Highs and Lows: Black student expulsion rates in Illinois schools

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Reginald Hardwick: From Illinois Soul, this is Dialogue. I'm Reginald Hardwick. Dialogue is an exchange about culture straight from the soul. Schools across the United States remove Black students from class at higher rates than other students, and that's true in Illinois where our investigation showed some schools suspend Black students much more often than others. In a few minutes you'll hear where Champaign and Urbana school districts fare on disciplining Black students. But first we take you to a Rockford middle school that is an outlier. It hands out the most discipline violations per Black student of any school in the state. Peter Medlin of NPR station WNIJ reports.

[00:00:58]
Peter Medlin: It's graduation day for Brothers for Change, a new mentorship program in Rockford public schools led by the district's Black male leaders like Prentiss Ragland. He's the assistant principal at West Middle School. It started with identifying children that maybe oftentimes find themselves the farthest away from the metrics in terms of behavior, attendance, grades, and socio-emotional well-being for all types of circumstances. Students smile with their certificates in West Gymnasium, where after the ceremony, teams of Rockford teachers will face off in a basketball game to raise money for the program.

Brothers for Change is one of the ways the district says it's trying to reduce discipline problems, particularly for Black students. They're overdisciplined everywhere, but Kennedy Middle School in Rockford stands out. It's a small school on the city's west side where over 90% of students are low-income. And if you look at three major forms of discipline — in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions — Kennedy not only has the highest discipline rate per Black student of any school in Illinois, it is more than twice as high as the next school on the [list].

And what's really driving that at Kennedy are in-school suspensions, when instead of being sent home, students are removed from the regular classroom but spend the day or parts of multiple days in an in-school suspension room. Kennedy has fewer than 400 students, but last year those students received 193 out-of-school suspensions and 1,780 in-school ones. And while 62% of Kennedy's students are Black, they receive over 80% of those in-school suspensions.

David Graffy oversees student discipline and compliance for the district, and he says that while the state has identified Rockford as over relying on out-of-school suspensions, it's not disproportionately suspending students of color. That's true, but the state's metric he's referring to doesn't include in-school suspensions and doesn't look specifically at Black students. Graffy also points out that Kennedy and RPS more broadly have significantly decreased out-of-school suspensions, and as those have gone down, in-school suspensions have shot up.

So while in-school suspension is certainly a better option than out-of-school suspending a student, you can't replicate the actual conversations and the learning opportunities that the teachers can provide, he says. The goal is to decrease out-of-school suspensions, but they are trying to reduce in-school ones too, and it has been a big shift. Ten years ago, Kennedy handed out a lot more out-of-school suspensions — 600 more kids a year than they are now — but now they're in-school suspending 700 more students than they were back then, and Kennedy has far fewer students than it used to.

As Graffy says, the idea is that in-school suspensions are a better option, but a 2020 Texas A&M study suggests that that's not necessarily the case. The academic impact of in-school suspensions may be more severe than originally assumed. Now, those impacts may be mitigated if schools provide support during in-school suspensions, which Graffy says they often do. I know certain in-school suspension teachers will do journaling activities where they'll just give them like a free ride activity to kind of talk about what it is that put them in there. Other ones will ask guided questions.

But what lands a student in the in-school suspension room to begin with? Well, at Kennedy, nearly all of them fall into one of two categories: violence without physical injury and the more vague "other reasons." And Graffy says it's often given after the school tries a smaller consequence like a lunch detention. One of the hard things that we always have to balance is the needs of the many versus the needs of the few. So obviously each individual student is entitled to a free and appropriate public education. And we have to balance that against, well, if they're disrupting the learning for the other 28 to 30 students in a classroom, like where does that line get drawn?

Victorious Batson just finished 7th grade at Kennedy, and she says that she's had many in-school suspensions — sometimes write-ups that say she was talking back to a teacher and sometimes for being late to class. I'm trying to be early, but I can't because I got to grab my computer, go to my locker, get my stuff out and then the bell already [rings].

Batson says in-school suspensions are terrible. She says the room is cold and they don't get much help. Nothing. Just look at your Chromebook, do your work, she says. Her school uses them too much. Instead of stepping in with smaller interventions that could stop a situation from escalating, she says her classmates are given suspensions when they don't deserve it and that it doesn't provide real deterrence for students actually misbehaving. It's just always ISS and they're going to go back and do it.

