School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School - to - Prison Pipeline

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has released its report, Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School - to - Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. 

The report examines compliance with federal laws designed to protect students of color with disabilities from discrimination, and whether the federal government’s enforcement of these laws adequately protects these students from discriminatory disciplinary actions and policies. The Commission investigated school discipline practices and policies impacting students of color with disabilities and the possible connections to the school - to - prison pipeline, examined the rates of exclusionary discipline, researched whether discipline policies unlawfully target students of color with disabilities, and analyzed the federal government’s responses and actions on the topic.

Key findings from the Commission majority include:

· Students with disabilities are approximately twice as likely to be suspended throughout each school level compared to students without disabilities.

· Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers – but black, Latinx, and Native American students in the aggregate receive substantially more school discipline than their white peers, and receive harsher and longer punishments than their white peers receive for like offenses.

· Most recent available U.S. Department of Education data reflect that black, multiracial, Native American/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander American students with disabilities were more likely than white students with disabilities to be expelled without educational services

 

• In addition to missed class time, excessive exclusionary discipline negatively impacts  classroom engagement and cohesion and increases the likelihood exclud ed students will be  retained in grade, drop out of school, or be placed in the juvenile justice system.  Black  students with disabilities lost approximately 77 more days of instruction compared to white  students with disabilities.   

• According to CRDC data , 1.6 million students attend a school with a sworn law  enforcement officer (SLEO) but not a school counselor and by the 2015 - 16 academic year,  schools reported having more than 27,000  school resource officers ( SROs ) , compared to  23,000 social workers. Latinx, Asian, and black students were all more likely than white  students to attend a school with an SLEO but not a counselor.