Education News – Kristin Decarr
“A newly-released report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project suggests that suspensions of high school students across the country are costing the nation a total of $35 billion each year. The report, “The High Cost of Harsh Discipline and Its Disparate Impact,” found that suspensions in only one year of school, the 10th grade, were responsible for 67,000 students dropping out of high school. The authors suggest that in the end, that statistic raises the total cost to the nation above $35 billion. In total, 71% of tenth graders who were suspended at least once in the 2001-02 school year ended up graduating two years later. Meanwhile, 94% of sophomores who were not in any sort of serious trouble in the same time frame graduated on time, marking a 23 percentage point difference. Estimates suggest that 16% of tenth graders received a suspension in the period studied, with the estimated economic cost around $35.74 billion.”(more)