsel, a legal advocacy nonprofit, supported the ban because children between the ages of 4 and 7 were being sent home multiple times a year, said Director Lauren Micek Vargas. 

Some students might be exhibiting behaviors because of a disability or possible trauma at home, she said. 

“With our most young, vulnerable children, oftentimes that behavior actually is a form of communication of something else,” she said. “If you punish something without trying to figure out what is happening underneath the surface … we’re missing out on an opportunity to really connect with the child and also see other things that are going on.”

But under IDEA, some legal procedures that could help students get access to special education services are triggered only by suspensions, said Robyn Linscott, director of family and education policy at The Arc of the United States.

Under IDEA, schools are required to hold a meeting with specialists, teachers and the family of any student who has been suspended for 10 or more days during a school year. These sessions determine whether the behavior that led to the suspensions is the result of a disability.

“If that is the case, then the school has to make sure that all these other supports are in place before they can be suspended again, before they can be expelled,” Linscott said. “They often look back to functional behavior assessments and their (individualized education program) to see if it was actually being followed. This is a really important protection and procedural point for students with disabilities.”

Even without suspensions, schools can informally remove students with disabilities by asking their parents to take them home. But that doesn’t count toward the federal 10-day limit.

Last year, Minnesota lawmakers initiated bills to reinstate suspensions and other exclusionary discipline only two years after passing a ban. State Sen. Jim Abeler, one of the bill authors, said the suspension ban had been implemented with good intentions, but “it’s been a disaster.”

“There’s no chance to intervene,” he said. “The kids see no consequences and don’t ever get a chance to get on track with a plan. Superintendents came (to the legislature) and begged for a way to work around this.”

A 2017 in Texas was revised last year to expand the reasons for sending a student in prekindergarten through second grade home. Before the change, young students could be suspended only if they brought a gun to school. Now, include repeated or significant disruption to the classroom or a threat to the health and safety of other students.

In Nebraska, lawmakers like state Sen. Ashlei Spivey are working on a that would allow more exceptions, like chronic disruptive behavior or violence. The legislation, which is separate from the bill to repeal the ban and more likely to pass, is in the second debate and voting stage in the legislature. 

Spivey said that while sending students home might be a tool for discipline, alternative interventions are key to preventing disproportionate suspensions and keeping young children in the classroom.

“If you feel like a 7-year-old should not be in a classroom, my thought is that you cannot throw them away, but you ask, ‘What are they navigating? What type of support do they need?’ ” she said. “There also needs to be clearly defined expectations of what escalates to a suspension and how you are defining that, and how it is being applied to all student populations.”

In 2016, my 10-year-old neurodivergent son was physically restrained and secluded twice at his Maryland public school. Being physically restrained and dragged down a hallway by school staffers and left in a room all alone led to a lot of fear and anxiety for my son and our family. We decided to homeschool him for the next two years.

In 2018, my son decided he wanted to go back to school to be with his friends. Though my family worked with staffers at his new school to ensure that what had happened at his previous school wouldn’t happen again, his excitement and our hopes soon turned to despair. 

During the first 15 days in his new school, my son was repeatedly restrained and secluded, despite strong state laws in Maryland limiting the use of restraint and seclusion to situations where a child’s behavior poses an imminent threat of serious physical harm. His fear and anxiety returned, and honestly, I was afraid to send him back.

A few days following the final incident, I made a simple promise to my son. I told him I would do everything I could to make sure this would not happen again to him, or to other kids like him.

That vow led me to start the , a national nonprofit that works with families, educators and advocates across the country who have had similar experiences. The alliance is on a mission to inform changes in policy and practice that reduce and eliminate the use of punitive discipline and other outdated behavioral management approaches, and to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

When I first started the alliance, my goal was to help families like mine know they were not alone and that they could drive change. In the first few months, I focused on my son’s school district, and in summer 2019, the school board voted to phase out seclusion and reduce the use of restraint.

Today, the alliance is a community of over 35,000 parents, self-advocates, advocates and professionals, including volunteers from 23 states, working together to create positive change. We have 21 affiliate groups and collaborate with many national and state organizations, focusing on legislation, education and support.”

In terms of legislation and policy, we work at the local, state and federal levels. We have collaborated with individual school districts to influence changes in policy and practice. In Vermont, for example, we partnered with the superintendent of a small school district to change its policy to prohibit seclusion and prone restraint. Over the subsequent four years, the district saw a 90.6% reduction in restraint use and a 100% decrease in seclusion.

We have met with lawmakers and provided written and oral testimony in support of efforts to create stronger laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington. In my home state of Maryland, we helped draft and pass legislation in 2022 banning seclusion in all public schools.

That same year, I testified before the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education in support of federal legislation to end the use of seclusion and dangerous forms of restraint. While that effort was unsuccessful, we continue to meet with congressional offices to advocate for a federal law.

Today, much of our work is focused on education. We advocate for schools to move away from compliance-based methods that depend on rewards, consequences and coercion, and promote practices that emphasize safety, connection and student voice instead. 

We often present at conferences and events and provide guest lectures for university classes on topics related to reducing and eliminating restraint and seclusion. Over the last year, I have led more than two dozen in-person presentations and panels on restraint, seclusion and trauma-informed practices in Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Kansas, New York, Georgia, Washington, D.C., as well as online sessions for audiences nationwide. Last year, we also hosted two virtual conferences that reached thousands of parents and educators from across the world.

Finally, we offer support and guidance to parents and professionals. Every week, we hear from families around the country who reach out for help when their child is experiencing restraint or seclusion. Educators frequently contact us for guidance about how to move their school or district away from these practices. These one-on-one conversations fuel a broader movement by equipping parents and educators with tools and strategies to make schools safer and more supportive for all.

The use of seclusion and restraint is a civil rights, human rights and disability rights issue. There are no federal laws governing the use of these practices in schools, but there should be. Recently, Congress reintroduced bipartisan legislation, the , to prohibit seclusion and dangerous forms of restraint and fund trauma-informed alternatives. Congress must pass this bill, and the president must sign it.

America’s schools can and must end seclusion, reduce restraint and improve outcomes for students, educators, families and communities.

When Ohio mother Joy Palmer raised concerns in 2013 her daughter was already falling behind in first grade, she feared it was because of hearing problems caused by chronic ear infections. School officials told her testing revealed no concerns and her daughter was performing well enough – except for her classroom behavior. 

And when Jackie Castillo-Blaber’s daughter was struggling in 2020 with grasping the alphabet and numbers in kindergarten, school officials in her upstate New York district told her many students were behind because of the pandemic and her daughter’s behavior was the biggest issue.

Three different mothers. Three different states. Three different decades.

Yet, the similarities are striking.

The three mothers of color felt dismissed when they raised concerns. When they insisted something was wrong, they were asked if there were issues at home or whether they knew to read to their children after school — which felt like an attack and criticism of their parenting.

“There’s this view that reading struggles are moral failures,” said Castillo, mother of Genevieve, 9, a fourth grader. “There’s just so much bias … when you look at parents and you say, ‘They’re probably not [doing] enough, that’s the reason why [their kid can’t read].’ ”

But in all three cases, the culprit wasn’t a bad parent or child.

It was undiagnosed dyslexia that began to manifest as frustration. For these three girls, acting out was a way to mask fears of falling behind or an inability to keep up academically with their peers – and later became behaviors that subsided once they received intervention.

A growing number of studies in recent years show students of color, , are for mental health issues and like dyslexia. And despite increased dyslexia screening in many states, many students are still not receiving the support they need. 

While dyslexia affects about one in five people and it’s one of the most common causes for reading difficulties in elementary school children, only 10% of kids with dyslexia receive special education services and intervention, according to the . 

It’s worse for Black and brown kids. 

In 2019, one study found that Black eighth graders were to be identified with a learning disability compared to their white peers.

The mislabeling of Black and brown children influences the support and services they get in the classroom, with experts believing there’s a strong correlation between misidentification, disparities in compared to their white peers and . 

Disabled white students, said Jacqueline Rodriguez, chief executive officer at National Center for Learning Disabilities, are often identified with both a learning disability and mental health issues, but the emphasis “is always on the [learning disability].” 

Yet, for Black and brown families “…we see a ton of emotional disabilities, but we don’t see the corresponding [learning disabilities,” Rodriguez said. 

School officials then “spend so much energy trying to quell the emotional response to the inability to read or write,” Rodriguez continued, “that they don’t actually address the academic interventions that would remove those emotional outbursts.”

Researchers point to an overall when it comes to recognizing dyslexia, but a slowing of teacher diversity and implicit bias may also be key elements in misidentifying disabilities for students of color.

A found school psychologists often believe the behavior of a Black or brown child is “willful or purposeful and not related to a disability,” and under-identification could reflect “a bias by education professionals who tend to be more responsive to white parents, or professionals may hold lower expectations of Black students’ academic abilities which may lead them to ignore a possible disability and ‘problem’ behavior.”

Student impact

A found 50% of dyslexic students reported being bullied and 30% said they felt lazy, stupid or less intelligent than their peers. 

Between 2016 and 2020, the number of children diagnosed with depression and anxiety increased by 27% and 29% respectively. Students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia, were at even higher risks, , according to the .

And those numbers are likely even higher for Black and brown youth who go unidentified, said clinical neuropsychologist Karen Wilson.

“When kids don’t understand what they’re reading, and they don’t understand that the reason why they’re struggling is because of a difference in the way their brain is wired, they will form their own narrative,” Wilson said, who is also the psychology department chair at California State University, Dominguez Hills and expert with , a learning disability advocacy nonprofit.

It’s an ongoing reality for Palmer’s 20-year-old daughter, Dey’Leana, who didn’t receive intervention or learn to read until she was 13. 

“I couldn’t get the confidence back that this little girl had, no matter how much I tried to say, ‘Yes, you’re good!” Palmer said. “Even to this day, … she compares herself to her siblings about what she can and cannot do.”

Jackson remembers times when her daughter would hit herself in the head and repeat the words “I’m stupid,” at home. She would pretend she was sick to avoid going to school. She would break her glasses to have an excuse for why she couldn’t read the words on the page.

In class, she wouldn’t sit still. She became the class clown – a coping mechanism so her peers would laugh at her jokes instead of at her when she read, Jackson said. Her behavior became so disruptive that Jackson began to get daily calls from school officials to come get her daughter.

“She was trying to do anything she could to get out of the classroom to avoid reading,” Jackson said. “As a Black mother – a single mother – at that time, it just was a very traumatizing time for both her and I, especially … not knowing there were rules and regulations to special education, not understanding that they should have been addressing dyslexia.”

In Ohio, Palmer’s daughter refused to do school work. She would stare blankly at her teachers, walk out of the classroom or try to put earphones in. 

“You can always teach a child to read, but once the self esteem is broken, it’s so much harder to repair, if ever,” said Resha Conroy, founder and executive director of the .��

Misidentification of a child’s disability can be expressed in several ways, including externally like Jackson’s daughter, or internally like Palmer’s daughter who tried to avoid drawing attention to herself.

“If you don’t address the reading, the behavior tends to become worse,” said Monica McHale-Small, director of education for the . “No matter what color the kid is, if kids are unidentified, misidentified or late identified, you start to see all those behavioral manifestations. … There’s always that phenomenon where a kid would rather be perceived as bad than to be perceived as dumb.”

For many Black and brown children, a broken self-esteem and externalizing behaviors “pushes them into the ,” Jackson added.

“Why do I say pushed? Because the older they get, the more frustrated, the more anxiety, the more [they think] ‘I need to get out of this classroom before I am humiliated or the teacher calls on me … I’m going to do something that’s going to get me out of this pressure cooker,’” said Jackson, who founded the and has worked with several families because of her experience with her daughter, Latecia.

Black students with disabilities were nearly four times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions and twice as likely to be expelled than white students with disabilities, according to the 2019 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The report also found Black children make up around 19% of all students with disabilities, but made up 50% of students with disabilities in correctional facilities.

Going forward

All 50 states have around dyslexia, according to the National Center for Improving Literacy – including at least in kindergarten – but, there’s still concern about implementation.

“Apart from screening, there has to be action after that, so what do you do if you find that someone is at risk?” Wilson said, adding that legislation doesn’t always mean intervention.

“Even when we think about, the protections that are put in place when we think about IDEA and section 504 –  they’re mandating equitable access – but implementation depends often on district capacity or on family advocacy,” she said. “Protection on paper means very little without accountability and practice.”

Black and brown children are , where there’s higher turnover of staff and more young, or temporary, educators who may not know the signs of learning disabilities or have access to professional development.

General teacher preparation programs offer limited coursework in special education, usually only three to six credit hours, Rodriguez said.

“A school that is well funded with high-quality teachers [that have been in the school system longer] with professional development, … is more apt to identify differences between students that learn and think differently quicker, because they know the red flags,” Rodriguez said. 

A first step forward toward more equitable dyslexia intervention for students of color is to create “more cohesive preparation” between general and special education teachers, she added.

Experts also called for comprehensive bias training and greater teacher diversity efforts to help with disparities in disability identification. 

“Whether well intentioned or not, we do bring bias into the classroom with us, not just around expectations for academics, but also expectations for behavior,” Conroy said. 

