Last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on school discipline, and the role of race and disability in student suspensions. The report found that students with disabilities are about twice as likely to be suspended when compared to students without disabilities. While one of the Commissioners made the statement that students’ disabilities make them more prone to misbehavior, we need to dig much deeper to make sense of the Commission’s findings. What follows are ten likely reasons for the significant gap noted in this report.
- Old-fashioned in-your-face discrimination by teachers and staff toward students with disabilities. My bet is that many teachers are unaware that they do in fact discriminate for no good reason. And unfortunately, many disabled students find it difficult to advocate for themselves and if they do, school personnel may not listen.
- Structural discrimination. For instance, a school or classroom might not be appropriate for students with disabilities.
- Lack of classroom support. What is the ration of disabled students to teachers and teacher aides? Given the numbers, is this a ratio that makes student success unlikely?
- Lack of well-trained teachers and aides, meaning they don’t have the awareness, understanding, and skills they absolutely need.
- Unrealistic rules and expectations. For example, how about the expectation that our son Jimmy, who has autism, would sit in his seat for an hour, much less a half-hour?
- Through no fault of their own, some disabled students don’t know the rules or can’t understand and follow them. For instance, if a teacher repeatedly told Jimmy to get in a circle, he would repeatedly get in the middle of the circle.
- Disabled students may get into trouble because of other students. For instance, some are taken advantage of and bullied into bad behaviors. A young boy with an intellectual disability might pull down his pants at school because someone told him to do it. The child, while breaking the rules, might do this out of fear, for acceptance, or simply because he doesn’t know any better.
- Having a child with a disability in one’s classroom can be challenging and even exhausting. Suspension might be the easy way out for a teacher who’s “had it.”
- Teachers may feel unable to control a child with a disability because they don’t know what to do.
- In certain situations, a disabled student’s behavior can be frightening to staff, particularly if they don’t know enough about the nature of the disability.
Closing the discipline gap between those with and without disabilities will not be easy by any means. It will take considerable resources, training, parental involvement, and strong leadership.
Please note: I recently finished a book that applies the latest research on autism to our family’s journey over more than four decades. My son Jimmy is a middle-aged adult on the autism spectrum. The voices and perspectives of my son, my wife and two daughters as well as friends and professionals are included throughout. It’s a real, uplifting, and remarkable story; one which I have wanted to share for a long time. Both the print and Kindle version of this book are now available. Profits will go to Linwood Center, an internationally recognized program whose mission is to create extraordinary lives for children and adults with autism (see https://www.facebook.com/RichardDBucherPh.D).
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These are important insights. Thank you for sharing them. While the suspension gap is an enormously important problem, I question whether suspension helps students at all. I am particularly concerned with its impact on children with disabilities, but suspect that there also may be costs for typically developing students. What message does it send to students who struggle at school? Do these students return to school better equipped to handle frustrations and social challenges? How does suspension impact families who are under a great deal of stress? Are there more proactive ways of addressing behavioral problems?
You raise some critical points. Obviously, the term disability covers so much ground, as does autism. Wonder if there’s any research that sheds light on the effects of suspending students with specific disabilities.