Every time educators suspend students from school, they have to select a formal reason.

In Texas, they have 42 options to pick from — fighting, school-related gang violence, even arson. Despite those choices, 88 percent of suspensions in Texas last year were marked in state reports as a “violation of student code of conduct” with no additional detail.

That’s more than a million suspensions last school year alone.

Many states have these nebulous categories, designed for behavior that isn’t captured by another, more specific, reason set by their departments of education. These categories are often used at high — and potentially problematic — rates. Texas districts reported the highest number of these vague suspensions, but a review of five years of data across 15 other states for which The Hechinger Report obtained data showed school officials citing a broad category such as “other” nearly a million times when suspending students.

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School discipline experts warn that these ambiguous categories lack guardrails and can be used to justify suspensions for any misconduct, including minor infractions. They’re often available in addition to other subjective options such as willful defiance and insubordination, yet are even more indefinite, further obscuring why students are kicked out of school.

The very existence of these types of “catchall” categories sends a troubling message to educators, said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“It’s a way to say you can suspend basically for any reason whatsoever,” he said. “It gives carte blanche to administrators.”

In Texas, the catchall category captures almost 9 out of every 10 suspensions. In Mississippi, the similarly imprecise category of “noncriminal behavior” accounts for 3 out of every 4 — 232,000 out of a total of 303,000 suspensions over five years. In Indiana, Alabama and Vermont, a similarly broad category accounted for more than a quarter of all suspensions in that time.

In all these states, there are at least 25 more clearly defined categories of suspensions, such as fighting, stalking and sexual misconduct.

Studies show that Black students, in particular, are more likely to be suspended for vague reasons, an indication that bias may play a larger role in suspensions than behavior. Research has also long demonstrated that kids who are suspended have negative outcomes, including lower academic performance, higher dropout rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system. Because there are such serious consequences, experts say transparency about the discipline process is key.

Related: Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions

In Mississippi, districts may soon need to note specifics about the kind of behavior that leads to suspensions in its noncriminal-behavior category, Shanderia Minor, spokesperson for the state’s education department, said in an email. The form districts use to record discipline incidents will be updated over the summer and may require additional information for these types of suspensions.

The Texas Education Agency said that discipline decisions are made at the local level. It did not respond to follow-up questions about the agency’s oversight. This means districts have complete control over determining what behavior is considered a violation of the student code of conduct.

In the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas, almost 91 percent of suspensions were labeled a violation of the student code of conduct, or “Code 21” last year. Sandra Benavidez, executive director of guidance and counseling, oversees the district’s approach to discipline. She pointed out that the majority of Texas’ 41 other categories are for extreme behavior — think felonies rather than misdemeanors. The student code of conduct, she said, is where infractions such as horseplaying and skipping class are defined.

“They’re still infractions. They’re still undesirable behaviors,” Benavidez said. When students are suspended for them, the misconduct is labeled “Code 21.” Benavidez uses the same language as Losen: “In some cases, Code 21 has become, for lack of a better word, a catchall.”

She added that better guidance from the state about what kinds of behavior merit suspension would be useful, citing a lack of training on when educators should turn to such punishment. “If you asked 20 administrators, they would each give you a different response,” she said.

Jason Okonofua, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies school discipline, said that more specific categories and clear guidelines are needed.

“Don’t leave any ambiguity,” Okonofua said. “Not only don’t have an ‘other’ box, but make clear instructions, like clear classifications for things, such that it’s very transparent for a teacher.”

Related: ‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, discipline and racial disparity

Transparency could help reduce inequities in suspension rates under vague categories, Okonofua said. In all states with available data, Black students were more likely to be suspended than their white peers for “other” reasons.

Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University, who has studied the racial and ethnic disparities in exclusionary school discipline for decades, said the more subjective a category, the greater the chance it will be applied unevenly. 

“When we have very broad categories, you can have subjective decisions and those subjective decisions really are more likely to tap into pre-existing stereotypes that exist in all of us,” he said.

In the Fort Worth ISD last year, Black students received 48 percent of all suspensions for violations of the student code of conduct. They made up just 20 percent of the student body.  