White educators may be more prone to implicit bias, and use how students of color are more likely to experience or as reasons behind misbehavior rather than think it’s a disability, according to the 2019 U.S.Commission on Civil Rights report.

It’s something the three mothers experienced repeatedly. 

Jackson was told by Nebraska school officials at one point her daughter wasn’t able to read because her biological mother was incarcerated and she had lived with her grandmother.

“Their justification was they were doing the very best that they could do for her and that she wasn’t trying hard enough,” Jackson said.

Palmer recalled an instance where a teacher had asked if her daughter was “able to be taught by a male teacher or does she have daddy issues?”

“Everyone assumed I was a single mom,” Palmer said. 

Most recently, when Castillo’s daughter began to have trouble in school, including crying out of frustration in class, she was referred to a social worker and asked about what things were like at home.

“There’s an overwhelming bias that a lot of us experience as parents of color … that there must be something broken at home, and that’s why your kid is acting out,” Castillo said. “Nobody had reached out to me to be like, ‘Hey, what have you tried with her? Have you noticed this at home?’ … There’s just this assumption that it’s a broken family.”

Although the three mothers eventually received some special education intervention for their daughters, which prompted some progress, Palmer and Jackson had to seek extra support outside the public school system with tutors or private programs.

“We need to ensure [schools] are working with parents and not against parents, that we are creating a team environment, … so [parents] feel safe and that they are in an environment where the children can get support,” Jackson said. “Children don’t have time to wait for systems to take decades to rectify and reframe education.”

Castillo is still navigating what more can be done for her fourth grader, who is receiving after-school tutoring in a neighboring county, paid by her school district. 

Her daughter is “doing much better” and now is able to de-escalate her frustration “to the point where she’s not crying anymore, and is getting through it,” but she still struggles with reading and writing.

“It’s a work in progress,” Castillo said.

She worries the intervention isn’t enough. She also has had to provide transportation for her daughter’s tutoring sessions, and recently moved the meetings to Zoom “to save money on the gas cost, car repairs and tolls.”  

She believes the tutoring would be more effective if it was during the school and worries about “the educational consequences my daughter will have to pay” if the intervention is not moved.

“[My daughter] needs to be able to write paragraphs right now and she can’t,” Castillo said. “All of these things that are going to lead up into what she needs to do to have a chance at a decent job when she graduates and I don’t see it happening. I see the gap only widening.”

While the practice itself is troubling, I conducted reveals something even more troubling: Corporal punishment isn’t just disproportionately used on Black and gender-expansive students — those whose gender identity falls outside traditional norms — it’s also disproportionately condoned by the public when it’s used on these children.

I surveyed more than 600 Mississippi residents to understand their attitudes about school discipline. Most disapproved of corporal punishment in general, but that feeling weakened when the child being punished was Black or gender-nonconforming. In short: Who a child is imagined to be affects whether that child is believed to deserve protection — or punishment.

This finding echoes years of research and advocacy warning that corporal punishment is more than just an outdated disciplinary practice. It reveals deep-rooted inequities in America’s schools.

that physical punishment contributes to worse academic outcomes, higher dropout rates,and even increased involvement with the criminal justice system. The has linked it to long-term mental health impacts such as anxiety, depression and PTSD.

In Mississippi, Black students are far more likely to be physically punished than their white peers. A key reason is a well-documented bias called — the perception that Black children are older, less innocent and more culpable than white youngsters. This leads educators and even the public to support harsher punishments for similar behavior.

Research from has shown how adultification affects Black youth, especially girls. My study confirms that the problem doesn’t stop at how discipline is applied — it extends to how it’s justified.

Even though 61% of respondents in my study agreed that corporal punishment should be banned, support for the practice increased or decreased depending on the perceived identity of the child. For example, on a six-point scale where higher scores indicated stronger support for corporal punishment, participants rated it significantly more appropriate (“fitting the crime”) for a hypothetical Black gender-expansive student (2.73 on the scale) than for a white gender-expansive student (2.32) or a Black cisgender female student (2.26). That’s not just unfair — it’s dangerous.

The good news is that public opinion may be shifting. A 2023 revealed that 65% of U.S. adults agreed with a federal ban on physical punishment in schools, while only 18% were opposed. This growing consensus is reflected in recent legislative actions: and banned physical punishment in public schools in 2023, while and introduced legislation in 2024 to limit the practice. My findings also show that a majority of Mississippians oppose corporal punishment in school. Yet state and federal laws still permit it, revealing a stark disconnect between policy and public will.

That gap must be closed. Here’s how:

First, Mississippi lawmakers — and those in the 21 other states where corporal punishment is still allowed — should immediately ban the practice in all schools. No child should fear physical harm at the hands of a teacher or principal. Nationwide advocacy efforts by organizations like the emphasize the critical need for legislative reform.

Second, schools should adopt , which focus on accountability, dialogue and healing. These methods reduce conflict and improve school climate without resorting to violence. Resources from offer practical guidelines to help educators to implement these approaches.

Finally, transparency is essential. School districts should be required to report disciplinary data by race and gender identity so communities can see what’s happening and push for changes when needed. Right now, the U.S. Department of Education’s offers a national framework for doing just that��— including statistics on the demographic breakdown of students exposed to corporal punishment. However, with the ongoing uncertainty around federal policy, there’s a risk that this resource could be cut, which would make it harder to track how corporal punishment is being used in schools nationwide. We need to speak up to make sure this data collection continues and even gets stronger.

in schools takes a multi-pronged approach. It means changing laws, updating policies and working with communities to push for positive discipline methods that help children thrive without fear of physical punishment. 

It’s time to end this antiquated practice. Not just for some students, but for all of them.

Today I sit on the sidelines, but with a heart tilted toward young people.

It seems that every day there is a wave of fresh cuts at federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education. I personally know a reading specialist who will not be able to return to her position next year because of these decisions. The cuts keep coming, and they will affect the education that schools are able to provide.

With each announcement, my stomach churns. Staff layoffs will be debilitating. I am also concerned that the proposed closure of the will reduce or severely limit access to vital support for students.

As a mother, a retired school nurse, and a woman of faith, I am pleading with elected leaders to invest in children — including our most vulnerable. Investing looks like ensuring that students and educators have what they need to thrive. It looks like maintaining consistent standards for the education of young people.

The Education Department is responsible for ensuring that schools meet the needs of neurodivergent students and those who need extra support to succeed academically. It also holds schools accountable for providing services to students of all ages and abilities. Shuttering the department means not only widening the achievement gap, but pushing children and young people into the cracks.

Our nation cannot thrive if we continue to perpetuate a system in which some students receive a quality education and others do not. Further, any family can find themselves in need of support, whether it’s for their child’s physical, mental or special education needs. Education in America should mean that regardless of where you come from or what you need, you will have an opportunity to have your needs met.

Moreover, if the federal agency  is fully dissolved, the responsibilities for mandating services and providing expertise will fall to the states. Every state operates differently, has different priorities and different challenges. Educational services may become wildly inconsistent. Students in Colorado could receive vastly different services than students in, say, Utah.

No essential service —which helps children, families and communities — should exist in a state of uncertainty. When faced with budgetary challenges or limited oversight, I fear that some schools may consider special education services and student accommodations as disposable.

Though I am no longer in schools, I am now the national president of United Women in Faith. Among our many campaigns for justice is a fight against “school pushout.” Pushout occurs through a patchwork of policies that disproportionately funnels children of color, children with disabilities, and students identifying as LGBTQ from the classroom into the criminal justice system.

Currently, it is estimated that for students with disabilities is about 40%, which is twice that of their peers without disabilities. Far too often, students with disabilities are unfairly maligned and funneled into the criminal justice system. 

We need a functioning Department of Education to ensure that preventative services and those provided under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) give children their best chance to succeed and not end up as just another statistic. I, along with my sisters at , will keep pushing for education justice, but this is not our fight alone. Everyone has a role to play to ensure students get what they need in schools.

Children are our future, and their education shouldn’t be an option or an afterthought.

But now, bills before the state legislature would roll back these reforms and again allow schools to dismiss children in kindergarten through third-grade. 

Three measures under consideration would strip a prohibition on “disciplinary dismissals” — the removal of children from schools — in grades K-3, loosen the definition of student behavior meriting exclusion from the classroom, end a requirement that schools try non-exclusionary strategies before dismissing a child and let schools once again punish youngsters by denying or delaying their access to lunch and recess.

A separate bill would overturn a ban on seclusion for K-3 students — the practice of confining a child in isolation. Some people believe seclusion should be an option when a child’s behavior is out of control. Others call it punitive and cruel, particularly when used on very young children. 

That split was evident in testimony at a recent state House of Representatives hearing on the legislation. Sitting on opposite sides of a windowless Capitol hearing room, the witnesses took turns describing starkly different realities. 

Principal of Jeffers Pond Elementary in the affluent, suburban Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools, Patrick Glynn testified that suspensions provide “the gift of time” so staff can “allow for healing” and create a “re-entry plan” for the student in question. 

Minnesota Elementary School Principals Association President Lisa Carlson, who oversees a school in another prosperous Twin Cities suburb, said a suspension can send a strong signal to a parent in denial about a student’s issues: “For some families, the only way to truly recognize the severity of a situation is to be inconvenienced by it. When a child is suspended, parents are forced to stop, pay attention and take action.”

But parent and educator Ali Alowonle told lawmakers that suspension taught her child the wrong lesson. “She was told that she could not come to school because a police officer had to determine if she were a danger,” Alowonle said. “She began to hate school and refused to go. Suspension broke my kid’s trust in school and adults there.”

Parent Susan Montgomery broke down describing her son’s suspension setting off a destructive cycle. “Now, at 20, he is trying to rebuild his life,” she said, pausing to choke back sobs. “He is taking computer class, participating in healing circle, Bible study, working as a janitor and attending recovery groups — but all behind bars.”

However and whenever lawmakers vote on the bills — they may be standalone legislation or wrapped into an omnibus spending package – they will resurface longstanding racial and demographic divides.

Minnesota has long had nation-leading racial disparities in education, with a teacher corps that is more than 90% white and an increasingly diverse student body. Its schools also have a long history of suspending and expelling non-white students and children with disabilities at much higher rates than their white, nondisabled peers. 

In 2017, the state Department of Human Rights entered into a settlement with 41 school districts and charter schools that were found to have suspended and expelled non-white children and those with disabilities at disproportionate rates. A 2022 from Solutions Not Suspensions, a coalition of advocacy groups that has campaigned for 10 years for laws requiring schools to stop disciplinary practices, found that children of color received 79% of exclusionary discipline despite being 49% of the student body during the 2018-19 school year. Children with disabilities made up 14% of students but received 43% of suspensions and expulsions. 

The agency noted that when the reason for discipline was subjective — e.g. “disruptive behavior” or “verbal abuse,” versus bringing a weapon to school — the disproportionality skyrocketed.  

Armed with these numbers, advocates got a break in 2023, when Democrats gained power in both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. They enacted laws outlawing the use of dangerous prone restraints by police officers stationed in schools and dramatically narrowed schools’ authority to dismiss children. 

But limits on police authority in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis officer had divided Minnesotans along both partisan and geographic lines, with city residents saying they were long overdue and rural residents largely opposed. In 2024, with an election looming and the support of rural Democrats feared to be softening, the Democratic-majority legislature reversed the ban on prone restraints.

The 2024 election left the state House evenly split, with equal numbers of lawmakers from each party set to take office. The late discovery that a Democrat did not actually live in the district where he was elected gave Republicans a one-vote majority until a March 11 special election likely restores the 67-67 split. They immediately started working to try to roll back policies enacted by the Democrats in 2023 and 2024.

Support for the discipline reforms passed in 2023 had been weak among rural Democrats. Now, advocates fear that the rollbacks being proposed by the Republicans could clear the state Senate, which has a one-vote Democratic majority. Advocates fear Democratic Gov. Tim Walz would not veto the measures. 

Kate Lynn Snyder is a lobbyist for Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union. Speaking in opposition to the changes, she reminded lawmakers that it is still legal for teachers to remove students from classrooms. Schools can send children home for less than a day, impose an in-school suspension or send a child to a sensory break room. When there is an ongoing, serious safety threat, expulsion is still possible.

“The largest complaint I hear about school safety from my members is that when our teachers call administrators to send someone to their office, no one is answering the phone,” she said. “That might be because of the perception that their hands are tied, or it might be because of the educator shortage, but either way teachers, like students, are not getting the currently allowed supports that they’re asking for.”

The state Department of Education also opposes the changes. At the hearing, lobbyist Adosh Unni described resources the agency has made available to schools interested in changing their approach to discipline.  

Matt Shaver, a former teacher who is policy director of the advocacy group EdAllies, urged lawmakers not to return to allowing schools to withhold or delay lunch or recess because of a student’s behavior.

“I took a lot of recess away from kids during my decade in the classroom,” he said. “I used this tool when students didn’t finish their homework or worksheets or weren’t focused in class. My line was, if you’re going to be playing during class time, you’ll do class time during your play time. I thought I was pretty clever and delivering consistent logical consequences that would teach the behaviors I wanted to see for my students. In hindsight, I was wrong.

“This wasn’t an effective tool because the same kids missed recess over and over,” he continued. “Instead of keeping a kid inside for a punishment, my time with them would have been much better spent on the playground building that relationship that would have made it more likely for them to respect and listen to me as their teacher.”

