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
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
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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.
One reason why so many preschool and kindergarten children are being expelled is that the expectations of them are not age appropriate. For example, it is not age-appropriate to expect preschoolers to share, to wait patiently, to sit quietly in groups, to learn subjects through worksheets and mandated exercises, or to be silent during transitions. Many preschoolers who are diagnosed with mental illness and, even, expelled from preschools would perform within a normal range if they weren’t burdened by age-inappropriate requirements. For example, children who have an age-appropriate difficulty conforming to rules about sitting quietly, doing worksheets, and waiting, often receive a diagnosis of hyperactivity when what they really need is a more suitable classroom culture.
For a manual that describes age-appropriate behavior for young children and offers over 270 examples from an actual preschool and kindergarten, see The Happiest Preschool: A Manual for Teachers.
And when they hide removals of students with disabilities (constructive suspensions) they circumvent IDEA protections and falsify school records. Calling a disciplinary removal “administrative excusal, cooling off period, dismissal to parent care” is a practiced lie.