The district and leaders like Prentiss Ragland hope that initiatives like Brothers for Change and its counterpart Sisters for Change will give students an adult in the building who knows them and has their back in case they run into these issues. So you meet them on a level where they're at, then you elevate them to the level that you want them to be at. Students who improve their behavior, attendance, and grades get to go on special field trips and get snacks.

Ragland says there are four parts of Brothers for Change. The first is building a relationship with their mentees. In the second part, they encourage students to find a sports team or club to feel like they're a part of the school's culture. For the third part, we reconnect them with the teachers in the classroom. Oftentimes the teachers struggle in because there's a cultural disconnect, he says. They try to bridge cultural gaps that can lead to problems in the classroom. Those cultural disconnects are real at a school like Kennedy, where 62% of students are Black but less than 7% of teachers are.

This spring, a Kennedy PE teacher was fired for using racial slurs and verbally abusing students, and the seventh grader Batson says she remembers that teacher using that language towards Black students. He would always just like treat other kids differently. He just would always get mad.

The final part of the program brings in parents and families to make sure they feel involved and informed about what's happening with their child. Batson's mom, Crystal Alexander, says she wishes she had that. She says the school never contacted her about why her daughter was getting in-school suspensions, and she wishes the communication was better so she could try to help with whatever issues might be going on. And she says her daughter used to love school, but not anymore.

[00:06:50]
Crystal Alexander: Uh, my daughter, [her] whole attitude changed. She used to be happy-go-lucky all the time. And when she went to that school, it [started] creating her to be upset, angry a lot.

[00:07:00]
Peter Medlin: As a mom, it's really hard for her to watch, and she's not confident things will change. Ragland hopes that Brothers for Change and Sisters for Change can be just that. This was the first year of the program. They had just a few brothers and sisters working with a dozen or so students each, but next year, the goal is to expand and hopefully build relationships that make students excited to come to school every day. I'm Peter Medlin.

[00:07:22]
Reginald Hardwick: You're listening to Dialogue from Illinois Soul. The school with the second-highest suspension rate is here in central Illinois at Lanphier High School in Springfield Public Schools. IPM's Emily Hays takes us there. You are correct as well.

[00:07:39]
Emily Hays: Two Lanphier High School students are going head-to-head in a Black history quiz bowl against teams from Springfield's other two high schools. The team is excited to compete, but after an hour, students from one of the other teams notice a middle schooler in the audience seems to be mouthing the answers to the Lanphier competitors. The moderator asked the student to move to the back of the room.

[00:08:02]
Reginald Hardwick: I would ask this gentleman to move himself so far back there to the back of the room.

[00:08:08]
Emily Hays: A principal later comes to get the possible cheater and the energy among the other students deflates. It's a situation teachers and administrators are facing across the country: students ignoring classroom rules or disrupting the rest of the class. Marvin E. Miller has driven buses for the district for eight years. He says students came back from the COVID-19 pandemic a little wilder and less willing to listen to authority. A little easier to throw out cuss words and threaten and, you know, and bully and just all that stuff, you know, spit on the floor, you know, throw the trash all over the floor — trash he has to clean up. There's a lack of discipline. There's a lack of respect. He wants most students to have a good experience and would like to kick out the problem ones.

His grandson says he is having a good experience at Lanphier. Keyon Horton is a rising junior. There's a lot of nice people here, a lot of nice teachers. You can go out in the hallway and hold a nice conversation with them. Anybody, he says one negative is that when others misbehave it affects everyone, but as the school year wrapped up, he noticed students were getting more suspensions for five to 10 days out of school. The out-of-school suspensions, I would definitely change those because they're starting to hand those out a little bit more frequently for sometimes just real small problems. I would change that.

He says some of the offenses were cursing or being late to class. Nationwide, Black students are removed from their classrooms more often than others. Data from the Department of Education shows Black boys only made up 9% of the preschool population but received 30% of the total out-of-school suspensions. And at Lanphier, there were only 500 Black students in the most recent year of data, but they received almost four times that number of in- and out-of-school suspensions.