​​“During my time in school I noticed that some of the Black girls would get in trouble for dress code even though their peers of a different body shape would not get in trouble for wearing the same thing.”

“From being in school, it always seemed to me that Black girls were always the ones who got disciplined. Not saying White girls never got disciplined, but maybe they were given a little more wiggle room for error unlike the other Black girls.”

These were some of the observations young women shared with the researchers of a new U.S. Government Accountability Office , which found that Black girls in public schools face more and harsher forms of discipline when compared to other girls. While it’s long been known that Black female students are disproportionately punished in school, the GAO report determined that removals from class were happening to Black girls for similar behaviors as white girls and in the same schools. This points to the disparity being more about how Black girls are treated in school than how they act.

“This damning new report affirms what we’ve known all along — that Black girls continue to face a crisis of criminalization in our schools,” U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said at a press conference last month unveiling the findings. “And the report provides powerful new data to push back on the harmful narrative that Black girls are disciplined more because they misbehave more.”

Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, is hoping the GAO report that she commissioned with House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and fellow congresswoman Rosa DeLauro can drive a legislative remedy to end racial disparities in the disciplining of Black girls. She told the that she realizes the a bill she re-introduced in April, stands little chance while Republicans control the House, but that states can take the findings and move on their own to address the inequity. 

While Black girls represented 15% of all girls in public schools, they received almost half of all suspensions and expulsions during the 2017-18 school year, including 45% of out-of-school suspensions, 37% of in-school suspensions and 43% of expulsions. 

Black girls received exclusionary discipline at rates 3 to 5.2 times that of white girls. This pattern held true in every state and most drastically in the District of Columbia, where the out-of-school suspension rate for Black girls was 20.5 times the rate for white girls. These disparities were felt even more harshly by Black girls with disabilities, who were more likely to be removed from school than both Black girls without disabilities and white girls who were also disabled. 

Exclusionary discipline can result in both short- and long-term negative outcomes for students, according to the report, not only disciplinary outcomes but also the preceding behaviors.

While previous GAO work demonstrated racial disparities in K-12 discipline, a dearth in data meant that researchers couldn’t establish whether that inequity remained across similar behaviors. This time, though, researchers were able to use an additional national data set — the School-Wide Information System — which tracks infractions and associated discipline across 5,356 schools in 48 states alongside U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data. 

This filled a “big gap in the research,” according to Jackie Nowicki, the report’s lead researcher and a director on the GAO’s Education, Workforce, and Income Security team. “That was huge for us,” she said, “because — as far as we know — that kind of research has never been done before.”

Nowicki said she hopes people will understand the results are, “not an opinion. It’s not a hypothesis. This is serious, robust, objective, non-partisan analysis from nationwide data.”

The report also included an analysis of 26 empirical studies, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and 31 responses to an anonymous questionnaire circulated to women ages 18-24 this year by the national organization,

Through this work, researchers identified multiple forms of bias that contributed to discipline disparities, including colorism and adultification, a form of racial prejudice in which kids of color are perceived as older, less innocent and more threatening. One study included in their review found that Black girls with the darkest skin tone were twice as likely to be suspended as white girls, which didn’t hold true for Black girls with lighter skin complexions.

Researchers also found that Black girls reported feeling less safe at and connected to their schools than their peers, factors which can impact both attendance and academic performance.

Amid a mental health crisis that is harming young girls in particular, “this is a really important piece of that overarching picture about how girls see themselves, how they experience the world, and what they take with them into their [adult] lives after they’ve left K-12 school settings,” Nowicki said.

To combat these issues, Pressley’s legislation would provide grants to states and schools that commit to banning discriminatory discipline practices, work to strengthen the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and establish a federal task force to study and eliminate these practices. 

Rohini Singh, director of the School Justice Project at Advocates for Children of New York, said she is optimistic that with increased awareness from reports such as this one, those on the ground, like school deans or administrators, will “check themselves” before doling out consequences.

The report will also be helpful in implementing solutions, she said. Often in New York she hears debates about how to keep schools safe: “What that means for a lot of people is more police in schools, more discipline, more suspensions. It’s becoming clearer through reports like this — and data that we have — that that’s not necessarily the case … oftentimes students can feel less safe because they can be targeted.”

Nowicki shares Pressley’s skepticism that the necessary action will happen at the federal level and her hope that the report can drive reforms locally.

“The kind of change that needs to happen here is going to happen school by school, building by building, individual by individual, by people who realize that this is a systemic issue shown in the data, and that we all can be part of this solution if we choose to be.”

The released by ImpactSTATS, Inc. and The BEE Collective used National Center for Education Statistics data to compare how often students were being excluded from school as a disciplinary measure at predominantly white versus Black Charleston schools in the 2022-23 school year.

To zero in on the treatment of young students, researchers considered only those schools that offered pre-kindergarten programs. Of the 42 schools in the study, 33 encompassed grades pre-K through 5; six went from pre-K to grade 8; two were pre-K to kindergarten and one school taught pre-K to second grade.

Of those schools, the ones with more than a 51% Black student population isolated children from learning settings for disciplinary reasons at a rate of 98.2 removals per 1,000 students, according to the report. This was seven times greater than the 14.1 removals per 1,000 students at majority white early-grade and elementary schools — and more than double the districtwide rate of 42.7 per 1,000 students.

Exclusionary discipline could include in-school or out-of-school suspensions and expulsion. When looking just at out-of-school suspensions in Charleston, the racial disparity by school population soared, according to the study released earlier this summer.

Students in majority Black schools faced out-of-school suspension rates of 78.8 per 1,000 students in the 2022-23 school year compared to 11.9 suspensions per 1,000 students for those in predominantly white schools. 

The districtwide rate was 34.8 suspensions per 1,000 students. 

“This tells us that we have a problem and it’s not children’s behavior — but adult action and adult decisions,” said lead researcher Melodie Baker. 

Charleston public schools served 50,312 students at the end of the last school year: 24,978 were white, 14,291 were Black and 7,916 were Hispanic, according to the district. 

Baker said removing a child from a classroom or isolating them from their teachers and peers robs them of an opportunity to learn self-regulation and is particularly damaging to the youngest learners.

“It makes kids feel like they don’t belong,” she said. “They feel ashamed. They feel confused. It affects their overall development.”

The practice is seen as : and are among the states that have banned or strictly limited such removals in the early grades.

Charleston County School District spokesman Andrew Pruitt last week pushed back against the study, which raises issues of racism and implicit bias, noting its data does not include the ages of the suspended students or the reasons why they were punished. 

“We take any report that raises concerns about unconscious bias negatively impacting our children seriously. However, we are incredibly concerned that a specific claim of that magnitude was made in the absence of an analysis of the appropriate and relevant data,” he said in a statement. 

The district didn’t start breaking down its disciplinary data by grade until recently, according to Pruitt. Though records were limited, he cited a total of 49 preschool suspensions in Charleston public schools in the 2022-23 school year. He did not separate that number by race.

Preschoolers across the U.S. are expelled at rates than K-12 students. South Carolina in preschool suspensions by a large margin in 2017-18 with 438 preschoolers suspended, according to the most recent available federal data. 

Those numbers have grown significantly worse in the Palmetto State and were a critical focus of . The Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children showing 928 South Carolina public preschoolers received in-school and out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24; 66% of those 3- and 4-year-olds were children of color and 77% were boys.

The committee’s data for Charleston County schools, the state’s second-largest district, cites that 25 preschoolers received out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24 and fewer than five received an in-school suspension. Eighteen Black Charleston County public preschoolers received an out–of-school suspension and fewer than five white students did. Twenty-one male preschoolers received an out-of-school suspension that year and fewer than five female preschoolers did. Six preschoolers classified as special education students were among those removed from school for disciplinary reasons.

The Charleston County School District has taken steps to address systemic inequalities in discipline, Pruitt said, including professional development training for all its early education teachers that focuses on how to appropriately respond to student behavior while taking into account young learners’ social-emotional well-being. He said the district continues to work with early childhood education organizations throughout the state to adopt best practices.

The report by ImpactSTATS and The BEE Collective notes citing the role of educator bias in harsh discipline, including perceptions of Black children as being older than they are, less innocent, more aggressive and more deserving of punishment for the same behavior displayed by white students.

New York-based was founded by Baker in 2023 to bring more diversity to the research field and to provide technical support and research assistance to grass-roots groups working with underserved communities of color. 

The BEE — Beloved Early Education and Care — Collective is that partly funded the study and collaborated on the research. It seeks to improve maternal and child health in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, including in addressing racism and implicit bias in early child care. 

Black children across all grade levels and those with disabilities have long faced higher rates of exclusionary disciplines than other student groups. According to analyzing data from the 2020-21 school year, Black boys were nearly two times more likely than white boys to receive an out-of-school suspension or an expulsion.

“It’s mostly boys who are being suspended — mostly for rough-and-tumble play,” Baker said, speaking anecdotally of the Charleston suspensions after interviewing those who worked with or observed district students. “But there’s a lot of research out there that talks about the positives of rough-and-tumble play. Males tend to perceive that very differently.”

Of Charleston County schools’ 3,673 teachers in the 2021-22 school year, roughly 2,402 were white females, 556 were white males, 404 were Black females and 103 were Black males, according to .

Cara Kelly, a researcher who observed classrooms within the Charleston district for seven years, ending in 2019, recalled several instances where kindergarten children were made to sit alone and in silence for 30 minutes or more for minor infractions such as talking to other students, calling out while a teacher was speaking or standing up when they were supposed to sit for long stretches of time. 

“It’s OK to give a child five minutes to calm down — but not to be completely excluded,” she said. 

Kelly, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oklahoma’s Early Childhood Education Institute, told The 74 she believed the punishments were not developmentally appropriate and often targeted Black children. 

The report recommends the district recruit more male teachers in the early grades, increase pay for all early childhood educators, decrease student-to-staff ratios and raise awareness about discipline reform legislation that seeks to prohibit suspensions, expulsions and corporal punishment while promoting more effective means of managing student behavior. 

Researchers acknowledge that the report, funded partly by the American Heart Association Voices for Healthy Kids, should be interpreted cautiously because of the data’s limitations regarding race and age.

The BEE Collective has filed a public records request asking the Charleston district to release the suspension records for children 5 and under for the last five years broken down by age, race, gender and school. Noting that the response to that Freedom of Information request is due Aug. 31, Pruitt said it was “unfortunate” that the groups moved ahead with publishing the report without that information in hand. 

Tawanna R. Jennings, an infant and early childhood mental health consultant for South Carolina’s Partners for Early Attuned Relationships Network, called the study’s findings “pretty astounding,” adding she hopes the results will be shared widely and that Charleston teachers receive better training and greater support.

“There needs to be more resources so that [teachers] can understand these behaviors,” she said. “How do you teach these children and how do you be empathetic with what they may be experiencing?”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ImpactSTATS and to The 74.

A Philadelphia group wants schools to focus more on being places of joy as a way to overhaul the culture in district schools, and it’s relying on parents and community voices for help.

Lift Every Voice, the organization behind this year’s Joy Campaign, is backing the creation of a to bolster access to recess, the arts, counselors, and the district’s program to bolster student mental health known as the Support Team for Educational Partnership. The blueprint would also create a Chief of Joy position in the district; in June, the City Council a resolution in Philly schools. The group says this approach to budgeting and community input is crucial for reducing things like disparities in student discipline.

The district has its own federally funded restorative justice program that focuses on student empowerment and engagement. But Lift Every Voice wants its work to be broader by auditing whether collective punishments like enforced quiet times and limited recess in schools contribute to inequities and an anti-Black environment. Parent surveys conducted by Lift Every Voice from earlier this year show that student mental health and school climate and environments are still major concerns that the district must address, the group says.

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Ultimately, it

“The school system is a closed system that doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re starting to force them to come to grips with our voice that’s not going away,” said Wes Lathrop, Lift Every Voice’s organizing director.

Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who co-sponsored the June resolution, sees the campaign as a way to help schools embrace cultural differences, and as a way to to reduce disparities and biases, including those held by adults.

“We have to find a way to embrace the model and make it part of the normal cultural norms,” Brooks said. “A project we’re taking on has to be embedded. The only way we do that is consistency and sustainability, and oftentimes we haven’t seen that.”

Lathrop sees community involvement in restorative justice as a two-way street, pointing to the importance for all citizens of having students who are well-prepared for the job market and post-graduation life: “Parents can be a real guiding powerful force to really shape the future of the district.”

Susan McLeod, a Philadelphia public schools parent, got involved with Lift Every Voice because of issues her child was facing. She feels crucial decisions are made in the district without any parent involvement, such as announcements of district school closures more than 10 years ago that took her completely off guard. The group has helped her feel empowered on her own and her child’s behalf.

“It’s important for us to lay this foundation for our kids to have a better learning experience as young as elementary school,” McLeod said.

Racial disparities in student discipline represent one particular concern. The district has adopted practices rooted in restorative justice, an approach to discipline that emphasizes conflict mediation between students and other forms of resolving conflicts as alternatives to student suspensions and expulsions.