When Benavidez joined Fort Worth ISD last summer, one of the first things she did was look at the district’s discipline data. She noted racial disparities in alternative school placements, which follow misbehavior, and convened a group to help rethink the district’s strategy for dealing with students at risk of getting kicked out of their schools. Benavidez acknowledged that giving educators too much discretion can let bias creep into disciplinary decisions.

“We, as district leaders, have to identify those vulnerabilities and put systems in place that minimize those opportunities,” she said. “That’s the work I’ve been doing with the team this year.”

Tara García Mathewson contributed reporting.

This story about school discipline data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Many American students face a strange punishment for missing school: losing more class time.

Educators nationwide regularly turn to suspension as a response to attendance problems, according to a Hechinger Report review of data from a dozen states that track this information.

Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, school districts in those states cited attendance-related violations as a reason for student suspensions more than half a million times. In all, they made up almost 1 in 10 discipline records.

Those totals are “crazy high,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

His research has shown that school attendance is an early indicator of whether a student is on track to graduate. Punishing students by forcing them to miss class can harm their chances of getting a diploma on time.

“To me, whether you’re truant, absent or late, that our remedy is to tell you to miss more school is just poorly thought out at best,” Balfanz said. “We just know from years and years of research that it’s really important for kids to be in school every day.”

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Hechinger’s analysis is the largest national look to date at suspensions for attendance violations, gathered as part of its Suspended …for what? project.

A previous Hechinger analysis of 150 Arizona school districts, in partnership with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, found nearly 47,000 suspensions for attendance issues across five years, also accounting for 10 percent of all such punishments.

Both Hechinger reports found that the suspensions for missing class disproportionately affected students from certain minority groups.

Educators say suspensions can be a useful tool to teach students a lesson when they have persistent attendance problems or to help keep schools safe. But many experts criticize these punishments as an ineffective way to solve the problem.

“One can understand the theory behind that, but there’s no real evidence to show that it actually then spurs a student to change,” said Joshua Childs, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “What that doesn’t recognize is that a lot of attendance issues are beyond an individual student’s control.”

Students may miss part or all of the school day for any number of reasons, including mental health concerns, transportation problems or family responsibilities. A suspension addresses none of these issues and can instead further alienate a student from school.

Related: Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions:

At least 11 states ban suspensions for attendance-related violations, and another six limit out-of-school suspensions for attendance violations. Following the 2022 Hechinger/AZCIR report, an Arizona lawmaker twice proposed bills that would have done the latter. Both measures stalled after initially drawing bipartisan support, and the legislator has decided not to seek reelection.

Some districts have acted on their own. In the 2022-23 school year, Georgia’s Gwinnett County Public Schools banned suspensions for attendance-related reasons. In the five years before that, the 194,000-student district assigned more than 27,000 such suspensions.

Statewide, educators issued more than 190,000 suspensions for attendance violations in that time, which accounted for more than 13 percent of all suspensions records.

The ban came with problems, though, Gwinnett spokesperson Bernard Watson said, including “an increase in the number of students arriving late to class, skipping class, and hanging out in restrooms and locker rooms.”

After hearing concerns about safety from school leaders, the district changed course. School leaders could once again suspend students for missing class, but only after they had first tried other options, such as detention, parent outreach or check-ins with support staff.

“Decisions related to discipline are not made in a vacuum,” Watson said in an email, adding that the district considers data, as well as seeking feedback from staff, parents and students. “These efforts help keep students and staff safe and productive in schools.”

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Lori Miller, executive director of the Georgia-based Truancy Intervention Project, said her organization regularly works with kids who are punished for missing class, even if they managed to get to school for part of the day. In these cases, she says, the suspension rarely makes sense to the students.

“Well, you’re telling me I should go to school, but I showed up, even though I’m late, and your response was to pull me out,” she said. “It’s very confusing to kids. We have to be very careful with the messages we’re sending.”

Miller added that the problem is worse at schools that are under-resourced, which disproportionately serve Black and Latino students. There, teachers and staff are stretched thin dealing with a wide array of student issues including mental health challenges and food insecurity. In those cases, she said, suspension can be the easiest, quickest way to address a problem — even if it’s not the best.

In almost all states with available data, Black students were more likely to be suspended for attendance-related violations than their white peers. The same was true in our previous investigation in Arizona. Experts called the findings concerning and said further investigation was merited.

