Suspension and Expulsion: District Reports

Where is the data in these reports from?

These reports are based on information from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). DESE annually collects data on discipline in all public and charter schools across the state and, upon request, shares that data with advocacy organizations, including CfJJ. The DESE discipline data describes two things: (1) the total number of students who were enrolled at a school, and (2) the number of students who were suspended or expelled. It provides these two numbers for the overall school population, for individual racial groups, genders, and other identities, and for the intersections of multiple identities (i.e African American students with disabilities).

CfJJ has published reports for all districts whose enrollment in 2022 was at least 5,000 students, but you can request a report for your district using the contact information below.

When students are suspended or expelled, how many days of school do they miss?

We only have data for 2023. That year, a student who was suspended or expelled missed an average of 5.4 days, or over one week, of school. But there are disparities in how severe suspensions are. On average, African American students, Hispanic/Latino students, and students with multiracial identities were excluded from school for a day longer than their peers.

Why is suspending or expelling students harmful?

From an educational perspective, the disruption of missing even one day of school can set students behind across all subjects and make it hard for them to get back on track. When a student misses an entire week of school, the effects are enormous.

From a legal perspective, students are twice as likely to be arrested while they are suspended or expelled from school, regardless of whether they have a history of involvement with the juvenile legal system.

From a societal perspective, studies find that overuse of suspension and expulsion leads to worse educational outcomes, lower rates of high school graduation and college enrollment, and more frequent involvement in the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems. See, for example, Andrew Bacher-Hicks et al., The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime (NBER Working Paper 26257, 2020).

Are these disparities the result of bias?

Yes. In the 2022-23 school year, almost half of all suspensions and expulsions were for incidents that, according to school data, did not involve violence, drugs, or criminal behavior. This means that many suspensions are for minor incidents that are handled at the discretion of school leadership and staff.

Some people might think that the different rates of discipline by race are the result of students of certain races engaging in more disruptive behavior. This theory has repeatedly been proved wrong by national studies. See, for example, Russell J. Skiba et al., Race Is Not Neutral: A National Investigation of African American and Latino Disproportionality in School Discipline, 40 School Psych. Rev. 85 (2011).

To understand how school officials use their discretion, it is helpful to look at a recent study. Principals and assistant principals were given a hypothetical referral where a student had committed a disciplinary offense. But the imaginary students’ names signaled different ethnic backgrounds, such as “Greg” or “Darnell.” Principals and assistant principals rated the behavior as more severe when the imaginary student had a Black-sounding name, and they gave those students more days of suspension. See Shoshana Jarvis & Jason Okonofua, School Deferred: When Bias Affects School Leaders, 11 Social Psychological & Personality Science 492 (2020).

How can you use these reports?

The information contained in these reports is a powerful tool for students, parents and community members who want to advocate against the overuse or disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline and harmful policies and practice that encourage these approaches in their local school districts. These reports provide information that can be used to explain to decision makers that your child, and others who are similarly situated, are being treated in an inequitable manner, or to make the case that your school district needs to adopt policies and change practices to prevent exclusionary practices that disproportionately hamper the education of certain cohorts of students. These reports can also be a valuable resource for school district leaders and decision makers in assessing disciplinary practices in schools and determining where there is a need to revisit policies and practices to address and eliminate bias and determine areas of needed action moving forward.