Overall suspensions have declined in Philadelphia public schools recently: The percentage of students with at least one suspension in a school year has dropped from about 11.5% in 2013 to about 5.7% in 2023. But over that same period, Black and Hispanic students were suspended at higher rates relative to their total enrollment than white students, according to data from the .

The district’s Relationships First initiative started in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include more schools. It’s focused on developing students as leaders in restorative justice efforts and trains teachers to guide students in that work.

“Folks have the opportunity to engage in restorative conversations … and to be able to provide alternatives to suspension across the entire district,” said Luis Rosario, assistant director of school climate and culture for the district. “I do think it’s a testament to the leadership of our school district to move in that direction.”

These efforts dovetail with another led by Healing Futures. Healing Futures is operated by the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project that receives case referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in place of a legal charge. In programs that last a minimum of eight weeks with mentor participation, students attend weekly discussions about their values and community and how to take accountability for the harm created by the student’s actions.

“We want to make sure that as many different perspectives of a situation can come into the room and offer their insight and support collectively,” said Hanae Mason, who is shadowing Healing Futures as part of her work as a to improve systems serving youth.

Building students’ agency and perspective can take different forms and lead to various outcomes.

Mary Libby, former principal at what’s now the Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy, worked to introduce restorative justice practices and noticed students taking on more responsibility after formal restorative sessions. Students led the push when in honor of singer and local civil rights activist Marian Anderson, Libby said.

“In order for us to collectively move forward in a restorative and inclusive way, we need to trust and let the kids lead that process,” Libby said.

Malachi Grogan, an incoming seventh grader at Anderson who helped lead efforts to change the school’s name, is proud of the trust he has created with his peers where he can now lead restorative or cooling conversations.

“If we talk about it then we can get to know how people are feeling,” Grogan said. “And if we don’t know how people are feeling, how are we supposed to help them?”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Healing Futures is not led by the district attorney’s office, but is part of the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project. It receives case referrals from the district attorney’s office but is not part of city government.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Short of banning school officials from paddling or hitting kids, the proposal from Palm Beach Democrat Rep. Katherine Waldron would require schools that use corporal punishment to get permission to do so from parents at the beginning of the school year.

Principals would be barred from hitting kids whose parents don’t opt in or fill out a permission slip. The bill gained unanimous approval in its first committee stop. The identical Senate version has not been heard.

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“Many people probably did think that it was already banned. I didn’t know it was a district-by-district thing. … I can tell you that if it were me and my kid came home and told me that they mouthed off to the teacher and as a result of mouthing off to the teacher some principal took a piece of wood to them; Me and that principal would have issues,” said Democratic Rep. Christopher Benjamin of Miami-Dade County. “This bill doesn’t go far enough. It should be outright banned.”

The measure also bans using physical force on students with students with disabilities and homeless students. Charter schools, which are public schools in Florida, would have to comply with corporal punishment restrictions.

Florida isn’t alone in the use of corporal punishments against students. While the practice is most common in southern states, only 27 states have , according to the latest analysis from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.

Over the past decade, school districts have lessened their use of corporal punishment, but that doesn’t mean it’s uncommon. In the previous school year, 18 districts reported 509 instances in which officials used physical force to discipline students, according to the Florida Department of Education. When and how the students can be hit is largely left up to principals. Only principals, not teachers, would be allowed to hit the kids under the proposal.

Reported instances of corporal punishment are concentrated in northern Florida counties such as Suwannee, Holmes, Columbia and Calhoun.

‘Capricious and arbitrary treatment’

Although the bill garnered bipartisan support, some House Republicans in the Education Quality Subcommittee said they disfavored a restriction against corporal punishment for students with individual education plans, which demonstrate that a student has different needs or could have a disability. Pasco Rep. Brad Yeager said his son had an IEP but that it didn’t affect his behavior. He also asked if Waldron would consider changing the bill so that parents have to indicate they don’t want principals to paddle their kids.

Waldron said the IEP provision protects students with disabilities who may not be able to control their behavior. In the 2020-2021 school year, school officials reported hitting 200 students with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The line of questioning from Marion Republican Rep. Ryan Chamberlin about whether misbehavior had gone up in counties that didn’t use corporal punishment irked fellow Republican Rep. Mike Beltran of Hillsborough and Manatee. Beltran is one of the GOP sponsors of the bill.

“The subtext to some of the questioning was that somehow we were being lenient, or excessively lenient to children, or that there was some problem in society that arose today that we need to preserve, or expand, or continue to use corporal punishment. I haven’t been lenient at all,” Beltran said.

He also said that corporal punishment should be banned completely. The Legislature attempted to do so not too long ago. In 2019, then Sen. Annettee Taddeo sponsored a bill .

He continued: “I could get sentenced by a judge, and they’re still not going to paddle me. Yet some principal and some teacher, basically, can decide to discipline the child. It makes absolutely no sense. It’s completely susceptible to capricious and arbitrary treatment.”

Chamberlin responded that he asked those questions because he was curious about Florida’s use of corporal punishment.

“It’s not about necessarily personal preference. It’s understanding what’s in the best interest of the children and how they can grow and learn,” he said.

Waldron gave credit to a group of University of Florida students who pushed lawmakers to take up the issue.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

The failure of many districts to educate students with disabilities, and particularly Black students, is an issue I have seen play out for 20 years. Despite protections under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, students with disabilities have higher rates of lost instruction than their white counterparts, due largely to being disciplined unfairly compared with other students. A quarter of Black students with disabilities were suspended in 2017-18, compared with 11% of similar white students. The risk of Black middle and high school students with disabilities getting suspended is over 40% and higher than for their non-Black peers. Black students with disabilities are also more likely to be referred to law enforcement than other student groups.

It’s been 69 years since Brown v. Board outlawed school segregation and nearly 60 since additional federal protections were implemented to ensure educational rights for Black children and children with disabilities. Yet, to be a Black child with disabilities in the United States is to face a level of discrimination many would think was a thing of the past.

While the disparities are unjust, behind-the-scenes systemic issues such as a lack of understanding of the needs of the Black and disabled communities, lack of capacity to investigate complaints promptly and bureaucratic negligence in not following investigative policies create obstacles to intervening in ongoing racial discrimination. For example, in Virginia, where I live, the Department of Education has failed to correct ongoing injustices by stalling response times and ignoring deadlines, and failing to inform parents of needed information. The pervasive nature of discrimination against Black students with disabilities in Virginia has been widely known to the state legislature and Department of Education, and yet has remained uncorrected. 

The historical lens of Black children being labeled as disabled or different from the expected relates to slavery, Jim Crow and racist violence, and the false premise that they can’t learn is embedded in the public education system. For meaningful change to happen, the Black community must demand more, file complaints and speak up at school board meetings and to state boards of education.

Federal civil rights enforcement is one tool to protect the rights of Black children with disabilities. The U.S. Department of Education has agreed to open a systemic complaint against the Virginia Department of Education, and on June 6, the Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation into a of discrimination filed by my organization, Advocating 4 Kids. The complaint represents students and families from across the state. This investigation is important, as it can potentially rectify some of the civil rights abuses against students with disabilities.

All too often, states and districts are not held accountable for denying students with disabilities the education they deserve. If state superintendents know they will not be held accountable by the U.S. Department of Education, a permissive culture continues down to the lowest levels, giving districts and educators leave to openly abuse students and ignore their civil rights.

What few may realize, though, is that even a federal investigation is not enough. The Office for Civil Rights lacks the capacity to rigorously enforce civil rights protections. Systemic change is required: new leadership at state and district levels, better enforcement procedures, transparency and oversight, and in the case of Virginia, a call for the General Assembly to ensure funds are allocated to provide historically underrepresented groups and communities with resources and training specific to their needs.

The only way trust can be rebuilt in civil rights protections is for governors, elected officials, state departments of education, and local and state board members to hold those violating the rights of students accountable for their actions. This must include training on wrongdoing, development of corrective plans with oversight, data collection on the types of violations that are being reported and withholding of funding. There needs to be a robust push for community engagement within Black and minority communities so parents can understand their rights and the rights of their children, and what to do when they believe a violation has occurred. 

Lastly, Black parents, advocates and activists must come together to address the root of the problem: Black voices have been excluded from developing special education policies, structures and regulations.

Public education in the United States was built upon a white supremacist system that still does not value education for Black students, or those with disabilities. As long as these children and their experiences are overlooked, they will continue to be overrepresented in out-of-school suspension and court referrals.

Advocating 4 Kids, Inc is doing our part and is hosting our first , titled “Uplifting Black Families in the Disability Community.”

The national conference will be held virtually Aug. 11 to 13. We aim to provide Black families, advocates and community members with the training to exercise their rights and seek better special education outcomes. Few parents and students understand these rights and how to begin the complaint process when they are violated, and fear of retaliation or feelings of futility can discourage many from trying. However, by coming together and sharing resources, parents can learn to prevent bias and racist disciplinary exclusion practices and policies. 

The Black and disabled communities must stand in their power and demand that our voices are heard.

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and a member of The 74’s Board of Directors.

Students of color continue to be disproportionately punished when compared to their white counterparts, according to a new report on school suspensions released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island.

The report, titled “Still Oversuspended and Underserved: Continuing Disparities in Suspension Rates in Rhode Island,” even as the overall number of school suspensions dropped significantly over the past two decades.

“In order to truly provide an equitable, uplifting, and educationally enriching school environment for all students in our state, we must make sure that no students are being inappropriately removed and excluded from the classroom,” ACLU Rhode Island Policy Associate Hannah Stern said in a press release.

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Stern added that schools should not punish students for “normal adolescent misbehavior” but ensure students have appropriate social and emotional support in schools.

In 2016, the General Assembly passed a law making suspensions as a last resort for those students whose misbehavior was disruptive to the learning experience of other students and could not be resolved through counseling and other interventions.

Despite progress in reducing the number of suspensions, the authors found that the proportion of Black and Latino students who are suspended remained the same.

The report looked at suspension data for the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic — 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019. Data showed Black and multi-racial students were suspended at a rate 1.5 times higher than their numbers in the general population would suggest. For Latinos, the rate was 1.3 times higher.

experienced the highest rates of suspension at 2.5 times greater than expected. That puts them on par with students with disabilities who face a 2.5 times greater suspension rate than their counterparts.

Far fewer white students receive out of school suspensions. The report showed the rate for white students to be 0.71%.

The more students are removed from classrooms and punished, the more likely their academics are to suffer and to drop-out, increasing vulnerability to the criminal justice system as adults, the report said.

The Rhode Island Department of Education called the report findings “insightful” and that it will use the data to “address inequities” in education.

“For students to succeed, it is crucial that they are in school every day engaged and learning,” Department Spokesman Victor Morente said in an email.

“RIDE is committed to working with stakeholders including students, families, educators, and members of the General Assembly to address concerns and ensure that schools are inclusive environments conducive for learning.”

Narragansett schools show highest disparity

Narragansett schools had the highest ratio of Black student suspensions. Blacks accounted for 0.8% of the student population attending Narragansett schools but represented 14% of suspensions in the district during the 2018-2019, according to data in the report. That made Black students 18 times more likely to be suspended.

The ACLU found that rates of out-of-school suspensions for behaviors classified as “insubordination” or “disrespect” consistently hovered around an alarming 40% of all suspensions.

“Minor offenses which are more reliant on the interpretation and tolerance level of teachers or administrators,” the report reads, “ should be addressed by behavioral counseling and restorative justice measures rather than through removal from the school for a period of time.”

In addition, the 2018-2019 school year saw 1,400 suspensions of students in kindergarten through grade five, of which 30% were for such subjective offenses.

In its conclusion, the report called for legislative action to alleviate the situation. Both chambers of the General Assembly are considering bills that implement its recommendations.

and its sister bill in the Senate, , would limit out-of-school suspensions to students grade six and above, who have not responded to other interventions — including restorative justice practices — and are deemed a risk to the school community. The bills would require consultation with a mental health professional when considering the suspension of a student in lower grades. In addition, districts would be required to submit a yearly report analyzing data and the administration of suspensions.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

Shortly after moving to Madison, Jamie Bardwell learned that the Madison County School District requires parents to opt out in writing from corporal punishment being used on their children, a fact she discovered from other students talking about it in her son’s class.

“A kid got paddled, came back and told my son, and my son was terrified,” she said. “I explained to him that that would never happen to him, we’ve written this letter, but it’s really scary for kids to have people in their classroom come back with these stories. Even if your kid isn’t the one who is subjected to corporal punishment, they’re still being impacted by it.”

The Madison County School District told Mississippi Today that corporal punishment is an option in the district, and that parents are always consulted before it is administered.

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The U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights tracks corporal punishment data in public schools nationally, which is generally defined as the use of physical force to discipline students. Often called paddling, the term stems from using a wooden paddle to hit a student on the butt.

Federal data shows that over the last decade, Mississippi had more corporal punishment incidents than any other state for every year data was collected.  In the 2017-18 school year, the most recent year for which there is federal data, nearly 30% of all incidents occurred in Mississippi. In the same year, 22 states reported at least one incident of corporal punishment and 10 reported over 1,000 instances.

The Mississippi Department of Education has more recent data, also for public schools. Instances of corporal punishment fell by over 23,000 from the 2016-17 school year to the 2021-22 school year. School leaders attributed this to a combined influence of the pandemic and a which banned the use of corporal punishment on a student with a special education classification.