The Hechinger Report and AZCIR also found many school leaders who were committed to eliminating suspensions for attendance-related reasons. These educators focused on developing connections with students and addressing the root causes of what was keeping kids out of class, strategies Balfanz said are key to improving attendance problems.

In Arizona’s Tolleson Elementary School District, for instance, every student is paired with an adult who checks in with them regularly. Clubs and extracurriculars also help students find a place where they feel they belong. An onsite health clinic helps address medical concerns early to get kids back to school as fast as possible.

Schools should be focused on “What does it take to get the kids to be there every day?” Balfanz said. “Not just, ‘We take the ones who come and we punish the ones who don’t.’”

This story about school suspension data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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After four years battling a chain of for-profit cosmetology schools in court, and many more years struggling with debts caused by those schools, about 150 students will receive some financial relief.

As part of a settlement finalized this week in a class action lawsuit, La’ James International College, which is based in Iowa, will pay current and former students who joined the lawsuit $1,500 each. It will also discharge debts those students owed to the school and make changes in how it communicates about financial aid.

The suit was brought against La’ James International College in 2020 following a Hechinger Report investigation into cosmetology schools in Iowa. Our reporting showed how the business model of beauty schools can help for-profit schools rake in profits while pushing students deep into debt for an ultimately low-paying career.

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The lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of current and former students by the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization Student Defense, accused La’ James of delaying financial aid payments and causing them financial hardship in violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.

“Students rely on their financial aid to stay afloat while they pursue their goals – and La’ James pulled that out from under them,” Student Defense’s litigation director, Eric Rothschild, said in a statement. “When for-profit colleges engage in such practices, hard-working students pay the price.”

La’ James did not respond to request for comment.

Most colleges disburse financial aid each semester, but beauty schools work differently. Students are required to clock a certain number of hours either in class or working in the school’s salon practicing their skills on paying customers. Financial aid payments are supposed to be made after students hit certain hour benchmarks, but students said La’ James often delayed those payments for months, so that they had to take out other loans to meet daily living expenses.

Cosmetology students in Iowa must complete more hours of training than those in any other state: 2,100 hours. (Most states require 1,500 hours.) Many for-profit beauty schools in Iowa have fought fiercely to keep it this way, lobbying hard against proposed changes. The state cosmetology school association has also protected its monopoly in this educational market, suing a community college that wanted to open a cosmetology program in 2005.

Related: Tangled up in debt

Many Iowa cosmetologists told Hechinger reporters that they spent a significant portion of their clock hours sitting around waiting for customers, not learning or practicing anything.

A Hechinger analysis showed that the more time a state requires for cosmetology training, the more debt aspiring hairdressers tend to take on. Yet the median annual pay for a cosmetologist is $35,000. 

According to the most recent federal data, La’ James programs cost up to $20,000, while graduates from their schools make anywhere from $23,000 to $30,000 annually.

The Student Defense lawsuit is not the first time the school has found itself in legal jeopardy. The chain was sued in 2014 by the Iowa attorney general’s office, which accused it of deceptive marketing and enrollment practices. That suit resulted in a settlement in which La’ James forgave more than $2 million in student debt, paid a $500,000 fine and agreed to not make false or misleading statements about financial aid disbursements.

In 2021, however, the attorney general’s office found that the school was misleading students about financial aid, and once again entered into a settlement where the school forgave more than $460,000 in institutional debt.

This story about cosmetology schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than 4 in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared with more than 6 in 10 other students.

Search to learn more about childcare availability at colleges and universities nationwide. Enter an institution name to see if child care is available and how many students are over the age of 24.

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Editor’s note: Substituting for Jill Barshay is Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report’s investigations editor. Jill will return next week.

Every school day, thousands of students are suspended for vague, subjective reasons, such as defiance and disorderly conduct. Our investigative team recently took a deep dive into these punishments, based on 20 states for which we were able to obtain data. Our analysis revealed more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions from 2017-18 to 2021-22 under these ambiguous categories. 

Here’s a closer look at some of what we found:

1. Suspensions for these categories of behavior are incredibly common. 

Our analysis found that nearly a third of suspensions and expulsions reported by states was meted out under these types of categories, which also included insubordination, disruptive behavior, and disobedience. 

