A new report from the ACLU of Arizona confirms what some Phoenix-area parents have suspected for years: Certain schools punish minority students and students with disabilities at disproportionately high rates.

Black students are eight times more likely to be suspended from charter high schools than their white counterparts, according to the report. Latino students are six times more likely to be suspended than white students in charter high schools.

In district schools, K-12 students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended than their peers without disabilities, the report says.

The findings, released Wednesday, have broad implications. Experts say over-disciplining students — particularly using out-of-school suspensions — can push kids away from the education system and toward the criminal-justice system.

"It doesn’t matter the age. There are kids who are as young as 8 years old that are getting suspended and expelled," said Luis Ávila, director of the ACLU's Demand 2 Learn campaign for fair disciplinary practices. "The punishments are so harsh that kids are eventually just dropping out."

The ACLU report used the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, from the 2013-14 school year. Most district schools and more than half of charter schools in Maricopa County submitted information.

An independent Arizona Republic analysis of the data found:

Seven district high schools had overall out-of-school suspension rates higher than 1 in 4 students. One West Valley high school with about 1,630 students issued 416 out-of-school suspensions in 2013-14.

Forty-six district and charter high schools in Maricopa County suspended 20 percent or more of their black students from school. The out-of-school suspension rate for black students was higher than the rate for white students in all but three of those schools.

Students with disabilities had disproportionately high out-of-school suspension rates at several elementary schools. One East Valley district school had an overall out-of-school suspension rate of 9 percent but a rate of 40 percent for students with disabilities. A group of 26 students with disabilities at a south Phoenix charter school received 14 of the out-of-school suspensions for that school year.

"I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I’m not at all," said Erica Meiners, a Northeastern Illinois University professor who studies the relationship between schools and prisons. "When we look at findings from Chicago, from New York, from Atlanta, we see these overrepresentations. It's kind of the national pattern."

One parent's story

Peoria resident Rochelle Thomas chose North Phoenix Preparatory School for her seventh-grade son two years ago because she thought a "rigorous academic challenge" would better prepare him for college.

The Great Hearts charter school came highly recommended, she said, and had a private-school feel without the private-school price tag.

The transition to more challenging coursework — and an environment where some wealthy, white students didn't think a black, middle-income kid belonged — was tough at first, Thomas said. But by the start of eighth grade, her son "had learned how to juggle the work and manage his time" and the family was expecting a much smoother year.

Instead, they quickly became ensnared in a disciplinary nightmare.

"There was new leadership, and I noticed problems right from the beginning," Thomas said. "Within a week after school started, the assistant headmaster sent me a letter basically saying, 'I’m going to watch him more closely.'

"I told her I wanted to make sure that he wasn't singled out or treated differently than any other child, but that’s exactly what happened," Thomas said.

First, her son got detention for hitting another child with a ball — while playing dodgeball, Thomas said. She talked to her son about respecting authority and how sometimes "you have to do things you don’t necessarily agree with" at school or work.

The discipline escalated, with her son being punished for forgetting his homework in his locker, not wearing the belt required for his uniform and leaving his glasses behind. Thomas said other students were allowed to correct such infractions after receiving a verbal warning.

The situation came to a head when another boy tripped Thomas' son down the stairs and he grabbed the boy's shirt in response. Thomas understood the out-of-school suspension her son got as a result, she said, but not the three-plus weeks he remained suspended as administrators investigated "crazy accusations" that were later disproved.

Finally, administrators told Thomas that if her son came back, he would be put on a "pre-expulsion plan" where he could be kicked out for any infraction. Rather than risk an expulsion on her son's record, she moved him to another school she said failed to challenge him academically.

"He cried. He told me he was sorry he disappointed me," Thomas said. "He felt like crap. He felt like what (other) kids said was right, that he didn’t belong there."

Great Hearts Superintendent Robert Wagner confirmed Thomas' son attended North Phoenix Prep during the 2016-17 school year but declined to comment on any disciplinary action, citing privacy laws.

"Please know that we, at Great Hearts, are committed to doing everything we can to support every student, at every school, every day," Wagner said in an email to The Republic. "We will reach out to Ms. Thomas about her son."

'We all want safe schools'

Daniel Losen, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Civil Rights Remedies, said fair disciplinary practices are not about excusing misbehavior but about ensuring punishments match offenses.

People think suspensions are all about kids hitting teachers, injuring other students or bringing weapons to school, he said, when those problems make up a small fraction of cases.

"We all want safe schools, good learning environments," Losen said. "There are still way too many schools suspending kids right and left."

