California students with unstable home environments most likely to be suspended, new study shows

Across California, two groups of children living among the most difficult environments — foster youth and those experiencing homelessness — are also the most likely to be sent home through punitive, out-of-school suspensions, new research shows.

That’s according to the UCLA Civil Rights Project and the Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law, which published a report Monday examining suspension data throughout the state. In 2021-22, the report found that California educators punished students who are in foster care with out-of-school suspensions at the highest rate: for every 100 foster students, 77 days of instruction were lost due to out-of-school suspensions, compared to an average of just 10 days for all students.

Homeless students were the second most likely to be suspended, with 26 days lost per 100 students. Despite the high figures, those numbers actually represent a slight drop from before the pandemic. In 2018-19, the year before COVID-19 drove students from the classroom, homeless students lost 28.5 days of school due to suspensions while foster students lost 83.

The study mirrors concerns outlined in a newly passed state law, one that aims to keep disruptive youth in the classroom by banning suspensions that send children home from school. Doing so, critics say, disproportionally impact students from marginalized groups.

“School administrators need to ask themselves what educational or community benefit is achieved when we punish homeless and foster children by sending them home,” said Ramon Flores, a PhD candidate in education at UCLA and co-author of the report. “For homeless and foster youth, when they are suspended out of school, the consequences may be grave.”

Lost instruction time soared higher when race was thrown into the mix. Across every demographic, the study found that Black students were suspended at disproportionate rates — Black foster youth, for example, lost 121 days of instruction per every 100 students enrolled in 2021-22, compared to 77 days lost for the average foster child.

“That’s not an educational decision. That’s purely a punishment,” said Dan Losen, co-author of the report and former director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA.

The study surveyed the 20 largest districts in the state, including San Francisco and Oakland Unified. Those Bay Area districts’ suspension rates were lower than the state average, with an average of 5.6 and 9.9 days lost in 2021-22 respectively. The Los Angeles Unified School District — the largest in the state — had the lowest rates of all, at just .7 days lost to out-of-school suspensions for all its students.

Losen attributed the low number to both the district’s longstanding policy against disruptive behavior suspensions and an overall buy-in from principals and school staff at LAUSD. Even so, things at the Southern California district are far from perfect: Los Angeles Unified has a much higher rate than the state does for referral to law enforcement, Losen said.

Though the San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles Unified school districts have all banned such suspensions for at least eight years, the two Bay Area districts registered higher rates of days lost per 100 students. San Francisco and Oakland also saw much higher rates of suspensions for minority students, with Black youth at San Francisco Unified, for example, losing 30.6 days in 2021-22 — five times higher than the average for all the district’s students.

Oakland Unified’s rate of lost instruction was nearly the same as the state’s, despite having banned suspensions for disruptive behavior since 2015. For Black students at OUSD, the study found that the rate of lost instruction per 100 children nearly tripled.

Similar patterns occurred throughout the Bay Area. Alameda’s New Haven Unified, for example, held the fifth-highest rate statewide for lost instruction specifically among Black students — 88.5 days as opposed to the student average of 10.2. San Lorenzo Unified, also in Alameda, and Morgan Hill Unified, in Santa Clara, ranked number 19 and 20, with lost instruction among Black students more than four times that of the average child in either district.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that would ban suspensions for low-level behavioral issues across all California schools, expanding policies like LAUSD’s across the state. Since 2019, so-called “willful defiance” suspensions have been prohibited for children in Transitional Kindergarten through 8th grade — and the new piece of legislation, which was authored by Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), expands the ban to students through grade 12.

Though the bill allows teachers to remove a student for difficult behavior, beginning next July, educators will not be able to suspend students for being unruly. Instead, school administrators must determine in-school interventions or support for the student instead of sending them home.

“Suspending students, no matter the age, doesn’t improve student behavior, and it greatly increases the likelihood that the student will fail or drop out,” Skinner said in a statement after the legislation was signed.