Do Charter Schools With Extreme Disciplinary Measures Cluster in Black Communities?

Shanice Givens’s son, Cyrus, was 6 when administrators at his charter school, Success Academy in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, put him on a list of students they wanted to push out. “They’d suspend him for not having on shoes, for not having his shirt tucked, for going to the bathroom,” says Givens. “So he lost courage and a will to want to do better.”

According to Givens, Cyrus was suspended 30 times that school year. Success Academy spokesperson Ann Powell says the kindergartner was suspended only seven times. Either way, that’s a lot of suspensions for a 6-year-old. Today, city leaders are increasingly pushing to reform school discipline practices to minimize suspensions for students like Cyrus, heeding calls from activists and researchers who say excessive discipline can fuel rises in student dropout rates and push young people into the criminal justice system.

In 2014, Boston mandated that suspensions and expulsions be treated as a last resort, and that such decisions must come with guaranteed due process for students and their families. Last year, Washington, D.C., passed a bill that would prevent schools from expelling or suspending pre-kindergartners, with some exceptions for classroom violence. And New York City is now pushing to ban suspensions entirely from kindergarten through second grade, albeit with some potential loopholes.

But data from these school districts indicate that one major factor may be undermining these reform efforts: charter schools.