Advocates in Springfield have worried for decades about how Black students are being treated in the school district. The district was ordered to desegregate in 1976, and it agreed to have its progress monitored by an outside organization under a consent decree. The Springfield NAACP branch has taken on that responsibility. I never had a Black teacher growing up, but my children did.

Candice D. Trees is one of the group's vice presidents. She says the decree requires the district to hire minority staff relative to its student population. D. Trees says the NAACP has a good relationship with District 186, and there's been progress over the years. Springfield's next superintendent will be African American, but many of the Black teachers hired are now retiring.

[00:10:38]
Candice D. Trees: We have to see people that look like them. It's just really, really important.

[00:10:42]
Emily Hays: She says that could help with Lanphier High School's high discipline rates, with the hope that Black teachers would be more likely to recognize a student's sleeping as a call for help instead of a cause for suspensions. Are you affirming their existence, or do you have presupposed dispositions towards children?

John A. Williams II is a professor in the education department at Texas A&M University. He researches inequitable discipline outcomes for Black students. He says hiring more Black teachers is one of many ingredients to improve discipline outcomes for Black students, but it's not a solution by itself. It's how we treat the kids, but it's also what type of — what are we feeding them from an educational standpoint? Do they see themselves in the curriculum? Other solutions include having policies that allow for flexibility from teachers and staff and administrators who support growing kids instead of punishing them.

Lanphier High School's principal says she's that kind of administrator.

[00:11:35]
Principal Alicia Miller: I love all kids. And I'm hearing from everyone, and every single student, whether they've been suspended or not, they know I love them.

[00:11:44]
Emily Hays: Principal Alicia Miller says the school's discipline rates have been improving this year and thinks new training on restorative practices is one reason why.

[00:11:52]
Principal Alicia Miller: You want to get people to reflect on how your actions, you know, impacted the victim. And you focus on the deed, not the doer.

[00:12:03]
Emily Hays: Miller is retiring as principal this summer, but she says the rest of the administration will still have the restorative training. The school has also worked with the state to improve graduation rates. Lanphier added a new focus on college readiness, which she says has helped students get engaged instead of acting out.

That kind of engagement is one of the goals of the annual Black History Quiz Bowl. Retired social worker Robert Blackwell was this year's moderator. He was excited about how many Black students participated. When the young folks were introducing themselves, they had so many profound reasons for which this was important to them.

Blackwell says he thinks teachers sometimes see lively student behavior as misbehavior and they should give them the benefit of the doubt when they're not trying to harm anyone.

[00:12:47]
Reginald Hardwick: And education reporter Emily Hays joins me in the studio right now. Welcome to Dialogue.

[00:12:53]
Emily Hays: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

[00:12:55]
Reginald Hardwick: So how did you come to this information that you gathered?

[00:12:59]
Emily Hays: Well, so I was looking at all of the information for Illinois schools. There's this massive database that's so great called the Illinois Report Card, and I was just looking through all of it for surprising trends. And I knew that discipline rates and suspension rates for Black and white students were not the same. But I didn't realize the extent of the disparity — that the total number of suspensions of Black students in Illinois is higher than the total number of suspensions of white students, despite there being so many schools that are all white. I mean, we have a lot of rural schools that are 98% white or something like that. So somehow, despite all of this, schools are disciplining Black students at a much higher rate. So I wanted to look into that more.

And then I thought, well, which schools are doing this? Is it different between schools or are they all doing the same thing? And it was really interesting to see that most schools were clustered in this very tight, dense cluster. And I think that in itself is probably not where we want to be, because many of those schools in that cluster are disciplining Black students at a higher rate than one discipline incident per student, if that makes sense. So they say there's 300 students in a school, they're disciplining — they have more incidents of discipline than 300. So there are a lot of schools like that. But then there were two schools in this outlier where they're doing extra discipline beyond that that really stuck out, and that was like, oh, OK, so there really is something to look at there. And then there were a couple of schools that were in a more positive direction, so that was cool to see as well.

[00:14:45]
Reginald Hardwick: We've talked about Rockford and Springfield. Did you look into any discipline rates here in Champaign-Urbana?

[00:14:52]
Emily Hays: Yeah, so I didn't do any interviews around it, but my graphic online, you can filter by county, and so if you filter by Champaign County, you can see that Urbana Middle School stands out from the rest in a higher number of discipline incidents. And according to this data, which was the 2024 to 2025 school year, Urbana Middle School gave out 843 suspensions to Black students and other forms of discipline. There were only 331 Black students enrolled in the school of 865. So that one is the one that stands out for our region.

