Black students in Fort Worth face suspension disproportionately. Could this plan help?
About a year ago, the Dallas Independent School District stopped suspending students for low-level offenses, and instead began sending them to so-called reset centers, rooms on campus that are designed to give them a place to refocus and work through their problems before returning to class.
Now, officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District are contemplating a similar move. The district launched a reset center program at Metro Opportunity High School, Fort Worth ISD’s alternative campus, this year. District officials are also researching how similar programs have played out in other districts across the country, and may launch a broader pilot program next year.
It’s one of a few strategies Fort Worth school leaders hope will help narrow a persistent disparity in suspensions between Black students and their peers. For at least the past decade, nearly half the students suspended in Fort Worth ISD each year have been Black, according to figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education and data released by the district in response to an open records request by the Star-Telegram. Black students generally made up only about 20-25% of the district’s enrollment during that period.
Fort Worth schools are hardly alone: across the country, Black students are more likely to be placed in out-of-school suspension than their white peers. Education researchers say that disparity can lead to major inequities in education, because a single suspension can have a cascading effect that changes a student’s academic trajectory for years afterward.
“It’s really increasingly showing, over and over, that it has very negative effects,” said Anne Gregory, a professor at Rutgers University.
Fort Worth school leaders eye reset center plan
Cherie Washington, the Fort Worth school district’s chief of student support services, said the district’s reset center project is in a planning and research phase. District leaders are looking at how effective such programs have been in other districts with similar demographics to Fort Worth’s, she said. They’re also looking at how much support such a program would need, she said, because the district needs to make sure it doesn’t roll out a program that it won’t be able to sustain.
The district will likely never be able to eliminate suspensions entirely, she said. Principals will always need to be able to remove a student from class as a last resort. But the district needs to balance that reality with better training for teachers and administrators to help them handle classroom behavior issues without kicking students out of school, she said.
Besides piloting the reset program, the district has also tried to work with students with behavior issues this year to find solutions other than suspensions, Washington said. For example, in years past, if students got into a fight, they would be given an automatic disciplinary consequence. Usually that meant the student was suspended, either in school or out of school. Now, if students get into a fight, a school administrator might call them in and talk about what happened. If the fight was the result of a misunderstanding, the administrator might bring in an intervention specialist to talk with the students and to try to resolve the situation without suspending anyone, she said. If the administrator or intervention specialist spots signs that the student is dealing with deeper-seated problems that are causing the behavior, they might connect the student with a counselor or case manager, she said.
That isn’t to say that a fight will no longer result in a suspension, said Jerry Moore, the district’s chief of schools. The change just gives teachers and administrators more leeway to consider the underlying factors that caused the fight, rather than doling out suspensions automatically, he said. That means school leaders have a freer hand to find ways to keep those students in school, while still dealing with problematic behavior, he said.
Ending suspensions is ‘a moral imperative,’ Dallas ISD leader says
Dallas ISD trustees voted in the summer of 2021 to eliminate nearly all suspensions and replace them with referrals to reset centers. District officials said the move would give students a way to work on their behavior without being excluded from school. Like many districts, Dallas ISD struggled for years to address the trend of disproportionate suspensions against Black students. Before the change, nearly 52% of the students the district suspended were Black. But Black students made up only about 21% of the district’s enrollment.
Dallas ISD officials declined interview requests for this story. But when district leaders proposed the move to the school board last year, Vince Reyes, Dallas ISD’s assistant superintendent, told the board that it was critical that the district “does away with an antiquated discipline system — a system that did not work for our students of color, and specifically did not work for our African-American male students.”
“It’s a moral imperative as educators and as human beings, when we look at our data, national, state, local, that we do something different for kids and for schools,” Reyes said.
Dallas school officials describe the change as a wholesale remaking of the district’s discipline policy. The district trained its teachers on how to de-escalate conflicts before they get out of hand, and told them to send students who might otherwise have been suspended to centers to work out their conflicts. The centers are painted in common colors and include seating for conversations in which adults work with students to resolve whatever issues brought them there. District officials told the board that the change would give students the opportunity to work out those issues in a productive way, without the need for them to be kicked off campus.
At the end of the first semester, district officials could point to signs that fewer students were being disciplined after the change. But the disparity in discipline between Black students and their peers persisted: 45% of the students referred to reset centers were Black, compared to just shy of 20% of the district’s enrollment, The Dallas Morning News reported.
Fort Worth Superintendent Angélica Ramsey said part of the solution could be simply talking to teachers about how behavior issues arise. For example, she said, in another district where she worked, leaders noticed that certain long-tenured teachers sent large numbers of students to the principal’s office for using their phones in class. In conversations with those teachers, Ramsey learned that many of them were sending students to the office anytime they looked at their phones to check the time.
“And we had had some conversations about, what about that irritates you so much? And do you realize that they don’t have a watch on and when you told them that they had 15 minutes, they’re really just looking to see how much more time they have left?” she said. “...Sometimes it’s simple as that.”
But, sometimes it isn’t, Ramsey said. The disparity in suspensions is a part of the broader trend of American society criminalizing people of color, she said. Children of some races are allowed to be children, she said, but kids of the same age of different races are treated as adults and expected to behave like them, she said. She thinks teachers and administrators could benefit from better training on recognizing their own implicit biases and keeping them from affecting their relationships with students.
Black students suspended disproportionately for decades
Since the 1970s, research has consistently shown that Black students are overrepresented in-school suspensions nationwide, said Gregory, the Rutgers University professor. There are other similar disparities among other groups, including Native American students and students in special education, she said, but the overrepresentation of Black students is the most extensively documented disparity.
