Editor's note: Sarah Butrymowicz, investigative editor at The Hechinger Report, has replaced Jill Barshay. Jill will be back next week.
Every school day, thousands of students are suspended from school for vague and subjective reasons such as insubordination or disorderly conduct. Our research team took an in-depth look at these penalties based on the 20 states for which we had recent data. Our analysis found that from 2017-18 to 2021-22, more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions occurred under these vague categories.
Let’s take a closer look at some of our findings.
One. Suspensions for this category of behavior are very common.
Our analysis found that nearly one-third of state-reported suspensions and expulsions were under these types of categories, which also include insubordination, disruptive behavior, and insubordination.
In Alabama, there are 56 categories that educators can choose from as justification for punishing students. A full third of our sample was assigned to one of the four ambiguous violations. The state calls it “rebellion against authority,” “disorderly conduct – other,” “disruptive protest,” and “disobedience – persistent and deliberate.”
In North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon, about half or more of all suspensions fell into similar categories.
There are several reasons why these categories are so popular. First of all, it often catches the low-level infractions that are most common in schools, such as ignoring teacher instructions or yelling or swearing during class. In comparison, clear and serious violations, such as those involving weapons or illegal substances, are rarer. They accounted for only 2% and 9% of disciplinary records, respectively.
But experts also say terms like disorder and rebellion can quickly get caught up because they are so broad and open to interpretation. For example, in Oregon, the umbrella category of disruptive behavior includes not only insubordination and disorderly conduct, but also harassment, lewd behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.
2. Educators categorize a wide range of behaviors as disobedience or disruption.
As part of the report, we obtained more than 7,000 disciplinary records from 12 school districts in eight states to determine what specific behavior led to these suspensions. The scope was wide, sometimes even within a single school district. Sometimes students were suspended for minor actions, such as being late to class. Others because they hit someone. Experts say it prevents school disciplinary decisions from being transparent to students and the public.
However, there were some common themes, such as yelling at colleagues, throwing objects in the classroom, or refusing to do work. We developed a list of 15 commonly recurring behaviors and hand-coded approximately 3,000 incidents to indicate whether they described that type of behavior. We used machine learning to analyze the rest.
Related: Young children misbehave. Some were suspended based on age.
In less than 15% of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, talking back or yelling at staff. In at least 20% of cases, students refused direct commands, and 6% were punished for misuse of technology, such as using cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.
3. Inequalities can become 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 this is especially true for categories such as disobedience.
In Indiana, for example, black students were suspended or expelled for protesting at an average rate four times higher than white students. In 2021-22, eight Black students per 100 students received this punishment, compared to just two white students. In all other categories the difference was three times higher.
Studies have shown that teachers sometimes react differently to the same behavior depending on a child's race. A 2015 study found that when teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of student misbehavior, teachers felt more troubled when they believed black students were repeatedly misbehaving than white students.
“They are more likely to be seen as ‘troublemakers’ when they misbehave in some way than their white peers,” said Jason Oconopua, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Teachers typically make quick decisions when it comes to removing a child from the classroom, and bias tends to “rear its head” in those situations, he said.
Related: What happens when a suspension is suspended?
Similar gaps exist for students with disabilities. In every state for which we have demographic data, these students were more likely than their peers to be suspended for insubordination or disorderly conduct violations. In many states, these differences are larger than for other suspensions.
4. Suspension rates vary widely within states.
Further emphasizing how much discretion educators have in deciding whether to suspend a student, each school district reports significantly different suspension rates.
Take Georgia, for example, which allows students to be punished for disorderly conduct and “student incivility.” The McDuffie County school system, which has 3,300 students, cited these two reasons for suspension more than 1,250 times in 2021-22, according to state data. That's almost 40 times more per 100 students. Similar-sized Appling County issued few suspensions for disorderly conduct and student incivility, so the numbers were redacted to protect student privacy.
Editor's note: From the Hechinger Report Fazil Khan He had nearly completed data analysis and reporting on this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about: internship fund It was created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed the data visualizations for this project, building on Khan's work.
This story about school discipline data was produced by: Hechinger Reportis a nonprofit, independent media outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up Proof Points Newsletter.