Black students and students with special needs are more than twice as likely as the general population to be suspended from school.
That’s the main finding from a widely publicized new report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But it’s not the one generating most of the publicity. Instead, the headlines largely take cues from the report itself, focusing on the discipline disparities in charter schools — which are broadly similar to those in other public schools.
The report notes that racial bias and poor treatment of special needs students can lead to excessive punishments that make disadvantaged students likely to graduate high school, and more likely to face serious judicial consequences later in life.
Some discipline disparities cited in the report, like the one for special needs children, appear somewhat larger in charter schools, on average. But Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, says it’s a mistake to focus on comparing district and charter schools, writ large, without controlling for other factors.
The report tells us what we have known for years: black students and those with disabilities are more likely to be suspended than white students. Charter schools are basically on par with district-run schools when it comes to suspension rates (the difference is a mere 1.1 percentage point) but some charters—particularly “no excuses” schools—have very high rates.
Let me be clear: Some charter schools have gone too far in their attempt to create an orderly learning environment. There is no warrant for overuse of harsh discipline. But the UCLA report ignores an equally serious challenge that parents know is very real: getting control of unsafe and disorderly urban classrooms so kids can learn. Many families choose charter schools precisely because they want to escape schools that fail to offer their children an environment conducive to learning.
While some schools are better at overcoming these problems, others are worse at exacerbating them. The report on charter school discipline places Orange County, Fla.’s NorthStar High in the latter category. The school gets singled out for its treatment of Latino students.* It had an eye-popping 76 percent out-of-school suspension rate in the 2011-12 school year, on which the report is based.
Discipline problems may have been a harbinger of other problems to come. In the summer of 2012, the charter school imploded. It became a poster child for reform legislation passed the next year, after its principal pocketed more than half a million dollars in payouts that taxpayers couldn’t recover. Thanks to that legislation, all Florida charter schools are required to post audits and other disclosures on their websites.
Perhaps transparency is part of the solution here, too. If parents had access to clear, consistent, up-to-date data on school discipline, they might be able to push back against disparities for groups that are treated unfairly. And they might be able to identify the worst-offending schools, which, like NorthStar, may be shortchanging students in other ways.
*Update: The report has been updated to note that NorthStar “no longer exists.”
See other responses to, and coverage of, the report from the New York Times, The 74 and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
