Report – The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School

Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School, by Daniel J. Losen and Jonathan Gillespie. August 2012. The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at The Civil Rights Project at UCLA

  • “Well over three million children, K-12, are estimated to have lost instructional “seat time” in 2009-2010 because they were suspended from school, often with no guarantee of adult supervision outside the school. That’s about the number of children it would take to fill every seat in every major league baseball park and every NFL stadium in America, combined. Besides the obvious loss of time in the classroom, suspensions matter because they are among the leading indicators of whether a child will drop out of school, and because out of- school suspension increases a child’s risk for future incarceration. Given these increased risks, what we don’t know about the use of suspensions may be putting our children’s futures (and our economy) in jeopardy. Furthermore, the high risk of getting suspended is not borne equally by all students, which raises civil rights issues and questions about fundamental fairness. This report will demonstrate that, while children from every racial group can be found to have a high risk for suspension in some school districts, African American children and children with disabilities are usually at a far greater risk than others.”
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