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A new national report on suspension rates finds that in 2006, more than half of black middle school students in Milwaukee Public Schools were suspended at least once during the school year, about twice the rate of white students. In the 18 urban school districts studied in detail, black female students at MPS were suspended at a much higher rate than in any other district, and black male students were suspended at a higher rate in only one other district.

“If you’re suspending more than half of your black males, you have a crisis,” says Daniel Losen, a researcher and attorney at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project and a co-author of the study for the Southern Poverty Law Center. At MPS, he says, “The rates are outrageous.” The report focuses on middle school students, it says, because those grades appear to be an important formative period for students.

According to MPS, the district began implementing programs in 2008, two years after the data used in this new report, to reduce the number of suspensions in the district after an earlier report by the Council of Great City Schools drew attention to the problem. The Council, a national organization representing urban districts, including MPS, called on the district to “mobilize to meet this challenge” and find alternatives to suspension, which disrupts a student’s education.

The heart of the district’s response (as recommended by the Council) is a new nationally-recommended program called “Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports” that teaches and rewards good conduct instead of punishing bad behavior. MPS piloted the program in 30 schools in the 2009-2010 school year and is rolling it out in 110 schools (out of 184) this fall. MPS says it’s already seeing benefits in schools that have implemented the program, including a decline in suspensions.

Despite the effort, however, the percentage of black, male middle school students suspended at least once during the school year has actually increased from 51 percent in 2006 to 56 percent in 2010. The only bright spot: The total number of suspensions given to that group of students actually dropped 32 percent, according to John Hill, student services coordinator with the MPS Office of Family Services and the point person for the Positive Behavior program.

High rates decline

The Southern Poverty Law Center study reviewed suspension rates for six groups of middle school students – black males, black females, Hispanic males, Hispanic females, white males and white females. For suspension rates (percentage suspended at least once in a year), Milwaukee ranked at or near the top in all groups among the 18 urban districts studied. In the years since 2006, however, MPS reports significant declines among all the groups except black and white males. (White males increased from 22 percent in 2006 to 25 percent in 2010.)

The study found that both nationally and in Milwaukee, female middle school students of all races saw some of the greatest increases in suspensions between 2002 and 2006. But at MPS schools, in the years following 2006, the female students have experienced the greatest reductions. The rate for black females declined from 52 in 2006 to 43 percent in 2010. Among Hispanic females, the rate slid from 21 to 17 percent. And among white females, it dropped from 27 to 11 percent.

But even though suspension rates have been declining steadily, MPS would probably still rank higher than most other cities nationally.

Reasons offered for the persistent gap between students of different races are varied. Losen says minority students may be enrolled in schools that have fewer resources and less access to the training and administrative support that help teachers deal with behavior problems before they escalate to suspensions. Losen, a former elementary school teacher, says training reduced the rate at which he sent kids to the principal’s office from daily to almost never. “As a new teacher, I was sending kids to the principal’s office right and left,” he says.

A tendency to react more strongly when black students act out may also be playing a role in the gap, he says. “We have to understand there is a less than conscious bias about black students and black males in particular,” he says. “Maybe questions need to be asked and teachers should reflect on their practices.”

Hill says in response to the gap, “There are theories out there, but I don’t know if there’s a specific answer.” He says the district is working on reducing suspension rates for all students. “We want them all in school.”

Encouraging positive behavior

Like most districts that implement the Positive Behavior program, MPS is gradually rolling it out over the course of three to five years. So far, the program has only been partially implemented in the 30 schools that piloted it last year (a mix of high, middle and elementary schools). Hill says half of them are already seeing decreases in suspensions.

Hill says most have seen their attendance levels improve or stay the same, an improvement over past trends of declines. “We want to end the trends headed the wrong way. For some schools, staying the same was a success story,” he says.

Much of the reduction in suspensions since 2006 appears to be coming from the district following the Council’s recommendations to reduce the “energy being devoted to numerous minor infractions.” The Council found that MPS, at the time, was routinely suspending students for three days for relatively minor offenses.

There are three categories of suspensions tracked by MPS – weapons violations, personal/physical safety violations and learning environment violations. Between 2008 and 2010, among all grade levels, suspensions from learning environment violations (such as disruptive behavior) dropped from 71 percent of all suspensions to about 61 percent.

“We started to see some schools change the way they were doing business,” Hill says.

Losen says the results are encouraging, but he still argues that a more aggressive response is needed to reduce MPS suspension rates. Nationally, in 2006, 14.7 percent of male students were suspended at least once from middle schools, along with 7.5 percent of female students. Other urban districts studied had fewer suspensions. Dallas and Baltimore ranked last in black male suspension rates with 20 percent each.

The 18 districts studied in detail were chosen as a geographically representative sampling, according to Losen. Milwaukee, along with Des Moines and Indianapolis, which also ranked high in the suspension of blacks, but not as high as Milwaukee, stood in for the Midwest.

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