College decisions used to depend mostly on an institution’s academic reputation and its social life. Today, many other factors influence a prospective student’s thinking. We’ve gathered those into this interactive College Welcome Guide, to help you assess how receptive colleges are to students from a variety of backgrounds, and to map state laws that affect college students.

If you have a question about the information here, or would like to share your perspective with us, email us at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

The table above has data for more than 4,000 colleges and universities. You can explore this data by clicking the buttons at the top of the table. After selecting a  category, enter the name of a college or university in the search bar. The table resets when the data type is changed, so if you change the category, you need to enter the college name again. If you search for a college that shares its name with other colleges, only one of them will show up in the table. You can view the data for each of them by clicking on the page arrows in the bottom center of the table.

Colored dots under some college names indicate whether the institution is religiously affiliated and/or serves a significant portion of particular types of students, including those who are Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous. We also mark institutions that are in rural places or serve students from those areas. A key at the bottom of the table describes what each colored dot represents.

The map below shows laws and policies that affect students, across nine categories in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

You can explore categories by clicking on the buttons. (By default, the map shows which states restrict the teaching of critical race theory, or CRT, in higher education.) Click on any state to see additional information for particular categories. The sources of information for each category are noted at the bottom of the map, and linked so you can learn more.

Among other things, these maps show whether states offer resident tuition or free tuition to veterans even if they aren’t using GI Bill benefits. (The federal government requires that veterans qualify for in-state tuition if they’re on the GI Bill, regardless of where they live.)

In addition to constraining or banning the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, some states have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on DEI efforts — a step that has historically served as a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-trans laws shown here are those passed since 2022 and include measures restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for people including those of college age.

State laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote can also affect students. In Georgia, for example, students at public universities can use a student ID to vote, but those at private universities – including several historically Black institutions – cannot. 

LGBTQ+ Profile scores from the Movement Advancement Project reflect the proportion of adults in a state who are LGBTQ+ and state policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

In addition to the reproductive rights laws listed in our maps, total or near-total abortion bans have been signed into law but are so far enjoined by courts in these states: Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Prospective students might also care about how likely they are to succeed at a given college. The graphic below shows graduation rates, both for the entire student body and broken out by race or ethnicity, and you can compare up to five colleges on any of these measures. 

Choose a category from the dropdown at the top of the graphic and then enter a college or university in the search bar; institution names will appear as you begin to type.

You can learn more about all our data sources here or download the data here.

Design and development by Fazil Khan

Additional reporting by Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Olivia Sanchez, Amanda Chen and Sarah Butrymowicz

Illustration by Camilla Forte

The post Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To create our College Welcome Guide we relied on more than a dozen data sources. If you haven’t seen our tool, you can find it here. Read on to learn more about where the information comes from.

Campus-level data

All of the data other than what is shown on the maps or otherwise noted comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS data is reported directly by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. Our dataset includes all two- and four-year colleges.

Figures for total enrollment and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender show the 12-month unduplicated undergraduate student numbers in 2021-22, the latest year for which the information is available. When 12-month enrollment was unavailable, as was the case for enrollment by age and attendance status (part- or full-time), data from the fall 2021 semester has been used. Pell Grant enrollment data is from 2020-21.

Institutional affiliation indicates whether a private, nonprofit institution is associated with a religious group or denomination.

Graduation rates were calculated using the most recent five years of data. In the case of institutions for which those five full years were not available, the graduation rate was calculated from the available years. This figure represents the percentage of students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years or an associate degree within three years.

The proportion of students with disabilities represents the percentage of undergraduates in the fall who formally registered with their institutions’ offices of disability services.

Under the IPEDS definition, a point of contact for veterans refers to whether a school has dedicated support services for veterans, military service members and their families. An institution is shown as having services for student veterans if it offers at least one of the following: the Yellow Ribbon Program, academic credit for military training or a recognized student veteran organization; or if it is a member of the Department of Defense Voluntary Education Partnership Memorandum of Understanding. The number of students receiving Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and tuition assistance includes spouses and dependents. Only benefits awarded through or certified by the institution are shown.

Hate crimes are reported by institutions to the U.S. Department of Education and are defined as crimes for which there is evidence “that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” The data, which was downloaded from the department’s Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool, includes hate crimes committed in any building owned or controlled by an institution or student organization or on any public property within or adjacent to a campus, such as streets, sidewalks and parking facilities.

Data about first-generation students came from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which gets it from the National Student Loan Data System. Under the federal definition, students are considered first generation if they do not have a parent who graduated with a four-year degree. First-generation status is self reported by the student.

Data about whether or not there is an LGBTQ+ student resource center on a campus comes from the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.

