Education Research Report: Pennsylvania School Districts Removing Students at an Alarming Rate

Education Research Report: Pennsylvania School Districts Removing Students at an Alarming Rate:

Pennsylvania School Districts Removing Students at an Alarming Rate

Pennsylvania’s 500 public school districts have dramatically increased their reliance on disciplinary practices that result in students being removed from school over the past 15 years, creating an educational crisis that goes far beyond the state’s largest school system in Philadelphia, a new study shows.
Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discipline and Policing in Pennsylvania Public Schools, published by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, represents a ground-breaking analysis that for the first time aggregates data from across the state for all major forms of school discipline. The research clearly shows a dramatic disparity in the treatment of black and Latino students and students with disabilities.
“Our report is intended to spark discussion within school communities and policy-making circles about what works best to create a healthy and safe school climate, not to point fingers,” states the ACLU’s Harold Jordan, author of the report. “A critical examination of school discipline data and discipline practices is a first step.”
In just the 2011-12 academic year alone, school districts issued more than 166,000 out-of-school suspensions, a rate of 10 suspensions per 100 students. Many students were suspended multiple times. Some 1,808 students were expelled from school, and 5,261 students were arrested by police. A school district’s size did not correlate with the high discipline rates.
York City School District (York County) led the state in its out-of-school suspension rate of 91.4 suspensions per 100 students, followed by Allegheny County districts Sto-Rox, Woodland Hills, Wilkinsburg Borough and Pittsburgh. Donegal School District (Lancaster County) led the state with its expulsion rate, 1.33 expulsions per 100 students, followed by Wilkinsburg Borough, Lebanon (Lebanon County), Cocalico