Some districts began the work of rethinking discipline models before the 2019 law passed.

William Murphy, director of student affairs for the Sunflower County Consolidated School District, said the district’s process of veering away from corporal punishment started in 2016 with restorative justice trainings, a practice that seeks to repair harm caused rather than focus on punishment. When the 2019 law passed, Murphy said multiple administrators told him they rarely utilized it anyway “just because of the lack of effect that it was having.”

He acknowledged that the decline, from 400 incidents in 2016 to 22 in 2022, was impacted by the pandemic and students not being physically in school. However, he said he doesn’t expect to see a return because of the emphasis the pandemic put on social-emotional learning.

“The pandemic allowed us to see into some children’s homes, to see some things that we might have not been privy to before,” Murphy said.

“When you’re having to do more home visits or get closer acclimated to students at home, you learn some things that I think will make you less likely to use corporal punishment,” he continued. “When you learn that a child might have been abused or that a home situation is particularly traumatic, I just think there’s a push to do more counseling, more talking.”

In the Scott County School District, Assistant Superintendent Chad Harrison said the district’s decline in corporal punishment was strongly linked to the 2019 law going into effect. Concerned that a teacher would mistakenly administer corporal punishment to a special education student, the district changed its policy so that it can only be used by administrators or administrative assistants. The district went from nearly 1,800 incidents in 2016 to 532 in 2022.

Harrison also said that the district has focused more energy on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, a framework which seeks to reward students for positive behavior rather than penalize them for negative.

Valeria Wilson, the behavior specialist for the district, explained the shift includes both creating a culture of rewards for all students and developing individualized plans for students who are struggling with behavior problems.

At every school, teachers, cafeteria workers, janitors, and front desk employees all have “bucks” that they can give students to reward behaviors like being respectful or paying attention. Students use the bucks to buy snacks or gain entry to celebrations throughout the year.

When students are put on a behavior plan, Wilson works with the student and a committee to develop daily goals and rewards if the student meets them. As a part of the plan, an adult checks in with the student daily to discuss their behavior and provide instant feedback.

“It’s just simply making them aware of their actions,” Wilson said.

Wilson also said that students are involved in the process of selecting their rewards in order to better motivate them.

“You have to find out what the interests of that kid are, and you can only do that by building relationships with them, and then you build your plan around that student,” she said.

Despite the shifts toward other discipline models that some districts are making, advocates are concerned that corporal punishment numbers will tick back up.

Ellen Reddy, executive director of the Nollie Jenkins Family Center in Holmes County, said she believes the pandemic accounts for some of the decline, but is also concerned districts are not being monitored properly.

The Nollie Jenkins Family Center highlighting significant disparities in corporal punishment reporting data between the Mississippi Department of Education and the federal government. Jean Cook, communications director for the Mississippi Department of Education, said MDE could not explain these differences, but that districts are not required to respond to any data quality questions from the federal government. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education did not respond to questions regarding their validation process.

When asked how MDE verifies its own data, Cook said districts are required by state law to report accurate information to the state’s data management system and, in doing so, verify their monthly data reports before submitting them to the department. The department does not independently verify this data after it is received unless a complaint is filed.

When talking about the decline of this practice in Mississippi, Reddy and her associates expressed concern about the demographic profile of the students who are still receiving corporal punishment, as national research has shown corporal punishment .

“Any student that experiences it is one student too many, so who’s still left in that category, what do they look like, and why are they still experiencing it?” asked Chanya Anderson, a data analysis consultant working with the Nollie Jenkins Family Center. “Because if you’re talking about such a drastic decline, what is it about those students that you still feel the need to use corporal punishment if your model has now shifted to something else?”

MDE data shows that for the 2021-22 school year, nearly 60% of corporal punishment instances were administered to Black students, while 35% happened to white students. For the same school year, 47% of K-12 students were Black and 43% were white.

Anderson also said that laws temporarily put a damper on certain practices, which could explain the decline in corporal punishment incidents.

“When you enact any law, even if laws don’t affect all populations … that’s still going to bring attention to the plight of corporal punishment generally,” Anderson said. “In light of laws, you will often see institutions pull back momentarily, and then as people forget about it and move on, they’ll start to increase their usage of it again once the spotlight has moved off the topic.”

This legislative session, Rep. Carl Mickens, D-Brooksville, introduced to ban corporal punishment but it died, as have his previous efforts for the last five years. Mickens said he doesn’t think the practice “will cause a child to learn, I think it might cause them not to want to learn.” Though he disagrees with the practice, he said ultimately only legislative leadership has the power to decide if a bill progresses.

Rep. Richard Bennett, R-Long Beach, chair of the House Education Committee, said he has not taken up the bills to ban it because he believes corporal punishment is a local issue. He said he has not looked at research on how it impacts children.

Studies have shown that corporal punishment can lead , , and . Morgan Craven, federal policy director for the Intercultural Development Research Association, said it’s telling that so many groups have lined up in opposition, including psychiatrists, pediatricians, lawyers, public health officials, school counselors and educators.

“Not only is it ineffective, but it can actually make issues worse,” Craven said. “Whatever it is that is leading to a particular behavior, it is not solved by hitting a kid.”

Francine Jefferson, who was a board member of the former Holmes County School District, advocated to end corporal punishment when she was on the board from 2010-2018. While she did not achieve a complete ban, the board did change policies to restrict the practice, including allowing parents to opt out.

“I grew up in that environment where teachers are allowed to paddle the kids. I mean, hell, the bus drivers could paddle you, everybody could paddle you,” Jefferson, who also grew up in the district, said. “I grew up with that experience, and it wasn’t a pleasant one … That’s why I pushed so much for it because I never forgot that experience.”

The district later entirely in 2018 after consolidation, but Jefferson said she is still concerned about it happening in Holmes County and other parts of the state.

“How many pounds of pressure do you put on a child’s bottom?” she said. “What’s the right amount? Nobody knows. If you can’t tell me that, then I don’t think you need to do it because you can’t take it back.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The revelations came from the latest release of the , an ongoing data collection effort led by the National Center for Education Statistics. And while the results don’t include data on the number or rate of behavioral problems observed by school staff, they illustrate the methods that educators are embracing to address those problems and their sense of their own effectiveness. 

Especially during a period when many teachers say they are dealing with more violence and disorder among their pupils than in the pre-COVID era — of a Virginia teacher by her six-year-old student stands out as the latest and most extreme example — the findings will likely influence discussions on school discipline at local, state, and federal levels. 

Thurston Domina, a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina, said that he believed that behavioral struggles have “become more acute in the last few years” both as kids have returned to full-time, in-person instruction and as schools have come to grapple with the effects of controversial disciplinary strategies like student suspensions.

“These data suggest two things: First, that schools are facing substantial behavioral challenges, and second, that they don’t feel confident about the strategies they have to address them,” Domina wrote in an email.

The School Pulse Panel solicits survey responses from school officials (primarily principals) around the country, periodically circulating findings to paint a picture of COVID’s impact on K–12 schools. Thursday’s update presented responses gathered from over 1,000 public schools last November, each relating to school safety, attitudes toward security personnel, and the post-COVID classroom environment. 

Those school responses are of particular interest in that they can be directly compared with answers to similar questions from another authoritative NCES report from before the pandemic: the , which also quizzed school leaders on the disciplinary climate of their institutions and the strategies they employed to improve it. 

Notably, 50 percent or more of all respondents to the panel survey said that they were limited in either major or minor ways by a wide array of hindrances. Nearly three-quarters of participants said they were constrained by a lack of “alternative placements or programs” for disruptive students, while majorities said the same of inadequate funding (61 percent), lack of parental support (60 percent), insufficient teacher training in classroom management (60 percent), and likelihood of complaints from parents (50 percent).

Less numerous, but perhaps more disturbing, were the minorities who said they were held back by lack of support from teachers themselves (40 percent), or by teachers’ own fears of retaliation from students (32 percent). 

In most cases, these factors were cited significantly more than they were in the report from five years ago. For example, while just 6 percent and 33 percent of 2017–18 respondents said that they were limited (in either a major or minor way) by lack of teacher training in classroom management, 12 percent and 48 percent said the same thing last November. 

The apparent desire for increased training stands out particularly given that it was one of the only behavioral and safety strategies listed in the survey that is not offered more frequently by schools than it was five years ago. By contrast, significantly higher percentages of schools now report engaging in “positive behavioral intervention strategies” (93 percent), crisis intervention (84 percent), recognizing self-harm or suicidal tendencies (84 percent), and recognizing bullying (84 percent). 

In a development that reflects the national and local efforts to reduce the use of what some detractors call “exclusionary” disciplinary policies, a significantly lower percentage of schools reported using out-of-school suspensions than did in 2017–18 (69 percent versus 74 percent). The widespread move to curtail the practice has come as federal authorities, including Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, have explicitly urged schools to keep kids in class as much as possible.

Matthew Steinberg, a professor of education at George Mason University who has conducted on the effects of school discipline reforms, noted that Thursday’s release didn’t clearly show that behavioral conditions were deteriorating inside American schools. Still, he added, the documented decrease in exclusionary discipline and the lack of new guidance suggests that schools aren’t “providing the necessary supports for teachers and educators to address student behavioral issues in the classroom.”

“The question is whether or not student behavior and misconduct have gotten worse in the wake of COVID, independent of whether suspension is used as a disciplinary consequence,” Steinberg said. A reduction in suspensions might result in the presence of more students exhibiting COVID-related behavioral problems, he added — which might, in turn, “adversely affect the environment within classrooms, with potentially important implications for student learning.” 

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Latino students accounted for 13% of suspensions while making up 28% of the student population. White students accounted for 3% of suspensions while comprising 10% of students. Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander students each accounted for 1% or fewer of suspensions.

District schools have issued about 10,500 suspensions during the 2021-22 school year, according to monthly reports submitted to the board of school directors.

Fighting, disorderly conduct and “chronic disruption or violation of school rules” have accounted for 64% of the nearly 8,900 total suspensions through Jan. 31, omitting September’s data, which did not break down reasons for suspensions. The same three reasons accounted for about 65% of the 7,100-plus suspensions of Black students during the same timeframe, omitting September.

Black students received about 82% of the roughly 1,500 reported suspensions for “chronic disruption or violation of school rules.”

Earl Arms, an MPS spokesman, said: “Overall our suspensions have gone down across the board for all behaviors and racial groups. As a total of all suspensions, it continues that 80% of all suspensions are written for Black students. That disproportionality can vary by school and behavior over that time period.”

Following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights that found that the district had disproportionately suspended or expelled Black students over two school years, MPS has submitted annual reports on its disciplinary data to the office.

The district also began reporting monthly suspension data to the board of school directors following a resolution in .

The federal investigation examined data from the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years and that Black students, who made up about 55% of the student population, accounted for about 80% of suspension and expulsions.

Those disparities persisted this year even as total suspensions dipped in January during the district’s pandemic pivot to virtual learning.

All MPS schools operated virtually from Jan. 4 through Jan. 14. Total suspensions in January, as well as the number of suspensions of Black students, were roughly half of the average of each of three months, from September through December.

Virtual learning is more accommodating of behaviors that are otherwise threatening to staff or other students, Arms said. Those behaviors can be dealt with in other ways. Therefore, he said, they “do not result in suspensions at the rate as behaviors do while all students are learning in person.”

The district report also highlighted alternatives to suspension, including “administrative counsel.”

Black students comprised about 81% of more than 7,000 students referred to administrative counsel so far this year.

Historical context

The Milwaukee school board required MPS to report monthly on discipline in 2020, more than two years after it forged an agreement with the federal Department of Education to address racial disproportions in discipline — by offering alternatives to suspension, holding informational sessions for parents and community members and establishing student committees to offer input on policies.

Some schools have successfully reduced suspensions. At a presentation to the school board’s Parent and Community Engagement Committee in January, the district highlighted efforts at Audubon Middle and High School, also known as Audubon Technology and Communication Center.

The school formed a student committee to help staff craft disciplinary policy.

The committee prompted changes to the school’s cell phone policy, which reduced suspension referrals by nearly 30%, Audubon principal Leon Groce told the school board.

Through last December, the majority-Latino school tallied 309 total suspensions, compared to 962 during the 2017-2018 school year through December. Groce said students drove that change.

“When we invite (student voices) to the table, it does make a difference,” Groce said. “We are proud to say that we are making strides in the right direction.”

MPS said that all 30 middle and high schools have a student discipline committee that meets monthly.