In Arizona, schools most commonly cite "defiance" or "failure to comply with an administrator" when giving students in-school or out-of-school suspensions — extremely broad categories that can include leaving a uniform shirt untucked or talking back. Many of those suspensions "address behaviors that could be handled more effectively another way," Losen said, particularly in cases involving students with disabilities who cannot appropriately control their behavior.

Out-of-school suspensions can dramatically affect student performance and graduation rates, experts say, because students miss out on instruction time and instead have time to get into real trouble. If minority kids get out-of-school suspensions at disproportionately high rates, "that means you’re contributing to the racial achievement gap," Losen said.

Several recent studies have concluded minority students are disciplined more not because they misbehave more, but because teachers expect them to misbehave more.

In 2015, Stanford University researchers had teachers review identical narratives describing a student's behavior. When the child had a "black-sounding" name, the teachers were much more likely to recommend a severe punishment.

A 2016 study from the Yale Child Study Center indicated the phenomenon begins as early as preschool. Researchers played videos featuring a group of four children — a white boy, white girl, black boy and black girl — for teachers of various races and asked them to identify signs of potential misbehavior. Tracking technology showed most eyes went to the black boy, even though there were no signs of trouble-making in the videos.

"Biases that even well-meaning teachers have play into different perceptions of identical behavior," Losen said. "All kids do misbehave at one point, but if you’re fixated on the black males, you’re going to be more likely to catch them doing something wrong than if you’re watching everyone equally."

Now what?

The ACLU of Arizona's Demand 2 Learn campaign began privately calling schools' attention to discrepancies in their disciplinary practices earlier this year, according to Ávila, the campaign director.

"Some schools are reacting well, and some are not," he said. "The majority of educators that we talk to are like, ‘This is something we should fix,' but what we keep hearing over and over again is, ‘It’s a system-wide issue.' "

The campaign entered agreements with four charter schools and four districts eager to correct exclusionary discipline practices, Ávila said. Demand 2 Learn will train administrators at those schools; provide technical assistance to help them interpret data; provide national experts to teach them how to measure progress; and discuss policy changes.

Balsz Elementary School District Superintendent Jeff Smith said he signed his district up because "we need to learn" and "we want to help ourselves." Balsz's suspension rate for Latino children in 2013-14 topped 40 percent, despite Latinos making up less than 7 percent of the student population. The suspension rate for white students — 70 percent of the district — was less than 1 percent.

Smith said he expected school officials to be defensive about the disparities at first, because most teachers and principals don't consciously discriminate or want kids to miss school. They're simply trying to maintain order and teach with minimal disruptions, he said.

"It’s … just creating the space for a conversation to say, 'Look at the data, look at the disproportionate discipline across the country, and then look at our schools,' " Smith said. "What are the conditions that we have here that are creating this, or perpetuating this, school-to-prison pipeline?"

Balsz plans to dedicate at least one employee to implementing restorative-justice efforts districtwide, Smith said. The disciplinary approach emphasizes rehabilitation and reconciliation to correct behavior: Students are held accountable and have to face the person they harmed, but suspensions and expulsions are seen as a last resort.

"Restorative justice is the opposite of, ‘Kick out the bad kids so the good kids can learn,'" Losen said. "It’s, ‘You’re all good kids, and we want to understand your behavior so we can help you stop it.' "

Meiners, the Northeastern Illinois professor, said she believes schools must also examine structural factors that could make them "pressure cookers" for heavy discipline.

"Maybe what's happening is this teacher has a 35-student classroom, and she can't have a restorative-justice response to a defiant student because she doesn’t have time and that's not what she's evaluated on," Meiners said. "Conversations about what makes a school strong and safe need to include consideration of class sizes, counselors, culturally relevant curriculum, and teacher backgrounds."

Parents and guardians are another essential part of the equation. The ACLU campaign will offer training for families unsure how to navigate disciplinary action against their children and share a toolkit that outlines what rights they have during the process.

“When we started hearing from parents, they expressed tremendous amount of frustration to us. They were coming to us and saying, ‘I don’t even know how to communicate effectively with my school officials,’ ” said Alessandra Soler, ACLU of Arizona executive director.

“We wanted to give parents the tools and resources to be strong advocates for their children," she said.

School partners

The following schools and school districts will work with the ACLU of Arizona's Demand 2 Learn campaign to minimize exclusionary discipline practices.

Academia del Pueblo

Arizona School for the Arts

Balsz Elementary School District

Fowler Elementary School District

Pendergast Elementary School District

Phoenix Collegiate Academy

Phoenix Union High School District

Vista College Prep

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