When you discover that a system has managed to circumvent its own regulations, you experience a specific type of frustration that gradually intensifies. That’s about how you feel after reading this recent Stanford research study. On paper, California’s public school suspension rates are declining. The data appears promising. However, researchers who investigated a discipline reform program in San Francisco classrooms returned with quite different findings.
The Shoestrings initiative was created with sincere intent. It was introduced by the San Francisco Unified School District following state sanctions for the district’s disproportionately high suspension rates among Black students.
| Topic Overview: Informal Exclusionary Discipline in U.S. Schools | |
|---|---|
| Study Title | Informal Exclusionary Discipline in Early Childhood Education |
| Published In | AERA Open — Journal of the American Educational Research Association |
| Lead Researcher | Jelena Obradović, Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education |
| Co-Author | Lily Steyer, Director of Child Policy, Clinton Foundation |
| Focus District | San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) |
| Program Studied | Shoestrings — Early Childhood Discipline Reform Program |
| Key Finding | Schools are replacing formal suspensions with undocumented informal removal tactics |
| Most Affected Group | Black preschool and K–12 students |
| Suspension Disparity | Black students are 3.6x more likely to be suspended out of school than white students |
| States with Suspension Bans | At least 17 states, including California (preschool ban enacted 2022) |
| Corporal Punishment | Still legal in 22 U.S. states |
| Related Research | UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Sean Darling-Hammond & Eric Ho, U.S. Dept. of Education |
| Policy Concern | Federal guidelines protecting students from racially biased discipline were rescinded in 2018 |
Correction, accountability, and genuine change were the objectives. The Stanford team’s analysis of that program, which was published in AERA Open, revealed that while the number of suspensions was declining, the kids weren’t truly attending class. Parents who had received quiet phone calls were picking them up early, sending them to the hallways, and giving them to non-teaching staff. Nothing was recorded in writing. State data did not display any of it.
According to a school employee who was interviewed for the study, schools are “so scared of having bad suspension data, especially for African American students” that teachers turn to “clever” forms of exclusion, or removals that wouldn’t be formally recorded as suspension or expulsion. Hearing someone say it aloud is amazing. There’s a feeling that a lot of people in these schools are aware of what’s going on and have determined that appearances of compliance are more important than actual compliance.
Three general patterns can be found in the informal practices that the researchers found. Some take place in the classroom itself, such as when a child is kept behind while classmates go to lunch, told to sit in the back, or excluded from activities. Others take place inside the school, where pupils are placed with non-teaching staff members or sent to the hallways. Then there are the out-of-school removals, which include quiet transfers to different schools, early pickups, and shortened schedules. They all have the same impact as a formal suspension. They don’t have the paperwork.
The larger national research that goes along with this makes it more difficult to write it off as a local peculiarity. Using the most recent federal education data, Sean Darling-Hammond of UC Berkeley and statistician Eric Ho conducted a separate study that looked at punishment in almost every quantifiable way, including expulsions, in-school and out-of-school suspensions, law enforcement referrals, school-based arrests, and corporal punishment. Black students received substantially more punishment than their white counterparts in every single category.
The ratios of disparity are not subtle. The likelihood of a school suspension was 3.6 times higher for black students. They were 15.3 times more likely to be physically punished in alternative schools. Black students were 7.8 times more likely to be expelled from wealthier schools, where fewer than 25% of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. These figures do not represent a system that is inadvertently drifting. They propose something more rigid and structural.
As the father of two Black sons, Darling-Hammond said that facing this information was truly agonizing. He pointed out that preschoolers are in a stage where their growing nervous systems require, above all, a sense of inclusion and acceptance. He describes it as “truly heart wrenching” to witness such stark patterns of exclusion at that age, before a child has even learned to read. When you think about what early removal from a learning environment actually entails—lower academic achievement, decreased school connectedness, significantly higher odds of dropping out, and a measurably higher likelihood of future juvenile and adult incarceration—it’s difficult not to feel the weight of that.
Darling-Hammond noted that despite years of state and district-level policies meant to lessen the disparities, the federal guidelines that once provided some structural protection against racially biased school discipline were repealed in 2018. Perhaps the most honest thing about this research is that it doesn’t fully address the question of whether those policies were ever actually enforced or if schools just got more inventive in their workarounds. Darling-Hammond is not without hope, though. The same study that presented the disparity data also raised awareness of effective ways to lessen it. The issue is not considered resolved. It is handled urgently. At the very least, that distinction seems like a good place to start.