In Alabama, educators have 56 categories to choose from as justification for student punishment; a full third in our sample were assigned for one of four vague violations. This is what the state calls them: “defiance of authority,” “disorderly conduct — other,” “disruptive demonstrations,” and “disobedience — persistent, willful.” 

In North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon, about half or more of all suspensions were classified in similar categories. 

There are a few reasons why these categories are so widely used. For one, they often capture the low-level infractions that are most common in schools, such as ignoring a teacher’s direction, yelling in class or swearing. By comparison, more clearcut and serious violations, such as those involving weapons or illegal substances, are rarer. They made up only 2 percent and 9 percent of the discipline records, respectively. 

But experts also say that terms such as disorder or defiance are so broad and subject to interpretation that they can quickly become a catchall. For instance, in Oregon, the umbrella category of disruptive behavior includes insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.

2. Educators classify a huge range of behavior as insubordination or disruption. 

As part of our reporting, we obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states to see what specific behavior was leading to suspensions labeled this way. It was a wide range, sometimes even within a single school district. Sometimes students were suspended for behavior as minor as being late to class; others, because they punched someone. And it was all called the same thing, which experts say prevents school discipline decisions from being transparent to students and the greater public. 

There were some common themes though, behaviors like yelling at peers, throwing things in a classroom or refusing to do work. We developed a list of 15 commonly repeated behaviors and coded about 3,000 incidents by hand, marking whether they described that type of conduct. We used machine learning to analyze the rest. 

Related: Young children misbehave. Some are suspended for acting their age

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, or for talking back, or for yelling at school staff. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on their cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.

3. Inequities can be even more pronounced in these ambiguous categories. 

We know from decades of research and federal data collection that Black students are more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers. In many places, that is especially true when it comes to categories like insubordination. 

In Indiana, for example, Black students were suspended or expelled for defiance at four times the rate of white students on average. In 2021-22, eight Black students received this punishment per 100 students, compared with just two white students. In all other categories, the difference was three times the rate. 

Research suggests that teachers sometimes react to the same behavior differently depending on a child’s race. A 2015 study found that when teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of misbehavior by a student, teachers felt more troubled when they believed a Black student repeatedly misbehaved rather than a white student.

They “are more likely to be seen as ‘troublemakers’ when they misbehave in some way than their white peers,” said Jason Okonofua, assistant professor at University of California-Berkeley and a co-author of the study. Teachers are usually making quick decisions in situations where they are removing a child from the classroom, he said, and biases tend to “rear their heads” under those circumstances.

Related: What happens when suspensions get suspended?

Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities. In all states for which we had demographic data, these students were more likely to be suspended for insubordination or disorderly conduct violations than their peers. In many states, those differences were larger than for other suspensions. 

4. Suspension rates vary widely within states. 

Further underscoring how much educator discretion exists in determining when or whether to suspend a student, individual districts report hugely different suspension rates. 

Take Georgia, for instance, which allows for students to be punished for disorderly conduct and “student incivility.” In 2021-22, the 3,300-student McDuffie County School System cited these two reasons for suspensions more than 1,250 times, according to state data. That’s nearly 40 times per 100 students. Similarly sized Appling County issued so few suspensions for disorderly conduct and student incivility that the numbers were redacted to protect student privacy. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

This story about school discipline data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip. 

Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor  experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice. 

But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school. 

“OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said. 

The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance. 

Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont. 

Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.

Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.

Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.” 

Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher. 

“She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”

Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.” 

In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations. 

Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue. 

The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension. 

At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”

In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way. 

“Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.” 

Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions

The connections are often much clearer to parents. 

A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.) 

Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room. 

Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled. 

Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions. 

The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers. 

Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities. 

A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.

Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”

Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”

Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly. 

Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says. 

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island. 

Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct. 

Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.

Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.

“Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”

Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.

“She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said. 

Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment. 

Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said. 

This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.

“Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org.* “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.” 

On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises. 

Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available. 

In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.

But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mindblowing to me, not one of you can do that.”

Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Julian Saavedra’s name.

This story about suspension of students with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

• Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
• Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
• Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
• Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
• Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
• Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

Officials in several other states said the same.

The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.* The group partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

Munir left anyway.

That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

*CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Johanna Lacoe’s title. She is the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.

