Every time educators suspend students from school, they must select a formal reason, according to The Hechinger Report.
In Texas, they have 42 options to pick from — fighting, school-related gang violence, even arson. Despite those choices, 88 percent of suspensions in Texas last year were marked in state reports as a “violation of student code of conduct” with no additional detail.
That’s more than a million suspensions last school year alone.
Many states have these nebulous categories, designed for behavior that isn’t captured by another, more specific, reason set by their departments of education. These categories are often used at high — and potentially problematic — rates. Texas districts reported the highest number of these vague suspensions, but a review of five years of data across 15 other states for which The Hechinger Report obtained data showed school officials citing a broad category such as “other” nearly a million times when suspending students.
School discipline experts warn that these ambiguous categories lack guardrails and can be used to justify suspensions for any misconduct, including minor infractions. They’re often available in addition to other subjective options such as willful defiance and insubordination, yet are even more indefinite, further obscuring why students are kicked out of school.
In Texas, the catchall category — a “violation of student code of conduct” — captures almost 9 out of every 10 suspensions. In Mississippi, the similarly imprecise category of “noncriminal behavior” accounts for 3 out of every 4 — 232,000 out of a total of 303,000 suspensions over five years. In Indiana, Alabama and Vermont, a similarly broad category accounted for more than a quarter of all suspensions in that time.
In all these states, there are at least 25 more clearly defined categories of suspensions, such as fighting, stalking and sexual misconduct.
The Hechinger Report