In addition to indicating which institutions are designated as historically Black, Hispanic-serving or affiliated with a religion, we used data from the MSI Data Project to show colleges and universities that have Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous enrollments that exceed the proportion of the general population for those categories. We also used data from the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges to indicate which institutions are considered rural-serving, meaning they’re in rural places or serve students from those places.

State-level data

Information about whether a state allows undocumented immigrants residing in that state to pay in-state tuition comes from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Veterans’ tuition status was determined on a state-by-state basis by a review of policies of public higher education institutions, as well as state higher education and veterans’ agencies.

States that restrict the teaching of critical race theory are tracked by PEN America. Legislatures that have constrained or banned the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs were identified through legislative tracking services and news reports. Some states that have not yet limited or banned DEI have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on those programs. We included this measure because it is a step that has historically been a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws affecting college students are monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Trans Legislation Tracker. Anti-trans laws are those passed since 2022 and include legislation restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for trans people including those of college age.

Information on state laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote comes from the Voting Rights Lab.

LGBTQ+ Profile scores produced by the Movement Advancement Project are based on measures including the proportion of adults and of workers who are LGBTQ+ and a state’s policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

Data from the Center for Reproductive Rights has been used to show abortion laws by state.

Download the data here.

This College Welcome Guide was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post How we made our College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As college admission decisions pour in and students weigh their options, some institutions are putting the poorest students at a surprising disadvantage: There are 17 colleges and universities where the lowest-income students may end up paying more out of pocket than the highest-income ones.

At these 17 colleges and universities in 2020-21, students from families earning under $30,000 actually paid more in net price – which is the amount students pay after discounts and financial aid – than those from families making $110,000 a year or more, the latest available federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) showed. 

The additional amount ranged from just $152 at Texas College in Tyler, Texas, to more than $5,000 at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Those figures reflect what was paid by students in the lowest-income quintile compared with what was paid by students in the highest-income quintile.

The 17 institutions are spread across 14 states; two are public universities. Generous financial aid to the higher-income students often accounts for the difference.

All but one of these 17 are among the 700 universities across the U.S. where the net price has risen more for the lowest-income students over the last decade than for their higher-income peers, as USA Today and The Hechinger Report reported recently. (At Mississippi Valley State University, the price declined for both groups but dropped significantly more for the highest-income students.)

Trends in net price by income and other information about universities and colleges nationwide can be found in The Hechinger Report’s newly updated Tuition Tracker.

“It provides a further reflection on what’s the purpose of higher education as a whole. Is it to reward and provide opportunity for the few and the fortunate or is it actually to lift this generation up and leave them better off than the previous?”

Michael Itzkowitz, education consultant and former director of College Scorecard, an online federal government tool

At Brenau, the lowest-income students paid $24,640 out of pocket in 2020-21 after all the discounts, grants, and scholarships. This was over $5,000 more than what the highest-income students had to pay. Lowest-income students at Brenau, in fact, have paid more in net price than highest-income ones every year since 2017-18, and the gap has been more than $3,000 in all those years.

In response to questions, Brenau sent a statement saying that it “is working to rebalance net price across income categories.”

“The majority of institutional aid for first‐time, full‐time freshmen students at Brenau is merit‐based; students seeking lower direct cost also have the option to enroll in online courses at a significantly reduced tuition rate,” the university statement read, noting that around 13 percent of its first‐time, full‐time students were enrolled online. Brenau only reports tuition prices for in-person students to IPEDS, which the university’s statement said “skewed” the net-price calculations.

Higher-income students received more financial aid, on average, at all but one of these colleges in 2020-21, likely because more institutional merit aid went to them. This is mainly due to colleges competing for students from high-income families, who are able to pay high tuition and bring in needed revenue but expect to receive scholarships and discounts.

“[It] begs the question of why and what kind of college are they?” said Michael Itzkowitz, an education consultant and the former director of College Scorecard, an online federal government tool to compare the cost and value of higher education institutions. “It provides a further reflection on what’s the purpose of higher education as a whole. Is it to reward and provide opportunity for the few and the fortunate or is it actually to lift this generation up and leave them better off than the previous?”

Many universities provide significant amounts of aid to students who may not necessarily need it. Between 2001 and 2017, 339 public universities spent $32 billion in institutional aid on students who did not have financial need, according to a New America study. Overall, about 40 percent of all the institutional aid at these universities went to students whom the federal government deemed able to afford college without aid. Since there’s only so much money to go around, discounts for non-needy students may leave the low-income students with larger funding gaps and a higher net price.