A version of this story was originally published by The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism () collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The data map is an extension from a report released by the U of M’s Poverty Solutions initiative that analyzed data from the 2017-18 school year. An estimated one in 10 Michigan students will experience homelessness by the time they leave their K-12 education, according to the report.����

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“The main takeaway really is that there is a lot of room for improvement and more investigation and research needs to be done, not only into the areas where the rates are really high, but into the areas of where the rates are low, to find out what is happening,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, a senior research associate at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.��

The map that some districts had rates below 5%, while others had a rate of over 40%.��

Only 50 out of 537 non-charter public school districts made up one-third of all students who were suspended or expelled in the 2017-18 school year. Those 50 school districts only served about 13% of students in Michigan. In 48 school districts, over 25% of students who had experienced homelessness were suspended or expelled.��

The 10 school districts where discipline rates for students who had experienced homelessness were the highest included: Benton Harbor Area Schools at 41.1%, Atlanta Community Schools at 40.7%, Flint City School District at 40.5%, Kelloggsville Public Schools at 38.8%, Beecher Community School District at 38.7%, Alba Public Schools at 38.1%, Hamtramck Public Schools at 37.9%, Eastpointe Community Schools at 37.2%, Westwood Community Schools at 36.2%, and Kalamazoo Public School District at 34.9%.��

None of these school districts responded to a request for comment.��

There were 60 school districts that had no suspensions or expulsions reported in statewide data as a result of either zero suspensions or expulsions or their failure to report using these discipline practices.��

Erb-Downward also highlighted the impacts of housing instability on students, saying many people do not accurately grasp the “impact that housing instability has on children from an educational perspective, or from a health perspective.”��

“Reality is we have a lot of kids in the United States who are experiencing housing instability and homelessness and this type of instability really has an educational impact,” Erb-Downward said. “And it has a health impact that [and] has a mental health impact. If we don’t recognize that as a society, we’re not going to be able to provide the support that kids really need to succeed.”

A study by the found that, generally, suspensions do not disincentivize misbehavior in the future and that more severe school discipline translates into worse academic performance. Another 2018 found that children, 12 years after a suspension, were less likely to go on to earn college degrees and were more likely to be arrested than students who never faced suspensions.��

Peri Stone-Palmquist, executive director of the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, said “it’s important for school districts to really take a close look, not to be defensive, but just to be curious about the data” from the U of M.

“We know that behavior is communication,” Stone-Palmquist said. “And we know that homelessness is experienced as a traumatic event for young people. So it makes sense that you might see an increase in behavior, both during homelessness and an after. I think what’s unfortunate and sad is that we’re not thinking about other ways to handle that behavior in schools.”

A package of bills in the Michigan Legislature last yeartakes aim at reforming the state’s disciplinary systems, with the specific intention of mitigating the effects of zero-tolerance policies that were scrapped in 2016 after subjecting students to expulsions or suspensions after just one act of misconduct.����

The package of bills, Senate Bills , and , were introduced by state Sens. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor), Erika Geiss (D-Taylor) and Adam Hollier (D-Detroit).��

The bills, which haven’t moved from the Senate Education and Career Readiness Committee, would establish guidelines for schools to release reports regarding how many days a student was suspended for; their race, ethnicity and gender; and their current economic and living situation. The bills also seek to establish due process for students facing disciplinary action as well as adding a living situation factor to the “seven factors” of whether a student should face disciplinary action.��

Irwin told the Advance the U of M report “shines a light on how much of a problem” school disciplinary action is for students who have experienced homelessness.��

“When folks are struggling to fit in, when folks are struggling to connect those positive elements of the community, it’s extra important that the community reach out and try to help them connect, because that’s healthy behavior,” Irwin said. “That’s how we get a healthy community.”

Erb-Downward said the interactive data map should also further empower state and local leaders to figure out better methods on “how to help kids navigate strong feelings and emotions” and to “create a school environment that’s safe” for all students.��

“When we’re starting to suspend and expel one in 10 children who have ever experienced homelessness in their life up to that point, we’re not helping those kids who’ve experienced trauma and have some real challenges,” Erb-Downward said. “They need support.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

Lhamon, who faced steep opposition from Republicans, will lead the Education Department office in charge of enforcing federal civil rights laws in schools, including rules that prohibit discrimination based on race and sex. She secured the post after a combative confirmation hearing in July, followed by a partisan 11-11 vote a month later in which members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee deadlocked on her nomination. Lawmakers voted earlier this month to discharge her nomination from committee and bring it before the full Senate.��

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Harris’s vote, which broke a 50-50 tie, followed an effort by Republican lawmakers to block her return to a position she held from 2013 to 2017. She was unanimously confirmed in 2013, but became a lightning rod in several key education debates, including one that looked to hold K-12 schools and universities more accountable for sexual misconduct on campus.��

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that Lhamon’s confirmation will help ensure that schools are “fairer and more just.”

“She will lead the Department’s vital efforts to ensure our schools and college campuses are free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex and disability and to protect all students’ rights in education,” Cardona said in a media release. “Catherine is one of the strongest civil rights leaders in America and has a robust record of fighting for communities that are historically and presently underserved.”��

In 2011, before Lhamon became assistant secretary, the Obama administration released a that instructed educators to investigate sexual misconduct allegations “regardless of where the conduct occurred,” and to use a less-strict “preponderance of the evidence” standard when determining guilt. Eight months into her tenure under former President Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose confirmation was secured by a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, rescinded the guidance and replaced it with new Title IX regulations in 2020. The Biden administration the Obama-era guidance.

Civil rights groups have praised Lhamon as a champion for student equity, but her conservative critics have accused her of being an overzealous bureaucrat who went beyond her legal authority during her previous stint on the job.��

In 2014, the civil rights office to warn school districts that discipline policies could constitute “unlawful discrimination” if they didn’t mention race but had a “disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.” In June, the to revisit how the Education Department can ensure racial equity in school discipline.��

While Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, Lhamon will be taking up her job at a time when battles over race and gender in schools have become even more divisive, as seen in several states recently moving to bar transgender students from playing sports.��

In fact, . In addition to making it more likely that students will face exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion, students are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, with researchers identifying a marked spike in missed school days among youth with disabilities. 

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The results, researchers note, suggest that school-based police could hinder students’ academic outcomes, increase their long-term involvement with the criminal justice system and appear to “seriously exacerbate existing opportunity gaps in education.” The effects of school police on discipline and arrests were “consistently over two times larger for Black students” than their white classmates, the study found. 

“There might be these benefits in terms of reduced violence, but there are also these really large costs, and costs that unequally affect students,” said report co-author Lucy Sorensen, an assistant public administration and policy professor at the University of Albany, SUNY.

“At the end of the day, I have a hard time, as an education researcher, thinking this is what we should invest money in,” Sorensen added. 

The report, a working paper released by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University that has not yet been peer reviewed, is the first school-level examination of campus officers across every public school in the U.S. It is also one of the first pieces of in-depth research on the effects of school police to follow a nationwide movement to remove cops from schools that was prompted by the death of George Floyd and argued their presence was especially harmful to students of color.

School security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland, maintained that campus police can be a positive force so long as they’re including a clearly defined selection process for officers who receive specialized training. 

“If you have a properly designed and implemented, supervised and evaluated [school resource officer] program, there are many positive things about that,” he said. “That said, if you have an SRO on your campus, chances are you’re going to see some increase in arrests by the mere fact that the officers are going to identify crimes that school administrators may previously have not recognized and reported.” 

The number of officers stationed in K-12 schools has grown exponentially in the last several decades, largely in response to school shootings, and the federal government has to facilitate that increase. In the 1970s, just 1 percent of schools had police stationed on campus. Today, that figure has jumped to roughly half. 

School shootings remain statistically rare and campuses have grown markedly safer in the last several decades. But the new report throws cold water on a common argument in favor of school policing: Officers failed to prevent school-shootings and other gun-related incidents. In fact, having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” according to the report.

Future research should explore the factors that drive that increase, Sorensen said. Though shootings have long motivated police presence in schools, preventing such tragedies is “not what the job entails on a day-to-day basis,” she said, and instead officers “are getting involved in minor disciplinary matters.”

George Floyd’s murder in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer ignited a heated national debate over the broader role of police in the U.S., and several districts ended their ties with the police or slashed their policing budgets. In Minneapolis, for example, the district terminated its police contract and replaced officers with non-sworn safety agents who lack arrest authority. Several dozen districts nationally made similar decisions as advocates highlighted racial disparities in school-based arrests that fed the school-to-prison pipeline and called on educators to replace cops with counselors and other student support services.

On Wednesday, the City Council in Alexandria, Virginia, its school resource officer program five months after it pulled police from hallways. The reversal followed parent outrage in the wake of . 

The latest research, however, further bolsters a body of evidence on the negative effects of placing police in schools. To reach their findings, researchers analyzed federal education data between 2014 and 2018 and data on law enforcement agencies that applied for federal grants between 2015 and 2017 for school-based policing. In a given year, officers led to a reduction of six non-firearm violent incidents per 100 students, according to the report. They also increased the out-of-school suspension rate by 10.9 students per 100. The increase in student punishments was starkest in middle and high schools where, per 100 students, 17.8 more received out-of-school suspensions, 1.7 more were expelled and 4.8 more were referred to police or arrested. Additionally, results suggest that school police increase chronic absenteeism by 12.2 students for every 100 kids enrolled, and an increase of 13.4 students per 100 among those with disabilities. Across disciplinary outcomes, the results were starker for Black students than their white classmates. 

Overall, the results suggest that stationing police in schools “intensifies the levels of punishment unevenly across different groups of students, and that Black students, male students and students with disabilities generally bear the brunt of this punishment,” according to the report. 

The new report follows a recent study on , which reached similar conclusions. In by the Center for Public Integrity, the nonprofit news outlet found that schools disproportionately referred Black students and those with disabilities to the police at a rate nearly double their share of the overall student population. 

“If you’re going to throw out your SRO program, then you should also throw your administrators out with it because they have been partners in those programs all along,” Trump, the security consultant, said. “It’s not just the police who must be screwing up.”

Ben Fisher, an assistant professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, noted the consistency of  the latest research with the North Carolina study, which found a “trade-off between some marginal decreases in school crime and some pretty serious increases in the exclusion of students through suspensions and arrests.” Fisher said it adds to a growing body of research highlighting that school resource officers have a detrimental effect on youth outcomes, while pointing out that other people could view the evidence through a different lens.

“I don’t think it’s good to exclude students from school or arrest them,” said Fisher, who has researched the efficacy of campus police for years but wasn’t involved in the latest report. “Other folks could read that same research and say, ‘There’s more arrests — good. They ought to be removed from schools if they’re doing bad things.’” 

When interacting with students, most school-based officers seek to avoid arrests, according to by the National Association of School Resource Officers, a trade group. About a third of campus arrests are based on observations from officers, according to the survey, and a similar share began with a referral from school staff. 

Ultimately, policymakers should weigh the decreases in campus violence against the other effects of school policing and decide whether other interventions could be more effective, the researchers concluded. 

“Interventions should not just be judged on a single outcome, but comprehensively on many outcomes,” the report states. “It also suggests that the comprehensive impact of using resources for school police should be compared with the comprehensive impact of using resources in other ways to improve school safety and climate,” including in schools, which researchers described as “a single intervention to both reduce suspensions and improve school climate.” 

As school-based police continue to generate passionate debate and additional research emerges about their efficacy, Sorensen said she expects education leaders to increasingly explore alternatives like investing additional money in social workers and mental health services for students.

“I think we’ll see a lot of different experimentation in the coming years,” she said, “and I hope we can learn from that.”

This piece originally appeared at & .

In late May, when video began circulating of George Floyd trapped under the knee of a police officer, struggling to breathe, it was the latest reminder of America’s failure to address the racism and brutality that pervades U.S. policing. For those who train and educate law enforcement officials, Floyd’s death — along with the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and other Black Americans — was also a moment of reckoning, prompting some of those educators to examine their role in preparing officers for a profession responsible for so much senseless violence.

In Virginia, where community colleges enrolled some 2,200 students last year in programs designed to train law enforcement officials, school system administrators it was time to review their curricula for future officers. Across the country, in California, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the state’s community college system, called for a similar examination of police training. A few college police academies announced their own reviews.

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In Minnesota, where Floyd was killed, the interim director of the state board overseeing police education a “sweeping action plan” for change, while advocates pressed the legislature to pass reforms, including more investment in de-escalation training. Bills introduced in Congress in recent weeks, and the , both called for more training for law enforcement officials.

But any effort to improve police education will have to contend with the reality that America’s system for training officers is a complex patchwork of hundreds of different programs that operate with virtually no standardization and little oversight. At present, police academies, the shorter-term, skills-based programs for officers, a military-style training model whose leaders have often been dismissive of change, say law enforcement experts. There are few mandates to give officers substantive training in anti-bias, conflict resolution and other approaches that some experts say could help mitigate violence. While efforts to ensure that police are educated about de-escalation and racial bias have gained momentum after Floyd’s death, there’s also a growing sense that training cannot reach very far without a more fundamental reimagining of the role of police.

“There is something about policing itself that makes it very difficult and resistant to reform, that makes things like implicit bias training and de-escalation training something of a dead-end,” said Brendan McQuade, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine who favors . “The problems are so entrenched. They say a few bad apples rot the barrel. The policing barrel is so rotten it’s mush, it’s totally toxic, it’s fermented … dump it out and start again.”

Police academies began to an aggressive, military approach to training in the 1960s and 1970s, amid the escalating “war on drugs” and electoral successes of politicians campaigning on “law and order.” While the 1991 beating of Rodney King a shift in some departments toward community policing, which emphasizes positive relationships between officers and citizens, the attacks of 9/11 warrior-style training and prompted police departments to increase their reliance on military equipment.

There is scant data on police education programs, which are operated by a mix of police departments, colleges and other agencies. A 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics , one of the few on police training, found that 48 percent of police academies followed a military model, compared with 18 percent that emphasized academic achievement. A third balanced the two styles.

