Education Week - January 16, 2013 - 6

EDUCATION WEEK

JANUARY 16, 2013

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Fla. Data Link Suspension to Lower Graduation Rates
Just one removal
raises academic risk
By Nirvi Shah
Washington

About three-fourths of Florida
9th graders who were never suspended out of school as freshmen
graduated from high school, compared with a 52 percent graduation
rate for those suspended once and a
38 percent rate for those suspended
twice in their first high school year,
an analysis has found.
Often, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found, students
suspended also were failing courses
and absent for other reasons.
While there has been a push, especially in recent years, to cut outof-school suspensions, the findings

suggest that changing discipline
policies to curb suspensions alone
isn’t a sure way to improve student
achievement or graduation rates,
said Robert Balfanz, the co-director
of the university’s Everyone Graduates Center in Baltimore and the
study’s lead author.
Schools must find ways to motivate students who aren’t engaged
in their learning, he said, and intervene when students miss a lot
of school, misbehave, and perform
poorly in class—all of which are
early warning signs that a student
may drop out.
“We need a more holistic answer
to this problem than ‘suspend fewer
kids,’” Mr. Balfanz said.
The study, discussed last week at
a national conference about the effects of disciplinary policies that remove students from school, looked
at nearly 182,000 Florida students

who were 9th graders during the
2000-01 school year and followed
their educational trajectories
through 2008-09.
“We knew from a lot of the other
work that’s been done recently that
lots of kids get suspended,” Mr. Balfanz said.
Of the Florida students, 27 percent were suspended at least once
in 9th grade. And the study, like
many others on the issue of outof-school suspension, found that
black students, special education
students, and low-income students
were disproportionately affected by
the disciplinary measure.
“We wanted to figure out what
are the consequences of that common occurrence,” Mr. Balfanz
added. “What we found that did
surprise us a little bit: Even one
suspension matters.”
And the effects appear to be

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Although the research focused
on students in Florida, Mr. Balfanz
said he believes the results are representative of the entire nation.
Jadine Johnson, a staff lawyer for
the Southern Poverty Law Center,
which is based in Montgomery, Ala.,
agreed. A 2009 study by the Public
Affairs Research Council of Alabama found that one out-of-school
suspension for a 9th grader in the

Mobile, Ala., public schools was also
an indication that a student might
drop out of school.
“It is happening all across the
country. [Mr. Balfanz’s] research
just reflects that,” Ms. Johnson said.
T h e l aw c e n t e r s u e d t h e
63,000-student Mobile district in
2011 over long-term suspensions of
students that the organization says
were handed down without following due process. A trial is scheduled
to begin in federal court in August.
The new research, she said,
shows that “the impacts of suspension, particularly for 9th grade students, cannot be overstated.”
“As districts continue to work on
graduation rates, they have to look
at suspension rates,” Ms. Johnson
added, as well as why students are
being suspended and how they are
being suspended.
The Jan. 10 conference included

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long-lasting: A larger percentage
of students who had never been
suspended as freshmen enrolled
in postsecondary coursework. And
students who went to college who
had never been suspended completed, on average, four terms in
college, compared with slightly less
than two college terms by students
suspended once.

Ten to 15 years after leaving
neighborhoods of concentrated
poverty, children of the Moving to
Opportunity program are in most
ways no better off than their
peers who stayed put. But new
findings from the ongoing study
of their urban communities suggest more comprehensive schoolneighborhood improvement initiatives stand a better chance of
breaking the cycle of poverty.
The latest studies on the research project, which were presented at the annual conference
of the American Economic Association here, find that removing children from concentrated
poverty boosts their parents’
sense of well-being, but by itself
doesn’t increase children’s reading or mathematics achievement
or the likelihood that they will
be on track to graduate from
high school or be employed as
adults. Even children who moved
before age 6, considered a critical period for brain development,
showed no academic benefits
from moving to higher-income
neighborhoods.
“The federal government
spends billions every year trying
to mix people up” through housing vouchers and other programs,
said Janet M. Currie, a professor
of economics and public affairs at
Princeton University in New Jersey and the director of its Center
for Health and Well-Being. Yet,
she added, “there’s this incredibly persistent sense that there
is still little opportunity for people in low-income neighborhoods,
leading to the cycles of poverty.”
Ms. Currie, who was not involved
in Moving to Opportunity, commented on the studies presented
at the conference, all of which

drew on data from the long-running project.
Lawrence F. Katz, an economics
professor at Harvard University,
and fellow Harvard economist
Roland G. Fryer Jr. are just starting to use some of that data to
separately explore how community and school improvements
work together to support student
achievement.
Mr. Katz is analyzing how school
and neighborhood interventions
affect children’s ability to, in Mr.
Katz’s words, “achieve escape velocity, breaking the persistence
of intergenerational poverty and
moving people from poor families
and poor neighborhoods to better
long-run outcomes.”
For example, New York City’s
Harlem Children’s Zone, which
combines school improvement
programs with neighborhood
engagement, community health,
and other supports, did improve
students’ academic achievement.
“We’re getting findings [from
Moving to Opportunity] that show
improving school quality for poor
kids definitely affects their longrun outcomes,” Mr. Katz said.

Adult Peace of Mind
The Moving to Opportunity for
Fair Housing program provided
vouchers for more than 4,600
low-income families in Baltimore,
Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles,
and New York to move to wealthier neighborhoods between 1994
and 1998.
The program did reduce the
concentration of poverty for
families, both in a seven-year
follow-up study and in the latest
report. After moving, the average
family lived in a neighborhood
with half the poverty rate of
its previous neighborhood.
Moreover, the families generally
moved to neighborhoods with

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Education Week - January 16, 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 16, 2013