This story about classroom discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The Hechinger Report spent the last year investigating a major subset of school discipline: suspensions and expulsions for vague, subjective categories like defiance, disruption and disorderly conduct. 

We started this project with some basic questions: How often were states suspending students for these reasons? What kinds of behavior do educators say constitute defiance or disorder, anyway? And were some students more likely to be punished for these kinds of things than others?

Answering these questions revealed how overwhelmingly common these types of suspensions are for a broad range of behavior, including minor incidents. Here’s how we did it.

How did we get state and district level suspension data?

We attempted to get data from all 50 states, but there is no single place to get school discipline data broken down by suspension category. States do not report this information to the federal government. In fact, some states don’t even collect it from their districts. 

When possible, we downloaded the data from the state’s department of education website. When it wasn’t readily available we submitted public records requests.

In the case of New Mexico, we used data obtained and published by ProPublica.

What did we ultimately collect? 

In the end, we obtained the data we were looking for from 20 states: Alabama, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Vermont, Washington, Minnesota, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Rhode Island.

In most cases, we received data from 2017-18 to 2021-22. In the case of Vermont, however, we did not have data for 2021-22 and in North Carolina, we had data only for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

We had demographic data that allowed us to examine the racial and special education disparities in California, Indiana, Vermont, New Mexico, Montana, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Massachusetts.

Was the data uniform?

Far from it. Each state has its own categories for student discipline, ranging from just six reasons a student can get suspended in California to more than 80 in Massachusetts. 

First, we identified any of the categories that had to do with disrespect, disorder or disruption and singled them out. These were the primary focus of our analysis. But we also wanted to know how suspensions for these reasons compared to others. 

To do that, we looked for common threads among suspension categories and created our own larger categorizations. For example, any offense category that had involved alcohol, drugs or tobacco was grouped into the category “alcohol/drugs/tobacco.”  Any offense  that involved fighting or physical aggression we put into a category called “physical violence.” These groupings were made following research into state discipline codes and discussion. We also showed our groupings to experts to get their feedback. In the end, we had 16 unique categories. We added the numbers from all state categories that fell into one of our larger groups. 

This allowed for an overall look at how many punishments were assigned for broad types of behavior. Yet because of discrepancies in discipline definitions in each state, direct comparisons between states are not advisable.

How did we deal with missing or redacted data?

In all of the states, suspensions below a specific count (generally fewer than 10 but in some cases fewer than five) were redacted to make sure no student could be identified. We considered them as zero since there was no way to accurately assess that number. In most states, this did not affect the overall findings. In smaller states or districts, where we saw or expected significant redactions, we only looked at grand totals.

Did the data have any other limitations?

Yes, once again, we had to contend with a lack of uniformity in how states gather this information. In some places, we obtained information only for suspensions. In others, the data included expulsions. In Alabama, instances of corporal punishment and alternative school placement were also included.

Some states only allowed districts to report a single reason for a suspension. Others allow several reasons to be selected. And, muddying the waters further, some states reported numbers of students who were suspended, while others reported the number of incidents that led to suspension. We’ve made a list available with details about individual states. 

How did we analyze demographic disparities?

We calculated the rate of suspension by looking at the number of students of a particular race suspended per 100 students of that race in a state or district. The comparisons between rates of suspensions of Black students and white students were made by dividing the rate of suspension for the former by the rate of suspension for the latter. For instance, if Black students were suspended at a rate of four students per 100 Black students in a state and white students were suspended at a rate of two students per 100 white students, then Black students were suspended at twice the rate of suspension of white students (4/2 = 2).

We did the same analysis for students with disabilities relative to their general-education peers.

How do we know what kind of behavior students were suspended for?

We submitted public records requests to dozens of school districts across the country asking for the most recent year or two years of discipline records for any suspensions assigned in their category of defiance or disorderly conduct.  

Most districts denied our request or never responded. Some estimated it would cost tens of thousands of dollars for them to pull the records. In all, 12 districts in eight states granted our request for free or for a more affordable cost. This gave us more than 7,000 discipline records to analyze.

So how did you analyze them? 

After reading through many of the records to begin to identify patterns, we once again made some broad categories of behavior that kept coming up, including talking back to an educator, swearing or refusing a direct order. 