The fact that Black students are overrepresented in school suspensions across the country is a big problem, Gregory said, because a suspension can have “a cascading effect” that alters a student’s academic trajectory. There’s been longitudinal research comparing students who were suspended with students of similar risk profiles who were never suspended, she said. That research suggested that being suspended once can make students more likely to be suspended again or arrested later on, she said.
That could be because of what happens to students while they’re not in school, Gregory said. When students are suspended, they’re likely to be hanging around other kids in their neighborhood who are unmonitored, giving them opportunities to get into more trouble.
Gregory said one big factor could be a cultural misalignment between Black students and their teachers. There’s been research that shows that Black students are less likely to be perceived as disruptive or defiant by Black teachers, she said. But Black teachers make up only about 7% of the nation’s educator workforce, according to the U.S. Department of Education, compared with roughly 15% of students in the nation’s public schools. So Black students are likely to spend most of their educational careers working with teachers of some other race.
Some of the issues are more structural than interpersonal, Gregory said: There’s been research that shows that schools with a higher percentage of Black students are less likely to have leaders who take a more supportive approach to discipline, more likely to have high levels of police presence and surveillance, and more likely to have school leaders who take a zero-tolerance approach to discipline. Other studies have shown that Black students are more likely to be suspended when they attend a school with higher concentrations of other Black students, she said.
But school leadership can make a big difference in the culture and climate of a campus, Gregory said. In schools where principals are focused on using counseling and prevention and intervention strategies to handle discipline, Black students are less likely to be suspended, she said.
There’s extensive evidence that the use of such restorative practices in schools can help reduce out-of-school suspensions overall, Gregory said. Research showing that those practices can reduce racial disparities in suspensions is scanter, she said, but there is some evidence suggesting it might help.
Gregory pointed to a 2018 study published by the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit think tank based in California, that showed that the implementation of restorative practices in campuses in the Pittsburgh school district helped to reduce the number of suspensions overall, but also helped shrink the disparity in suspensions between Black and white students, as well as the disparity between low-income and more affluent students. The change also helped improve school climate, as measured in questionnaires administered to teachers, according to the study.
Denver schools shift to restorative practices
It’s a model the Denver school district adopted at some of its schools more than a decade ago. The change started small, with one principal implementing restorative practices at a single school in the district, said Jay Grimm, the district’s director of the whole child. Today, restorative practices are a major component of the district’s discipline code.
Under the restorative practices model, schools focus less on handing down punishments when students misbehave and more on resolving underlying issues that lead to bad behavior. Historically, when students acted out, teachers sent them to the principal’s office, where they’d receive some sort of punishment. Under the new model, teachers and students are encouraged to have conversations about what caused the conflict and how their behavior affects each other.
Grimm said the district expanded those efforts in 2017, when it received a grant from the Colorado Department of Education to create a cohort of 15 campuses focused on restorative practices. The grant coincided with a resolution passed by the Denver school board stating that the district would become trauma-informed. Among other things, that change meant that teachers received training on how to support students who’d been exposed to trauma.
During the two years covered by the grant, those 15 schools saw a decline in overall suspensions, but an even larger decline in suspensions among Black students, Grimm said. In those schools, the district reduced suspensions by 64% overall, and 78% among Black students, he said.
The program has grown since then, Grimm said. Today, most schools in the district have a restorative practices coordinator, he said. As the program has expanded, the overrepresentation of Black students in the district suspension numbers has continued to tighten, he said. But it hasn’t gone away entirely, he said.
“We still continue to battle that disparity and that disproportionality,” he said.
‘It has a lot of promise.’
Rachel Perera, a government studies fellow in The Brookings Institution’s Brown Center for Education Policy, said the results of other restorative justice programs in school districts around the country haven’t been encouraging up to this point. Those programs have been successful in reducing suspensions overall, but there hasn’t been strong evidence to show that they can tighten disparities in suspensions between Black students and their peers.
Still, Perera said the model shows promise. She suspects most of those programs have been evaluated before they’ve been given enough time to be effective. One of the biggest challenges in implementing an effective program is that the model requires a cultural shift in schools that takes a concerted effort over the course of several years, she said. The model represents a major departure from how teachers and school administrators have thought about discipline in the past, she said, and not everyone will be on board with the change immediately.
Perera said one of the key components to an effective restorative justice program is professional development for teachers and school administrators that focuses on racial equity. Those disparities are a product of structural racism, she said, so any efforts to correct that problem need to take racism into account.
“Without that, it can be very hard to imagine that that type of program would be successful,” she said.
Whether a district maintains a continued focus on racial equity during its implementation of a restorative justice program can be a major determining factor in that program’s success or failure, Perera said. She pointed to a study released this year in which researchers at the University of California, Irvine looked at the effects of a restorative justice program in an unnamed large urban district in the western United States.
The study found that, as the district lost focus on the racial equity underpinnings behind the program, its benefits began to be concentrated among white students, while disciplinary outcomes for Black students remained largely unchanged. Although the district saw fewer suspensions overall, the gap in suspensions between Black and white students actually widened, according to the study. If districts hope to use restorative justice programs to narrow racial gaps in discipline, that goal must remain the focus of implementation, professional development and evaluation of the program, Perera said.
One of the key things for districts to understand before implementing a restorative justice program is that it’s a years-long commitment, Perera said. Because of the cultural shifts required, It may take five or six years before those problems are effective, she said. That means that district leaders need to maintain focus on those programs, even as other district priorities shift over the years.
“I think that with the right leadership, it has a lot of promise,” she said. “It has a lot of promise under the right conditions, and with the right amount of time.”