“The problem is we treat a police academy kind of like we treat a military boot camp,” said Lorenzo Boyd, a former law enforcement official and the director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “We should treat it more like a classroom setting where we’re allowed to ask questions and use critical thinking skills.”

Police recruits in basic training spend a median of 60 hours on firearms instruction and 51 hours on self-defense skills, according to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics . A median of 11 hours is spent on cultural diversity, and eight hours on mediation and conflict resolution. Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that between 2006 and 2013, academies increased the time recruits spent on firearms an average of 8 hours, while time spent on community policing rose by an average of one hour, despite calls for greater focus on this law enforcement approach.

In 2014, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, then-President Obama set up the Task Force on 21st Century Policing to recommend changes to law enforcement. Among its : encourage the state boards that oversee police training to mandate instruction on crisis intervention, implicit bias, cultural responsiveness, “the disease of addiction” and other topics. But Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School who served on the task force, said it’s impossible to know the degree to which those and other recommendations were implemented because of how little data the federal government collects on policing.

John DeCarlo, a former police chief who directs the master’s program in criminal justice at the University of New Haven, said there ought to be a national curriculum for policing, or a national certification and minimum qualifications for police chiefs at the very least. He also said that federal and state governments should incentivize officers to get higher levels of education, and that more non-cops should be teaching future officers.

“Where cops learn to be cops in the United States is sometimes from TV and that’s where we don’t want them learning to be cops. We want them to be educated. We don’t want them to be mirroring the Dirty Harrys of the world,” said DeCarlo. “I want gender scholars and race scholars and criminal justice scholars to be teaching future cops, not TV.”

Some academies have already moved from a “warrior” approach to a more “guardian” approach. In Washington State, under the direction of former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, recruits in “procedural justice,” which fairly resolving disputes and winning public trust.

Last year, Northeastern University partnered with the Cambridge Police Department to open a police academy for recruits from across Massachusetts, based on a philosophy of valuing people and human life. Ruben Galindo, the university’s director of public safety who spent 31 years with the Miami-Dade Police Department, said he and the university police chief, Michael Davis, proposed the idea for the new academy because of the “dysfunctional environment” in existing training programs.

While the Massachusetts academies’ curricula had evolved somewhat to meet , said Galindo, the way they operated had not. Instructors bullied and demeaned new recruits and referred to people on the street as “scumbags,” “junkies” and “punks,” he said. “They almost want to break [recruits] down to build them up,” said Galindo of academy instructors, “but we are not preparing officers to go to Vietnam.” While Northeastern’s basic curriculum is the same as that of other programs, its culture is starkly different, he said.

Camden, New Jersey, also altered its approach to training officers after the city’s police department was disbanded in 2013 and replaced with a county-led force. The Camden police department and the community college-run academy from which it recruits now place greater emphasis on conflict resolution, de-escalation and developing awareness of implicit bias, police officials said. Complaints of excessive force dropped from 65 in 2014 to three last year, according to department data. “The whole atmosphere of the academy has changed dramatically since these changes were put in place,” said Donald Borden, president of Camden County College.

President Obama the city in 2015, citing its progress in police reform. Kevin Lutz, a Camden police captain who formerly supervised the department and college’s training, in Minneapolis last year as part of a task force on police reform convened by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Still, as the news media has looked to Camden as an example of police transformation, many people have that the changes are . For example, members of the local NAACP chapter argue that the police force is whiter and less representative of the city than it was before.

Colleges and accrediting boards that are seeking to re-examine how they instruct and oversee police officers are running up against a lack of detailed standards and data. Glenn DuBois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, said that a panel of experts would be examining current curricula because little is known at the state level about what is being taught. In Virginia, the college system runs degree programs designed for future law enforcement officers but does not operate police academies. DuBois said he didn’t have the authority to shut down a program but that he could “ask some pretty uncomfortable questions.”

Ortiz, the chancellor of California’s community college system, which operates academies and degree programs for future officers, said that colleges need to “take personal responsibility and personal accountability. We cannot sit here as educators and say the problem is somewhere else.” If the college system determines that any police academies are not committed to making needed changes to their approach and curricula, he said, “then we need to sever that relationship.”

Erik Misselt, the interim executive director of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, which accredits the state’s police education programs, said the board had begun an audit before Floyd’s death to examine the programs and how they compare with those in other places. While the board’s ” require that officers learn about racial bias and conflict resolution and how to respond to people with mental illness, there’s no guidance on how those topics are taught or how much time officers spend on them.

“We know there are changes that need to be made,” said Misselt, “and certainly the need for those changes has been nothing but accelerated with recent events.”

Still, Misselt said Floyd’s death was not a training issue per se. Academies and programs do not teach the tactic used by the officer who pinned Floyd to the ground, he said. “You can have the best training in the world but at the end of the day it comes down to morals, it comes down to the culture of an organization, it comes down to what’s tolerated,” Misselt said.

And, in some ways, Minnesota’s system for educating officers is, at least on paper, more progressive than those in many states. Since the late 1970s, it has required that officers have at least a two-year college degree. (Most of the officers in Floyd’s death held college degrees.) Serving in the military also fulfills that requirement.

Part of the problem is that police officers can find ways to secure training outside of what is approved by the state. In 2019, the Minneapolis mayor a warrior-style training course after the officer charged with shooting Philando Castile was found to have attended it. (The training was run by an individual and not credentialed by the board Misselt oversees.) The police union president was that he pledged to find ways to continue making the class available to interested officers.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota and around the country, calls to dismantle the police are growing louder. A majority of the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to disband the police force and create a new system of public safety.

If the role and responsibilities of police narrow, said Misselt, officer training will adapt too.

He noted that some police officers question why their work has ballooned to encompass emergency services like intervening in family disputes and responding to people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. As an officer, he would sometimes respond to 911 calls from parents who wanted help getting their child out of bed and to school. “Why on earth is a police officer being called into that situation?” he said.

“I do push back a little bit when people say it’s entirely a policing or a training issue,” said Misselt. “Society needs to decide whether we are going to put funding and the appropriate resources toward the other social issues that we’re all dealing with. That’s not a place for a police officer. That’s not what a police officer’s job was ever meant to be.”

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When former President Donald Trump secured the White House, a top priority was clear from the onset: Erase the legacy of foe and predecessor Barack Obama.

A newly sidelined Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights during the Obama administration, refused to watch quietly. Just months into Trump’s term, a ProPublica investigation found the new administration and Lhamon, citing “grave concerns,” launched .

“I’m deeply worried about the kinds of discrimination that may be allowed to proliferate if there’s not an effective and meaningful civil rights backstop,” Lhamon, who became chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told The 74 in 2017. The final Commission report of Trump’s civil rights record.

The Trump administration’s sharp turn in direction could be felt at the civil rights office, where Lhamon oversaw sweeping investigations into schools’ student discipline policies and questioned whether they were racially biased. The Trump administration, with just a few strokes of the pen, rolled back much of the Obama administration’s civil rights work in schools, including guidance that sought to combat the nation’s stark and persistent racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. Trump administration efforts to narrow the focus of investigations, she said, were “dangerous.“

Now it’s Lhamon’s turn to undo Trump’s legacy and restore the priorities of an earlier era. But as she’s poised to return to her old job leading the civil rights office, she is likely to face opposition from both the right, which sees her as a radical and has a newfound zeal for attacking race-based policies in education, and activists on the left, who say the Obama administration didn’t do enough to protect students of color from harsh school discipline, especially at the hands of campus police. Meanwhile, a new RAND Corporation that takes a sweeping 20-year look at the Office for Civil Rights concluded that its investigations are an insufficient vehicle to deliver justice to students who have suffered discrimination.

President Joe Biden nominated Lhamon last month to once again be the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights; she awaits a confirmation hearing that will almost certainly also drill down on other contentious issues, such as campus sexual assault and transgender student rights, another culture war cause of the GOP. On the discipline front, earlier this month the Education Department and explore policy options that promote campus safety through “fair and nondiscriminatory school discipline.” Weeks earlier, to the Biden administration, urging them to reinstate and strengthen the Obama-era guidance, citing “a clear connection between exclusionary school discipline and an increased rate of incarceration.”

Policymakers and pundits have clashed for years over the factors behind racial disparities in discipline and how to remedy them, but Lhamon is expected to resume her work on the issue in a new political environment. George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer last year sparked a national debate over the way students of color, Black children in particular, are disproportionately arrested at school compared to their white classmates, leading districts across the country to sever longstanding ties with the police.

In recent months, the way educators teach students about the historic and present realities of racism has risen to the top of the national discourse as “critical race theory” becomes a partisan landmine. The concept argues that racism isn’t merely a product of individual prejudices but, rather, is baked into government policies.

Russell Skiba, a school psychology professor at Indiana University-Bloomington whose research focuses on inequities in school discipline, said that Lhamon’s tenure represented “a major step in providing leadership to the country” about racial disparities in suspensions, But it’s critical, he said, that the Biden administration expands its focus on the role school-based police play in the disparate treatment of Black students.

“It was extremely important for the Obama administration to step up and essentially validate what researchers had known for a long time and what many, many schools and school districts were beginning to find out, that preventive approaches to discipline are simply more effective,” he said. As civil rights officials investigated the source of racial disparities in school discipline, Skiba said the data was “a canary in a coal mine that says there is still a problem there, our system still has the effects of 400 years of racism and oppression somehow wound into it.”

An Education Department spokesman said that Lhamon declined to comment during her confirmation process. In line , the Education Department is “exploring ways that states, schools and communities can help close” racial disparities in school discipline.

“All students deserve access to safe, supportive schools and classrooms,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a press release. “Discrimination and use of exclusionary discipline can negatively impact students’ abilities to learn, grow and thrive.”

“We ended up with lots of files of increasingly stale documents based on investigations that had begun with good intentions and much fanfare but which led nowhere.” —Kenneth Marcus, Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights during the Trump administration

Yet, as the Obama-era Education Department opened expansive civil rights inquiries, cases piled up and investigations took longer to close. Kenneth Marcus, who led the civil rights office during the Trump administration, sought to make investigations more efficient but faced accusations he was overzealous in closing them. During the Obama years, the office was “biting off more than it could chew,” Marcus told The 74, adding that many investigators were frustrated because they lacked “the skills, time or ability in many cases” to carry out the work.

“We ended up with lots of files of increasingly stale documents based on investigations that had begun with good intentions and much fanfare,” he added, “but which led nowhere.”

‘Rethink discipline’

Much of the school discipline debate revolves around a legal concept that one expert called the “cousin” of critical race theory: Disparate impact. The latter occurs when officials deem policies discriminatory if they have a disproportionately negative effect on a racial group but weren’t clearly created with biased intent. The concept was central to the Obama administration’s approach on school discipline.

Under Lhamon’s leadership in 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice that warned districts that their discipline policies could constitute “unlawful discrimination” under federal civil rights law if they didn’t explicitly mention race but had a “disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.” While the document acknowledged that racial disparities in student discipline rates may be “caused by a range of factors,” it said that the “substantial racial disparities” couldn’t be attributed entirely to “more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color.”

Racial disparities in school discipline are starkest for girls. Black girls are more than four times more likely than white females to face suspension, according to . Meanwhile, Black boys are more than twice as likely to be suspended than their white male classmates. Such disparities exist across other sanctions, including expulsions and school-based arrests.

The Obama guidance document marked a turning point for the civil rights office, which had based purely on disparate impact. Meanwhile, the Obama administration instructed federal investigators to broaden the scope of civil rights inquiries, including those related to racial discrimination in school discipline, to assess whether systemic biases were at play.

The efforts were part of a broader effort encouraging school leaders to “rethink discipline” by adopting measures like restorative justice and reducing their reliance on exclusionary practices like suspensions. Though schools across the country embraced alternatives to suspensions and .

But even as districts seek to reduce suspensions and focus on alternatives like restorative justice and positive behavioral interventions and supports, a about whether those efforts are sufficient. The report found “limited evidence” that such programs reduce the disparities — and, in fact, end up protecting white and female students in disciplinary situations more than students of color.

Kashish Bastola, a 17-year-old student from McKinney, Texas, said he wasn’t surprised when the for racial disparities in discipline last year.

“We’ve seen that in our classrooms, we’ve seen that with my closest friends getting dress-coded just because they’re Black,” said Bastola, an ambassador and organizer with the youth-led group Student Voice. “The way we have our dress code set up, it’s so subjective that teachers and administrators can dress-code you and say you violated a rule based on a broad interpretation of the policy. That, to me, seems really dangerous.”

Though more needs to be done, Bastola lauded the Obama administration’s focus on reducing discipline disparities, which helped shift educators “away from the idea that schools have to be punitive.”

An office under stress

In recent years, a significant body of research has found that suspensions, expulsions and school-based arrests , including lowered academic performance and an increased likelihood of dropping out.

These negative effects fall disproportionately on the shoulders of Black students, who are less likely than their white classmates to . During the 2017-18 school year, Black students represented 15 percent of the country’s public school enrollment and 38 percent of those who received at least one out-of-school suspension, according to the most recent federal data.

