School Suspensions Drop, But Still Unequal

While suspensions are down in New Haven public schools, deep racial disparities persist.

Members of the Board of Alders Education Committee caught that message in a two-and-a-half-hour hearing about exclusionary discipline, held this past Wednesday night on City Hall’s second floor.

Westville Alder Darryl Brackeen, Jr., a former social studies teacher at Lincoln-Basset, called the meeting to discuss glaring racial disparities in discipline, after Board of Education data showed black students are four times more likely to be suspended than white students across New Haven’s public schools.

At some schools, the disparities can be even worse. According to federal data from 2015, the most recent year available, students at Edgewood School were 9.6 times more likely to be suspended if they’re black and 6.8 times more likely to be suspended if they’re brown than their white classmates.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the district’s disciplinary practices — a case that’s still pending.

After hearing from school administrators, parents, a pediatrician and even a mayoral candidate, alders decided to continue the discussion, wanting more testimony from families who’ve dealt with suspensions and expulsions first-hand.

They voted to keep the public hearing open, to move the follow-up session to a school where suspensions fall along racial lines.

“We recognize that our city is in a financial crisis and the resources for educators to effectively do their jobs are scarce, but we must ensure that we do not continue to perpetuate a national trend of the school-to-prison pipeline,” Brackeen said. ​“The national trend shows children who are eventually pushed out of schools end up in the criminal justice system. In particular, disenfranchised communities are the ones being funneled through the pipeline.”

Do Restorative Practices Work?

At last week’s hearing, school administrators talked up the district’s overall move toward restorative practices. Under that model, students take responsibility for the harms they’ve caused and talk about how they plan to change their behavior, rather than just taking their lumps and acting out again once they return to class.

With those tools, some schools have all but phased out suspensions, like John S. Martinez Sea & Sky STEM Magnet School and Columbus Family Academy.

Yet districtwide, racial disparities have persisted even as suspensions dropped. Administrators said there’s still much more work to be done to figure out why black males are so often kicked out of class and what can be done about it.

Anne Gregory, an associate professor at Rutgers who studies school discipline, said that it’s good news to see New Haven’s suspension rates are declining overall, even if disparities remain.

“A reduction for all groups can be a good thing, as long as students are getting behavioral supports and are engaged in learning,” she said. ​“Even if the gap isn’t reducing, it’s also important to recognize the positive news.”

Gregory added that districts across the country are dealing with the same issues, finding that it’s difficult to close the gaps in suspensions.

“Districts are really having a hard time matching the racial disparities,” she said. ​“While [suspension and expulsion] rates are going down, basically the interventions seem to be working for all groups. It doesn’t have a special effect for black students, which is what’s needed to reduce the gap.”

Take It From Pittsburgh

That’s not to say that it can’t be done, Gregory added.

A recent randomized control trial in 44 Pittsburgh schools, conducted by the RAND Corporation, found that implementing restorative practices did start to reduce the gap for black students.

Specifically, Pittsburgh used the International Institute for Restorative Practices’s Whole-School Change program, which encourages candid discussion of feelings and experiences, both proactively to build shared values and responsively to address misbehavior.

As a result, Pittsburgh’s black students went from losing 4.37 times as many days to suspensions as white students to 3.59 times as many days. The gap between the percent of black and white students who are suspended at least once also shrunk from 3.78 percent to 2.88 percent.

However, there was one significant downside: Math scores declined significantly for Pittsburgh’s black students in 3rd through 8th grades.

As the authors dug into the data, they found those drops in achievement occurred at predominantly black schools — for both black and white students. That led some to speculate that reforms were tougher to implement in those schools that had relied more on kicking students out.

Gregory added that Oakland and Denver had similar success in reducing racial disparities in discipline through restorative practices.

Better Behaved?

Locally, what has worked so far in reducing exclusionary discipline across the board?

Typhanie Jackson, the district’s director of student services, said that explicit instruction of social-emotional skills through the Comer Developmental Pathways, norm-setting in each building through restorative practices and positive behavior interventions and supports (often shortened to PBIS), training on trauma for teachers, and partnerships with community organizations through Youth Stat have all made a difference.

Yale Alder Hacibey Catalbasoglu pressed school officials on why suspensions were so much lower. Are students behaving better, or are administrators just suspending less? A little bit of both, Jackson said.

Gregory suggested that New Haven could dive into its data for some school-level clues. She said that school-climate surveys could indicate whether students feel that they have supportive, positive relationships; personnel data could show how much of each school’s staff is trained in restorative practices; and disciplinary data could show how often teachers are writing office referrals for students of different races and how often administrators are holding restorative circles.

The sanctions still being handed down in New Haven are most often for ​“major safety issues,” like fighting, said Kermit Carolina, the district’s supervisor for youth, family and community engagement. But he added that the district is still taking steps to cut down even on those suspensions.

“We know that sending a kid out into the street for days, going back to a dysfunctional situation does not change the behavior. Sometimes, we focus on the consequences, but the objective is to change the behavior,” Carolina said. ​“When your child does something wrong at home, you don’t kick them out to the street for 180 days. You find other ways: bring the kid to a doctor, psychologist, social worker, whatever’s needed to change that child’s behavior. We have to take that approach and treat each and every child in the district the same way.”

What’s Next for New Haven?

Up next, Carolina said, the district plans to consider alternatives to expulsion hearings and put a moratorium on out-of-school suspensions for students in early grades. The district will make its policies clearer by revising the student code of conduct to reflect that suspensions and expulsions should no longer be a first go-to response.

The district plans to review quarterly data and develop school-based strategies to improve how it feels inside each building, looking in particular at data for high school freshmen who’ve seen spikes in discipline. And the district plans to find additional resources to hire more support staff.

Finally, in the few plans that will actually address race head on, the district plans to institute more mentorship and employment programs for black boys and train its teachers in behavioral management and implicit biases.

(Click here to download the full presentation.)

After the meeting, Carolina said that the district needs to offer smaller learning environments, but he said he opposed opening a school just for black boys, as Rev. Boise Kimber had proposed in 2017.

”I am not in support of a school in our district for black males only,” he said. ​“The problems discussed during the presentation require a systemic approach that addresses the needs of a specific subgroup of our more behaviorally challenged students, in particular, black boys.”

JoAnne Wilcox, a mother of three who’s been working with students at Riverside Opportunity School for the last year, said that she believes teachers need to be given the time to develop authentic relationships with their students.

“Our teachers are not given the luxury of time. They have so many constraints and their own benchmarks,” she said. ​“Our teachers are so used to having to jump through hoops that they don’t always welcome the responsibility of true relationship-building. How do you have buy-in when everything’s been punitive for you?”

Other speakers, including a pediatrician, said that the solutions need to start with early childhood education, addressing trauma before kids reach elementary school or even earlier.

Board of Education President Darnell Goldson said he was ​“stumped” by what’s driving the racial disparities in discipline. He said an educator pointed out to him that many of the school principals who are black themselves are also the ones who seem to have ​“paid more attention to discipline for young black boys.”

Goldson said figuring out how to close the gap will be a top priority for the school board this year. At the next board meeting. he plans to ask the superintendent to come up with ​“suggested solutions.”

“I think this should be one of the most important issues [for the school board] to tackle this year. We, as board members, deserve to be blamed if we don’t start to focus on this and figure out how to put policies in place in order to reduce this. We don’t have time to wait.”