And then in terms of a positive direction, you know, Centennial High School had a fair number of Black students — I think it looks like the largest number in our area — but they only gave out 192 suspensions, so that is significantly less than [Urbana] Middle School despite a larger population. You can do that for any county that you look at.

And one more thing — I covered Decatur as well. Stephen Decatur Middle School was number four on the rate I calculated of number of incidents affecting Black students. So if it was spread out evenly, they would be disciplining Black students at a rate of three times per student. So that's number four on our list out of the state. We didn't cover it because we just did one and two, but that would be something to ask about if you're in Decatur.

[00:16:30]
Reginald Hardwick: Are there any school districts in Illinois that you found that do not overly discipline Black students?

[00:16:36]
Emily Hays: Yes, there is one school on Chicago's South Side with 2,000 students that rarely does any suspensions. So I went there to find out why. [I asked,] what's unique about your high school? We're in the hallway at Kenwood Academy High School and Principal Karen Calloway keeps stopping students to ask them what makes the school unique. Here's junior Carter Elligan.

[00:16:58]
Carter Elligan: I think Kenwood's secret sauce is the teachers and the administration like wanting the students to do really well and excel.

[00:17:07]
Emily Hays: Sounds like any school, right? But that's not always the reality for Black students in Illinois. One school in Rockford is handing out so many suspensions that if they were spread evenly, each Black student would have been suspended almost seven times. Here's junior Jabari Carson on why he thinks other schools have that kind of data. Some teachers kind of neglect us and think that Black students are obviously, you know, just like inclined to be doomed and like terrible students, we have bad behavior — they enforce all these stereotypes on us.

Principal Karen Calloway says Kenwood Academy's one-word mission is college for every student. We are a national leader in scholarship acquisition. [That's] our big tagline, it's our claim to fame, and we do a pretty good job of making sure that we achieve that. They send students to Ivy Leagues, historically Black universities, state schools, liberal arts schools, and she says their success isn't because they have a more privileged group of students. About half of the student body is low-income, meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch or another kind of public aid. That's more than the state average, but less than Chicago public schools as a whole.

Administrators at Kenwood say they believe in every student, even if they've gotten into fights in the past, like Riyanna Crane. She transferred in from a nearby high school also on the South Side of Chicago, Hyde Park Academy. She always did well academically, but she was in a conflict-prone friend group. Any type of conflict, I don't like stuff like that, but my friend group — they kind of was. Her mother warned her to stay away from them, but they were her friends. They kept getting into fights with upperclassmen, and Rihanna says the older students responded by targeting her. She tried to tell the adults at Hyde Park. They would not care. Like they would just push it away, push us out. We can talk about this tomorrow. We can talk about this tomorrow. We can talk about this next month. And one day she knew there wouldn't be a tomorrow. So one day like I literally came in the office. I'm telling them like, this is going to happen if y'all [don't do something]. Like this is going to happen. So I want to stay in the office or I want to talk about it. Oh no, you can come back later. You can come back later.

Before she was able to talk to them, the upperclassmen jumped her. She says it was violent. Riyanna says they stomped on her head, injuring her. The administrator's response was to suspend everyone. She was suspended for two to three days. So she worked to get transferred to Kenwood. She found administrators there who listen to any problem no matter how small. So that's why I feel like the suspension rate is very low here, because instead of just throwing the bad people away, we fix it. Like we find out what's going on, we talk about what's going on, and we resolve it.

Kenwood Academy understands that communicating with students is the secret. Take the time out to explain to them or see what they're going through and know who they are.

With an authentic relationship — John A. Williams [II] is a professor in the education department at Texas A&M University. He researches inequitable discipline outcomes for Black students. He says Black students in the U.S. started being suspended more after integration, when previously white schools were sometimes reluctant to bring in Black students. People taught pre-segregation, they didn't suspend Black kids like that. Like the Black teachers who worked [there were] like, why would we kick you out when you're part of our community.

