Closing the School Discipline Gap: Equitable Remedies for Excessive Exclusion

Educators remove over 3.45 million students from school annually for disciplinary reasons, despite strong evidence that school suspension policies are harmful to students. The research presented in this volume demonstrates that disciplinary policies and practices that schools control directly exacerbate today’s profound inequities in educational opportunity and outcomes. Part I explores how suspensions flow along the lines of race, gender, and disability status. Part II examines potential remedies that show great promise, including a district-wide approach in Cleveland, Ohio, aimed at social and emotional learning strategies.

Closing the School Discipline Gap is a call for action that focuses on an area in which public schools can and should make powerful improvements, in a relatively short period of time.

Book Features:

Shows the academic and social costs of excessive disciplinary exclusion. Examines school policies and practices that lead generations of African-American and Latino youth into the school-to-prison pipeline. Offers evidence-based interventions for reducing excessive and disparate out-of-school suspensions. Connects the research presented to real changes that can be made to federal, state, and district policies.

Contributors include Robert Balfanz, Jamilia Blake, Dewey Cornell, Jeremy D. Finn, Thalia Gonzalez, Anne Gregory, Daniel J. Losen, David M. Osher, Russell J. Skiba, Ivory A. Toldson.