“There’s a hierarchy to how teachers treat students based on these physical characteristics — boy, girl, light-skinned, dark-skinned, immigrant, all of these kinds of things — and some [students] have been very privy to paying attention to that.” —Leton Hall, middle school science teacher, New York City

The root causes of these disparities are complicated and varied, according to , which focused on the discipline of elementary school students. But nearly half of the discipline gap could be attributed to teachers treating Black and white students differently, suggesting that the “differences in punishment may be due to racial bias” among educators. The report concluded that just 9 percent of the disparities could be explained by differences in behaviors between Black and white children, a frequent talking point among critics of Lhamon’s position on school discipline.

“In elementary school in particular, when misbehavior tends to be relatively common and relatively minor, educators exercise high levels of discretion in determining sanctions for inappropriate behavior,” according to the report. As a result, some educators’ responses are marred by racial stereotypes.

Leton Hall, a middle school science teacher in the Bronx, has experienced such bias first-hand. During the Trump administration, Hall and other members of the Educators for Excellence advocacy group urged officials to keep the Obama guidance in place.

“I have seen biases, even in myself as a Black man, of how I’ve, at some points, targeted males of color” with discipline more harshly than their peers, he said. As he became more experienced, he grew more lenient toward students, he said, “but I’ve seen other teachers not give kids leeway and automatically go toward the top-of-the-rung of what you need to do to discipline a kid when maybe that wasn’t necessary.”

Students in his school are acutely aware that such disparities exist, he said, and on occasion call them out.

“There’s a hierarchy to how teachers treat students based on these physical characteristics — boy, girl, light-skinned, dark-skinned, immigrant, all of these kinds of things — and some of them have been very privy to paying attention to that,” he said. He said it’s critical that teachers recognize and combat their own biases.

Despite more attention on the issue in recent years, federal civil rights complaints related to racial discrimination in school discipline have remained relatively steady, according to a spanning two decades. Between 1999 and 2019, families and advocates filed nearly 5,000 racial discrimination complaints related to school discipline, less than half of which led to federal investigations, according to the report, which was conducted by Rachel Perera, a Ph.D. candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Nearly every case was settled through voluntary agreements between the Education Department and school districts yet, during the Trump administration, Perera found that a higher share of cases were closed after a finding of no violations or insufficient evidence compared with the final stretch of the Obama administration, when discipline disparities became a major focus.

That finding, Perera said, is “consistent with the concerns that civil-rights advocates have been raising” about the Trump administration’s focus on efficiency. But her research also highlighted a major drawback to Obama’s approach: The time officials took to complete cases “significantly increased” during Lhamon’s tenure followed by dramatic declines during the Trump administration. A spokesperson for the Education Department, whose civil rights office and an annual budget of $130 million, declined to comment on the report.

To Perera, the findings suggest that the office was either under-resourced, a problem Lhamon has also cited, or that federal investigators “are not equipped to do this type of work.” Regardless of the reason, the lengthy investigations were a “big drawback in pursuing this as an avenue for recourse,” because a years-long backlog “doesn’t necessarily help the students and families who are needing some relief” when they file complaints.

Despite that need for relief as the disparities persist, Perera concluded that federal civil rights investigations aren’t “an effective way to narrow disparities at scale.” If the civil rights office “is going to be an avenue for all students, they seem to to be under-resourced to do that.”

‘Common ground’ unlikely

To Marcus, the Trump-era civil-rights chief, Lhamon and other Obama officials were overly focused on pushing schools to address “statistical anomalies” that advanced a political agenda. After Trump’s presidency, he returned to his post as the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a group focused on Jewish civil rights.

While it’s important for investigators to identify discriminatory actions that “do not reveal themselves through explicit language and policies,” he said that disparate impact inquiries are “often used to cut corners in order to put pressure on institutions to address statistical anomalies whether there is bias or not.”

“It is unfortunate that the debate has become politically polarized,” Marcus lamented. “It is also unfortunate that, sometimes, corners are cut so that, instead of ferreting out discrimination, government officials instead try to implement what can look too much like numerical quotas.”

Marcus’s comments mirrored those from attorney and Trump administration advisor Hans Bader, of forcing districts to create “racial quotas” to ensure that students of color are disciplined at similar rates to their white classmates. In an email, he criticized , released in 2019 under Lhamon’s leadership, which argued that students of color “do not commit more discipline offenses than their white peers” but receive harsher and longer punishments. As such, the report recommended that the Education Department offer districts guidance on “how to comply with federal nondiscrimination laws” when disciplining students. But the report, Bader said, made “unsupported claims about misbehavior rates being the same,” and failed to provide adequate evidence to back up that central thesis. In fact, highlighted in the report had actually shown the opposite.

In 2018, the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, drew new attention to school violence and school discipline policies, with some Republican lawmakers and pundits claiming that discipline-reduction efforts made schools less safe. A federal school safety commission led by Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos the Obama-era guidance created “a chilling effect” on teachers’ ability to punish students and “likely had a strong, negative impact on school discipline and safety.” DeVos .

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said the Trump administration’s decision to use Parkland as motivation to rescind the guidance was “really a bad decision because it conflated two issues that really were not closely connected,” but he supported the policy shift nonetheless, pointing to poverty and community crime rates as drivers behind the racial disparities in discipline.

Now, if the Education Department prods districts to reduce their discipline rates as schools recover from the pandemic, it could have unintended consequences. Heightened emotional challenges among students, he worried, could prompt a spike in behavioral problems.

“Kids are going to bring some of that with them into schools, some of that trauma, and some kids are going to act out and they’re going to misbehave,” Petrilli said. “Schools need to be ready to have strategies that are going to keep kids safe and keep the classroom orderly.”

The advocates want more

Though the 2014 guidance letter signified a newfound focus on combating racial disparities in school discipline, Obama-era efforts to reduce suspensions preceded both it and Lhamon’s tenure. In 2012, for example, the Education Department , public schools to create alternatives to suspensions and reduce disparities.

Jackie Byers, director of , said the federal agreement was critical because the Oakland district “wasn’t going to address this without a mandate,” but it also came with side effects. Even as suspension rates dropped, she noted that the racial disparities persisted and that educators sometimes gamed the numbers through “off-book suspensions.” Meanwhile, officials’ focus on suspensions and expulsions failed to adequately confront the racial disparities in school-based law enforcement referrals.

After a decade-long battle, the Black Organizing Project won a major victory last year when the Oakland school board , a change that followed Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

“I’ve seen models of where it works exceptionally well, where it even provides a pathway for students to look at themselves as potential law enforcement officers.” —Education Secretary Miguel Cardona when asked whether he supports police in schools

Now, as the Biden administration scrutinizes racial disparities in student suspensions, Byers said that federal officials should take a lesson from Oakland. While she’s heartened by the new administration’s “willingness to at least talk about race,” and its “willingness to address racial disparities in pieces of school discipline,” she accused officials of lacking “the courage to address the issue of policing.”

In response to a question from The 74 in May, “a positive thing.”

“I’ve seen models of where it works exceptionally well, where it even provides a pathway for students to look at themselves as potential law enforcement officers,” Cardona told reporters at the Education Writers Association’s national seminar. But school-based policing, he continued, must be “done well, or else it could turn really negative.”

For Byers, Cardona’s statement suggests a lack of commitment to racial equity in school discipline, noting “a direct correlation between policing and suspensions.”

“If you are willing to address one part of it, but you’re not willing to address this —��and in fact, you’re willing to invest in more policing —��then to me you’re not really serious about shifting the culture. You are interested in maintaining at least the status quo.”

Aiming to upend policies that have disproportionately punished Black students, the Dallas Independent School District is moving to rewrite its school disciplinary code, ending suspensions for low-level infractions like disrupting class or using profanity.

Instead of kicking students out of school, the district plans to use digital tools that have become part of school life during the pandemic to create in-school “Reset Centers” where students can Zoom into classes and access mental health professionals and teletherapy.

If approved by the Dallas school board as expected, the new policies in Texas’ second largest school district would be unprecedented in the state and one of the most progressive discipline reforms in the country, education experts said.

“If it’s done correctly, it could be truly historic,” said Andrew Hairston, Director of Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, a social and economic justice nonprofit.

The move would not only end suspensions for minor behaviors, but also change how more problematic issues like fighting and bullying are handled.

Students involved in more serious infractions such as sexual assault and felony drug possession, will still be expelled as required by state law.

“Suspension was never the right structure, but it is certainly not the right structure coming out of a global pandemic,” said former Dallas ISD school board trustee Miguel Solis, part of a task force charged with overhauling how the district handles disciplinary issues.

After the murder of George Floyd sparked a national reckoning on issues of institutional racism, Solis said, Dallas ISD resolved to take a clear-eyed look at its systems and policies. Board President Justin Henry called on trustees to suggest comprehensive policies addressing the unequal experience and academic outcomes of the district’s Black students.

In the 2019-2020 school year, Black students made up 21.6% of the district’s enrollment, and accounted for 51.6% of out- of-school suspensions. Meanwhile, Black students’ academic outcomes were worse than their peers.

“Every way we sliced the data, African American students are at the bottom, but when we look at special education and discipline, they’re at the top,” said Pam Lear, a member of the task force and Dallas ISD Chief of Staff and Race Equity Officer.

Anticipating a “second pandemic” of mental health challenges as students return to school next academic year, the task force recommended capitalizing on technology schools have used to connect teachers and students for more than a year during COVID-19.

Tools like teletherapy, Google Classroom, and Zoom — though rarely used before the pandemic and considered not as effective as in person counseling or classes — have become ubiquitous. Dallas officials say they can be used to connect struggling kids to help safely rather than banishing them from school.

Mental health issues, academic frustration, social anxiety, and a lack of coping skills often fuel incidents that get students kicked out of class, said Solis. All are likely to increase as students re-learn how to be in a school building with their peers and process the economic hardship, fear, instability, and grief of the past year.

While people used to be skeptical of teletherapy for behavioral and mental health support, that perception is changing with the pandemic, said Stephanie Taylor, clinical director of psychoeducational services for PresenceLearning, which provides online special education services for thousands of schools across the country. “The pandemic forced some changes,” she said.

School districts now have the chance to be proactive as they account for the trauma students have endured and adjustments they will have to make to reacclimate to school, Taylor said. “Those who anticipate the different settings and the different levels of need … are the ones who will have the easier transition.”

Without the right resources, ending out-of-school suspensions ultimately leads to more in-school suspensions, which, Solis said, are harshly punitive and academically damaging.

He remembers, as a middle school teacher, seeing students under in-school suspension wearing orange safety vests so teachers could identify them, he described “like prisoners.” Relegated to a portable building for most of the day, the students would travel in a supervised group for bathroom breaks.

“It was a quasi-criminal justice situation” Solis said. The teacher in charge was not trained in restorative justice, didn’t teach lessons, didn’t do anything except oversee the preteen inmates.

Dallas has been adopting restorative practices for years, but fully ending discretionary suspensions and making proper use of the Reset Centers will require full buy-in from teachers, said Lear. “Everybody who is implementing has to go through the process of ‘why are we doing this?’”

According to a by social and economic justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed, school suspensions have been a common school discipline tool in Texas at least since 1969 when lawmakers wrote disciplinary standards into the state’s education code under the title “Law and Order.” Efforts to end the practice have been opposed by teachers and administrators as well as state lawmakers, Texas Appleseed senior staff attorney and former educator Vicky Sullivan said.

The desire to end exclusionary discipline as much as possible has existed in the district for a long time, Solis said. In 2017 the school board banned suspension for grades Pre-K-2, a local policy that became state law later that year. However, the peak year for suspension was 7th grade, and Solis wanted to see the ban used where it was needed most.

“This issue never went to sleep for me,” Solis said.

Not only was exclusionary discipline heavier in certain grades, but in certain schools as well. It was a district-wide problem, but looking closer, it was possible to see clusters of expulsions, teachers who relied on it more heavily than others.

“We also have to look at implicit bias,” Lear said. “We need to ensure that there is awareness.”

To help with this, the task force is proposing increased training for teachers and the creation of an early warning system to help address trauma and prevent larger problem behaviors. The goal is for teachers to have classroom cultures that minimize stress, for campus staff to intervene with mental health checks before a disciplinary code is even needed.

“The teacher student dynamic is going to be radically different,” Solis said.

Lowering the emotional temperature will serve teachers who have their own trauma and strain from the pandemic, which stretched many of them well past what they’d been trained for in the classroom, on top of fears and losses from the virus.

Implementation will be everything, said Hairston, and initially Dallas ISD should expect to hear from administrators and teachers that “kids are still acting out.” The change in culture won’t happen immediately, he said, but neither did the punitive system Dallas is trying to replace.

“It took (decades) to create this behemoth — it will take more than a few years to address the full magnitude of its past and present harms,” Hairston said, speaking not only of Dallas ISD, but of the national K-12 public school system’s heavy reliance on suspension and expulsion.

Retooling a disciplinary system for more than 150,000 students is no small feat, Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa acknowledged. But it could be one way that the “new normal” created by the pandemic is better than the old. It may take time to get every teacher at every campus on board, but Hinojosa wants to see progress beginning in August, assuming the board greenlights the initiative, which should cost around $4 million, in May or June.

“I’m going to be patient, but also impatient,” Hinojosa said. “We’ve got to get it right.”