States push for harsher school discipline practices to address student misbehavior
Thalia Gonzalez:
I'm just worried that the data has already been so disturbing.
We know that nonwhite students, and particularly Black children, are disciplined more severely across every category. Just this year, "Scientific American" released a study that half of the 250 kids expelled, expelled from preschool, younger than age 5, were Black boys, right, and that, nationally, preschool children are suspended more than once, and who are those children? Those are Black kids.
And so we just have to have a real clarity that these offenses and the ways in which we're then pushing young people out of their schools lead to a whole set of lifelong consequences.
So it's not just, oh, the disparities exist, the discipline gap exists, and, ultimately, a student decides to not come to school, stop engaging in the classroom. The risk factor of missing 15 days of school for a suspension means you are seven times more likely to drop out, but that that means that you will have less access to jobs, housing, participating in society, voting, and even your life expectancy.
And then, of course, I think there's so much evidence about entry into the juvenile adult systems. Rice University's Education Research Consortium just released data that, for every suspension a student faced, they are 7.5 percent more likely to contact the juvenile justice system.
And who those young people are, are Black students, are Latinx students, and our Native and indigenous students as well. But I also want to bring attention to the fact that it's not just in the context of race or in the context of gender, but students who are also experiencing learning disabilities, right?
Our historical data, our current data shows us, across all categories of disciplines, suspensions, expulsions, referrals to law enforcement, it is students with disabilities who can lose as much as three times as much instructional time from discipline, and that that's most acute for our Black students in particular.
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