About 1,700 of the records were in PDFs (including some with handwritten notes) that could not easily be converted to a spreadsheet. We coded all of these by hand, checking if the incident contained any of our categories and marking yes or no. We also hand-coded 1,500 of the remaining records. Each incident could have as many “yeses” as merited. We checked each other’s work to make sure we were being consistent. 

We then used a machine-learning library and trained a model with our labeled dataset and used the trained model to predict the remaining incident reports for the same categories. The accuracy of the model in predicting the incidences (on a test dataset which was taken out from the labeled dataset) varied across categories but, overall, the model had a low rate of false positives. We also spot checked the findings to make sure records were not being miscategorized. 

This story about discipline data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Hechinger’s school discipline project: How we did it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To Florina Caprita, the mother of three young children, the paralegal studies program at Ashworth College seemed like the perfect route to a much-needed career. The classes were entirely online, and an admissions officer told her she could make small monthly payments toward the $4,465 tuition while she was taking classes, instead of having to pay it all at once.

But in 2018, a family emergency forced her out of school, just six credits shy of her degree. To make matters worse, she fell behind on her monthly payments, which had steadily increased from $25 to more than $200.

She struggled financially for several years as her health declined, but last spring, she got an opportunity to earn a degree at a different college. The problem? Ashworth, a for-profit school in Georgia, refused to release her transcript until she paid – in full – the more than $2,200 that she owed them.

This practice, known as transcript withholding, has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators. Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice. That means students like Caprita can fall through the cracks.

In October, the Department of Education released new rules that would bar colleges from withholding a transcript for any semester for which a student used federal student aid money and paid their balance in full. The move was lauded by advocates as a huge step forward in eradicating the practice – but would not apply to any of the thousands of schools that don’t accept federal student aid to begin with, including Ashworth College.

Experts have long criticized authorities for not providing better oversight of these schools.

“Some of these schools exist that way because they would never qualify, and that’s usually because they provide very low value to students, unfortunately,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the progressive think tank New America. “Not in all cases, but a lot of these programs are not lifting people out of poverty, they’re not providing a route to middle class jobs or middle-class income, and so I think sometimes they’re of questionable value.”

Unlike the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does have jurisdiction over colleges that don’t qualify to receive federal money. And in the past year, the agency has begun investigating colleges for refusing to release transcripts because of a loan balance owed directly to the school.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them. If they withhold [the transcript] from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Florina Caprita, who has an outstanding loan from an online for-profit university

In 2022, the agency found that transcript withholding was an abusive practice under the Consumer Protection Act, “designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.”

The CFPB has adopted a broad definition of what a student loan is. They include in that category things like payment plans, arguing that those are essentially forms of credit. Money owed for things like unpaid room and board balances or overdue fines, however, is not covered. 

By their definition, Caprita should have been eligible to access her transcript. But she says she called and emailed the college repeatedly to no avail. She even asked to re-enroll in a new payment plan but college officials said their hands were tied and she would have to take up the matter with a collection agency.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them,” said Caprita, who is 44 years old and is hoping to join a Christian ministry. “If they withhold it from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Ashworth College did not respond to requests for comment.

A CFPB official acknowledged that it’s impossible to examine the policies of all of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. The bureau has tried to make enough public statements for institutions to take note and change their policies without additional intervention, the official said. The agency has investigated some colleges for transcript withholding and made them change their practices but has not released any institution names publicly.

The education department’s rule on transcript withholding will go into effect in July 2024, joining other federal and state regulations meant to protect students from transcript withholding.

An education department spokesperson said that the agency plans to adjust its oversight procedures to ensure that schools that receive federal funding are following new regulations and that all student complaints alleging transcript withholding are investigated. Schools may eventually lose eligibility to receive federal student aid if they don’t comply with the new rule.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this, period.’ ” 

Edward Conroy, senior policy advisor, New America

Despite the fact that the regulation only applies to students who have used federal money to pay for their education, advocates hope that colleges will respond in a broader way.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’ ” Conroy said. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.” 

Indeed, that’s what some policymakers have seen happen at the state level. Some states have only banned the practice at public institutions or for debts of up to a certain amount. In other cases, schools are only required to release transcripts for certain uses.