The students at Kenwood say they feel like they are a part of a community. Junior Theo Andrew had an example of a similar situation to Crane's, starting at Kenwood during his freshman year. An upperclassman was calling him names and disrespecting him in front of others. Andrew didn't want to make a bad reputation for himself and affect his extracurriculars and opportunities, so he walked into Principal Calloway's office.

[00:20:31]
Theo Andrew: [Principal] Calloway, I need you to help me out because if you don't, this is — this is what's going to happen. And she said, 'OK, Theo, I got you. Sit right here in my office right quick and we're going to get this dude.'

[00:20:42]
Emily Hays: He says she spent four periods trying to find the upperclassmen.

[00:20:45]
Theo Andrew: It's not just like, oh, students, you can talk to the administration. No, the administration's going to try to talk to you. The administration is going to want to help you at Kenwood.

[00:20:53]
Emily Hays: Andrew and the other students I interviewed are of course all planning to go to college. Andrew plans to go to a historically Black university to major in business and music or mechanical engineering. Rihanna Crane is figuring out whether she wants to major in business or accounting. Jabari Carson is seeking [a degree in] marketing. Carter Elligan plans to double major in communications and business and minor in entertainment to eventually work in the entertainment industry.

Principal Calloway says she didn't realize other schools approach their students and student conflict differently.

[00:21:22]
Principal Karen Calloway: We like the students that we have because we like that they have a lot of personality. They have a lot of energy, and they want to be great. So we can take it from there.

[00:21:33]
Reginald Hardwick: And we're back with education reporter Emily Hays in studio. And Emily, did you have any reaction to this series?

[00:21:40]
Emily Hays: Yes, I was so delighted to hear from a teacher I had interviewed before in western Illinois, who's now a principal, who was in a training and he thought our series was so good that he played it for the teachers in the training. And he said it was just what they were talking about and it was really helpful. So I was delighted to hear that because that's exactly the kind of impact I'd love to see.

I was also on our 'The 21st' talk show and we got some callers in, and it was really nice to hear — every time I was thinking, oh, are they going to tell me something different from what we found out? Is there something that I didn't know or left out? And the callers actually really confirmed what we were talking about. One was calling from — he was a principal from DeKalb — and he said that he often sees that people see Black students' behavior as innate, but white students, they'll be like, oh, he's acting out because his parents are going through a divorce and not giving Black students that same benefit of the doubt and understanding. So that was a call I was really interested to hear from, especially his personal experience from an area near one of the schools we covered.

[00:22:54]
Reginald Hardwick: Since doing this and other projects here in Illinois, what I've heard continually is you have a lot of predominantly white female women teaching in the classroom who may not have had a lot of experience being in Black communities — because we live in very segregated communities in America — teaching in a lot of urban school districts with different kids of color. How much of an impact do you think that has on these statistics, and are there efforts to change that?

[00:23:28]
Emily Hays: Yeah, so that is something that I was expecting to be very significant. When I talked to the expert, it was not as clear cut as I thought, because he said Black teachers can also be culturally insensitive or have poor training on classroom management. So it's not automatic. So he said, you know, having more Black teachers is one ingredient to solving this problem, and it is really important, but it needs to be accompanied by administrators, for example, who are supportive of more types of discipline that aren't punishing students, but more like affirming them and helping them grow. So that's one thing — having more flexible policies that allows people who want to do the right thing to do the right thing. So it definitely is significant, but it's not the entire answer.

[00:24:28]
Reginald Hardwick: And once again, how can people look for your story and look for the statistics?

[00:24:33]
Emily Hays: This is on our website, ipmnewsroom.org, and I would love for you to explore the graphic I made, look at your county, look at the school that your child goes to, and you can hover over the different dots and find out more information.

[00:24:48]
Reginald Hardwick: Wonderful. We'll also have a link at illinoissoul.org. That's education reporter Emily Hays. Thank you, Emily, for joining us.

[00:24:56]
Emily Hays: Thank you for having me.

[00:24:57]
Reginald Hardwick: And also, thanks to Peter Medlin of WNIJ. He's the education reporter up north and thank you for reporting this important story. 

Six years ago, a Black teenager named Antonio Mays Jr. decided to join the protest against the murder of George Floyd. He left for Seattle, never to come home again. What happened to him is the focus of a new podcast series from NPR. We'll talk with the co-host next on Dialogue — an exchange about culture straight from the soul.