Educators must select a formal reason each time a student is suspended from school.
In Texas, you have 42 options to choose from, including fights, school-related gang violence, and even arson. Despite these choices, 88% of suspensions in Texas last year were labeled in state reports as “violations of the student code of conduct,” without further details.
Last school year alone, there were over 1 million suspensions.
Many states have these vague categories designed for behavior that isn't captured by another, more specific reason established by the Department of Education. These categories are often used at high rates and can be potentially problematic. Texas school districts reported the highest number of these vague suspensions, but data collected by the Hechinger Report, which reviewed five years of data from 15 other states, found that school officials used broad categories such as “other” when suspending students. It turns out it's been cited nearly a million times.
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School discipline experts warn that these vague categories lack safeguards and could be used to justify suspension for any misconduct, including minor infractions. In addition to other subjective options, such as willful defiance and insubordination, which are often available, they are much more unclear and make the reasons why students are kicked out of school even more ambiguous.
The very existence of these types of “catch hole” categories sends a troubling message to educators, said Dan Losen, senior director of education at the National Youth Law Center.
“This basically means you can stop for any reason,” he said. “Gives power of attorney to the manager.”
In Texas, the catchall category captures nearly 9 out of 10 suspensions. In Mississippi, the similarly imprecise “non-criminal conduct” category accounts for three in four, or 232,000 of the 303,000 five-year suspensions. In Indiana, Alabama and Vermont, similarly broad categories accounted for more than a quarter of all stops in that period.
All of these states have at least 25 more clearly defined categories of suspension, including fighting, stalking, and sexual misconduct.
Research shows that black students in particular are more likely to be suspended for vague reasons, suggesting that bias may play a larger role in suspensions than behavior. Research has long demonstrated that children who are suspended from school have negative outcomes, including lower academic achievement, higher dropout rates, and increased involvement in the criminal justice system. With these serious consequences, experts say transparency in the disciplinary process is important.
Related: Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions
stop… for what reason?
Hechinger research shows that students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year due to subjective infractions such as insubordination and disorderly conduct.
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Mississippi school districts will soon be required to specifically address the types of behavior that result in suspensions in the non-criminal conduct category, Mississippi State Department of Education spokeswoman Shanderia Minor said in an email. The forms the district uses to record disciplinary incidents will be updated in the summer and may require additional information about these types of suspensions.
The Texas Education Agency said disciplinary decisions are made at the local level. It did not respond to follow-up questions about the agency's oversight. This means that the district has complete control in determining which actions are considered violations of the Student Code of Conduct.
In the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas, nearly 91 percent of suspensions last year were classified as violations of the student code of conduct, or “Code 21.” Sandra Benavidez, director of guidance and counseling, oversees the district's disciplinary approach. She noted that most of Texas' 41 different categories correspond to extreme behavior. Think of felonies rather than misdemeanors. She said the student code of conduct defines offenses such as horseplay and skipping class.
“They are still violations. It is still undesirable behavior,” Benavidez said. If a student is suspended, the misconduct is marked with a “Code 21.” Benavidez speaks the same language as Losen. “In some cases, Code 21, for lack of a better word, has become a catch-all.”
She added that better guidance from the state on what types of behavioral merit suspensions would be useful, noting that educators lack training on when such punishments should be meted out. “If you ask 20 managers, each of them will give you a different answer,” she said.
Jason Oconopua, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies school discipline, said more specific classifications and clearer guidelines are needed.
“Leave no ambiguity,” Okonofua said. “Not only is there no ‘other’ box, but we write clear instructions, like a clear classification of things, which makes it very transparent for teachers.”
Related: ‘It was the most unfair thing’: insubordination, discipline, racism
Transparency could help reduce inequities in suspension rates based on vague categories, Okonofua said. In every state with available data, black students were more likely to be suspended than their white peers for “other” reasons.
The more subjective the categories, the more likely they are to be applied unevenly, said Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University who has studied racial and ethnic disparities in exclusionary school discipline for decades.
“When the categories are very broad, you end up making subjective decisions, and those subjective decisions are actually more likely to tap into pre-existing stereotypes that exist in all of us,” he said.
Last year in Fort Worth ISD, black students received 48% of all suspensions for student code of conduct violations. They made up only 20% 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 pointed out racial disparities in alternative school placements for misbehavior and convened a group to help rethink the district's strategy for dealing with students at risk of being kicked out of school. Benavidez acknowledged that if she gives educators too much discretion, she may allow bias to creep into disciplinary decisions.
“As district leaders, we need to identify these vulnerabilities and put systems in place to minimize those opportunities,” she said. “This is what I’ve been doing with the team this year.”
Tara García Mathewson contributed reporting.
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 Hechinger Newsletter.