For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.

“They’re not going to bother trying to figure out how to operationalize this very difficult thing to operationalize,” he said.

Starting next summer, the Colorado law also requires institutions to submit data about how many students requested transcripts and how many were withheld. Einhaus said that some schools initially resisted the new law, arguing that it would take away one of their main tools to recover money owed from students. “It will be interesting to see if this really is having an impact on the amount of debt they’re able to collect back,” he said.

But Brittany Pearce, a program manager at the higher ed consulting firm Ithaka S+R, is skeptical that withholding transcripts was ever an effective way to recoup debt. “From a really practical business sense, nobody is winning,” she said.

Correction: This story has been updated to remove the description of Ashworth as unaccredited. It is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission. 

This story about transcript withholding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Check out our College Welcome Guide.

The post Holding transcripts hostage may get a lot harder, thanks to new federal rules appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To create our College Welcome Guide we relied on more than a dozen data sources. If you haven’t seen our tool, you can find it here. Read on to learn more about where the information comes from.

Campus-level data

All of the data other than what is shown on the maps or otherwise noted comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS data is reported directly by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. Our dataset includes all two- and four-year colleges.

Figures for total enrollment and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender show the 12-month unduplicated undergraduate student numbers in 2021-22, the latest year for which the information is available. When 12-month enrollment was unavailable, as was the case for enrollment by age and attendance status (part- or full-time), data from the fall 2021 semester has been used. Pell Grant enrollment data is from 2020-21.

Institutional affiliation indicates whether a private, nonprofit institution is associated with a religious group or denomination.

Graduation rates were calculated using the most recent five years of data. In the case of institutions for which those five full years were not available, the graduation rate was calculated from the available years. This figure represents the percentage of students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years or an associate degree within three years.

The proportion of students with disabilities represents the percentage of undergraduates in the fall who formally registered with their institutions’ offices of disability services.

Under the IPEDS definition, a point of contact for veterans refers to whether a school has dedicated support services for veterans, military service members and their families. An institution is shown as having services for student veterans if it offers at least one of the following: the Yellow Ribbon Program, academic credit for military training or a recognized student veteran organization; or if it is a member of the Department of Defense Voluntary Education Partnership Memorandum of Understanding. The number of students receiving Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and tuition assistance includes spouses and dependents. Only benefits awarded through or certified by the institution are shown.

Hate crimes are reported by institutions to the U.S. Department of Education and are defined as crimes for which there is evidence “that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” The data, which was downloaded from the department’s Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool, includes hate crimes committed in any building owned or controlled by an institution or student organization or on any public property within or adjacent to a campus, such as streets, sidewalks and parking facilities.

Data about first-generation students came from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which gets it from the National Student Loan Data System. Under the federal definition, students are considered first generation if they do not have a parent who graduated with a four-year degree. First-generation status is self reported by the student.

Data about whether or not there is an LGBTQ+ student resource center on a campus comes from the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.

In addition to indicating which institutions are designated as historically Black, Hispanic-serving or affiliated with a religion, we used data from the MSI Data Project to show colleges and universities that have Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous enrollments that exceed the proportion of the general population for those categories. We also used data from the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges to indicate which institutions are considered rural-serving, meaning they’re in rural places or serve students from those places.

State-level data

Information about whether a state allows undocumented immigrants residing in that state to pay in-state tuition comes from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Veterans’ tuition status was determined on a state-by-state basis by a review of policies of public higher education institutions, as well as state higher education and veterans’ agencies.

States that restrict the teaching of critical race theory are tracked by PEN America. Legislatures that have constrained or banned the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs were identified through legislative tracking services and news reports. Some states that have not yet limited or banned DEI have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on those programs. We included this measure because it is a step that has historically been a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws affecting college students are monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Trans Legislation Tracker. Anti-trans laws are those passed since 2022 and include legislation restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for trans people including those of college age.

Information on state laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote comes from the Voting Rights Lab.

LGBTQ+ Profile scores produced by the Movement Advancement Project are based on measures including the proportion of adults and of workers who are LGBTQ+ and a state’s policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

Data from the Center for Reproductive Rights has been used to show abortion laws by state.

Download the data here.

This College Welcome Guide was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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