BY BETTY MÁRQUEZ ROSALES AND MALLIKA SESHADRI

EdSource

California’s most vulnerable students are still suspended at disproportionately high rates despite efforts to address racial disparities in school discipline policies.

According to “In Harm’s Way: The Persistence of Unjust Discipline Experienced by California’s Students,” published Monday by the National Center for Youth Law, youth in the foster care system and those experiencing homelessness in California were more frequently suspended than other groups between 2017-18 and 2023-24.

“The trajectory is one that suggests that for the kids who are suspended the most, very little has really changed, and for American Indian students, it’s gotten a little bit worse,” said Daniel J. Losen, senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law. “These are the historically discriminated against, the kids who have the most needs, and these are the kids that are being persistently pushed out of school and the reforms are no longer having the desired impact.”

When racially disaggregated, state data show even greater disparities. During the 2023-24 school year, for example, the average rate of lost instruction due to out-of-school suspensions was 76.6 days per 100 foster care students. A race breakdown of the foster care youth data shows:

• 73.9 lost days per 100 white students
• 98.2 lost days per 100 American Indian students
• 121.8 lost days per 100 Black students

Similar patterns are seen in the data for students experiencing homelessness and students with disabilities. And out of all students, the report shows that American Indian youth are the only group whose suspension rates are higher in 2023-24 than in 2017-18.

Advocates argue that schools should consider students’ home lives when deciding to suspend them. A student with disabilities may be acting in a way that is related to their disability rather than behavioral, while a student may be acting out because they were moved to a new foster placement and haven’t yet spoken about it. Seeking to understand why a student might be acting a certain way would be among the first steps in reducing suspensions.

The report’s authors, Ramon T. Flores and Daniel J. Losen, detailed a series of recent actions by the federal administration that they state threatens California’s ability to address the disproportionately high suspension rates.

A few of the actions mentioned in the report include an executive order in February attacking programs that support diversity, equity and inclusion; the federal Department of Education’s closure of more than half of the nation’s Offices for Civil Rights, including California’s, and the reconfiguration of social-emotional learning as a form of discrimination.

“The rhetoric coming out of this administration is full of bigotry, full of all kinds of misguided, wrongful interpretations of the law that … in promulgating some of their interpretations, they are violating the law themselves,” said Losen.

Reforms addressing disparities may be leading to new issues

California’s efforts to address high, disparate suspension rates date back several years.

A student’s “willful defiance” of school authorities was previously the category under which most suspensions were placed. What could be deemed “willful defiance” was broad and often subjective; it could include failing to follow directions in class, not having the required school materials, or refusing to spit out gum.

Many criticized the category for justifying disproportionately high rates of suspensions among students of color. The Los Angeles Unified School District was early to end willful defiance suspensions more than a decade ago. But the effects linger for some students who attended the district’s schools before the end of that policy.

Rates have diminished due to changes in state policy that now prohibit schools from suspending students under the California Education Code, which includes willful defiance or disruption.

This policy was initially applicable only to grades K-3, but was expanded in 2020 to include students through eighth grade. During the most recent school year, the policy was expanded once more to cover students in all grades from K-12.

“Education should not be interrupted because of adolescent behavior. We have to use behavior as an opportunity to teach students and redirect students as opposed to pushing them out,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel with the ACLU of Southern California.

For example, he said, if a student is tagging or graffiting surfaces, they might need an artistic outlet to express themselves. Suspending them, on the other hand, wouldn’t directly address their needs.

But the decrease in the suspension rate for disruption or defiance has paralleled slow increases in suspensions under other categories for reasons that are not clear, the report’s authors note.

Since the prohibition of suspending students for “willful defiance,” most suspensions in California schools are now categorized as either “Violent Incident, No Injury” or “Violent Incident, Injury.”

Each of these two categories groups together several codes of conduct. This creates the illusion that every suspension under a category like “Violent Incident, No Injury” is violent in nature, the authors wrote.

Yet, the use of profanity or vulgarity — a non-violent incident, the authors affirm — is included in that category, next to sexual harassment, terrorist threats and aiding or abetting physical injury.

“To still call it a violent incident, even if it just involves profanity or something like that, is misleading to the public,” Losen said.

In grouping several codes of conduct, the California Department of Education “may have contributed to fears expressed by many who resist discipline reform, that reducing the use of suspensions will bring about chaos and will expose students and teachers to much more violent misconduct,” the authors wrote.

There is also no definition of what constitutes profanity or vulgarity.

“That’s where racial and other types of biases can really influence whether the teacher thinks something has to be reported or the student has to be sent to the principal or not,” said Losen, who was a teacher for 10 years before attending law school. “It’s like the word roughhousing. When is it roughhousing, when is it a fight?”

The underlying issue is the lack of transparency. When districts submit their suspension data to the state Department of Education, the reasons provided for each suspension are independently listed. Releasing the state data in a similar format, without lumping together several codes of conduct, would increase the public’s ability to analyze and provide solutions for student suspensions.

Ungrouped data would also provide greater clarity on the racial disparities currently seen in the available data.

Across each of the five school years’ worth of data that are analyzed in the report, over half of all suspensions of Black students were categorized as “Violent Incident, No Injury.”

The disproportionate rate further increases when filtering the data by student groups. Black students in the foster system, for example, are suspended under the “Violent Incident, No Injury” category nearly 15 times more than all white students.

Rates vary widely across districts

Suspension rates vary greatly for districts across the state, the report shows.

The Turlock Unified School District saw a notable drop in student suspensions during the 2023–24 school year, with the overall rate falling to 4.2%, down 2.8% from the previous year. Every student subgroup saw improvement, with the most dramatic reductions among foster youth (with a decline of 15.3%) and homeless students, who reported a 4.8% drop. Foster youth remained the most suspended group at 18.9%, despite the notable decline.

Among the changes that led to lower suspensions was an effort to address the underlying causes of student behavior. This approach is similar to what’s been found to help address the exceedingly high rates of chronic absenteeism seen nationwide since the Covid-19 school closures.

“Punishment does not change behavior,” Whitaker said. “And that’s what school suspension is, when you deprive a student of their education for certain behavior where, literally, that behavior might be evidence that they actually need more education and more behavioral support.”

Suspension rates are part of the state’s chronic absenteeism data. In recent years, a significant effort has been made to understand and address why chronic absenteeism reached a high of 30% in 2021-22, even as schools reopened after pandemic-related closures.

“I’m always disappointed because schools really can control a lot of the absenteeism due to discipline,” said Losen. “One thing that districts can do is reduce their use of suspension and replace it with more supportive approaches.”

The most recent effort was announced last week by state leaders: California has joined a campaign to cut chronic absenteeism by half within five years.

“When we support students, we’re supporting our future, we’re supporting our economy,” said Losen. “When we neglect children, we eventually pay for it because the costs of crime, social services, a depressed economy, and people not earning a living wage — all that gets worse when we fail to educate our students and fail to meet their social-emotional needs, their behavioral needs, as well as academic needs.”