While many colleges and universities have their own tools to allow prospective students to calculate net price, federal net price data available through IPEDS is the only way students and parents can compare colleges and universities nationally to decide how much they will need to pay to attend any particular college or university. The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker tool, which uses IPEDS data, allows the students and parents to navigate the federal information more easily.

An audit published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last November found that nine out of 10 colleges in a nationally representative sample either do not include or understate the net price in their aid offers. While the exclusion of the net price leaves students guessing how much they’d need to pay, an underestimation makes a college appear less expensive than it is, the report noted.

IPEDS’ net price data could contain inaccuracies at times since the calculations are based on self-reported data from colleges and universities. For example, according to the IPEDS data, The College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, appeared to have charged the lowest-income students about $9,000 more than the highest-income students in 2020-21. But Joe Hughes, the college’s director communications, said by email that the college had made an error while reporting financial aid data to the agency. When that error was corrected, the net price for the lowest-income students in 2020-21 at the college came out to be about $3,300 less than the price for the highest-income students. This made sense, because the net price at the college for the lowest-income students has historically been lower than for the highest-income ones.

But at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, and at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), the lowest-income students have had a higher net price than their highest-income peers consistently since 2012-13, the IPEDS data show.

Lowest-income students at Columbia College have been paying more in net price over that period, and in many of those years, the gap was $5,000 or more. The college did not respond to a request for comment.

At SNHU, the lowest-income students paid between $5,000 and $10,000 more than the highest-income students in every year from 2012-13 to 2019-20. Students in the lowest-income quintile paid $22,903 in net price in 2020-21 compared to the $22,741 that the highest income students paid. According to the university, the $162 gap remained after cuts made in tuition to align the cost of on-campus programs with online programs, which are cheaper, and after one-time scholarships were given to all incoming campus freshmen covering the first year’s tuition.

SNHU’s president, Paul LeBlanc, argued that IPEDS data does not accurately represent what students pay there, because most of SNHU’s 100,000 undergraduates are enrolled in online programs, which cost significantly less than on-campus programs. In fall 2020, it reported just under 1,800 students as first-time, full-time, and half of those were enrolled online. These were the ones IPEDS accounted for when calculating net price.

“IPEDS forces us to report in a very skewed way,” said LeBlanc. “You're only allowed to report the one [number] so we have to take the high one, which is campus tuition.”

IPEDS calculates the net price at an institution based on the cost of attendance, which includes tuition and required charges, such as books and living expenses, for first-time, full-time students for the academic year.  The tuition amount is left to the discretion of the institution.

Cost of attendance at SNHU could be lower for online students since they may not incur living expenses. However, even if that were to bring the average cost of attendance down, the average financial aid (which is deducted from the cost of attendance to arrive at the net price figure) for the lowest-income students consistently remained less than half of what the highest income students got between 2014-15 and 2019-20. This means that the overall net price for the university might have come down if the cost adjustments were to be taken into account, but the lowest-income students would have still paid more, since they received less aid, on average.

The average aid to students in both income quintiles was more aligned in 2020-21, hence the relatively smaller gap of $162 in net price.

This story about college net-price disparity was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post Where poor students pay more than rich ones appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Even in high school, Miguel Agyei worried about how he’d pay for college.

The son of parents who work at a hospital and for UPS, Agyei wanted to go to a school away from his home state of Illinois, but that was too expensive. He instead picked close-by Bradley University and worked during the summer to pay the costs his financial aid didn’t cover.

An athlete who ran track and field, he set the university record in the 60-meter hurdles, but the conference meet that determined who would get athletic scholarships was canceled because of Covid.

He asked his coaches if there was money to help him buy textbooks, but they said there wasn’t. He had to get help from an advocacy group called College Possible to pay his rent. To cover his other expenses, he took a job answering phones five days a week for a call center for people applying for unemployment benefits.

“It was very, very stressful,” said Agyei, who also borrowed $25,000 in student loans. “I would go to practice, go to class, work five or six hours, do my homework, go to bed and get up and do it again.”

Meanwhile, he noticed that his bills from the college kept going up.

Bradley is among nearly 700 universities and colleges that, over the last decade, have raised the prices paid by their lowest-income students more than the prices paid by their highest-income ones, according to federal data analyzed by The Hechinger Report.

Lower-income students generally still pay less than higher-income ones. But the increase in college costs is falling more heavily on families that are likely the least able to absorb it, as federal and state financial aid fails to keep up with rising prices, and colleges shift institutional aid to wealthier families they know can pay at least a part of the tuition.

“Those increases can really make or break a student staying in college,” said Scott Del Rossi, vice president of college and career success at College Possible, which helps low-income and racial minority students go to and through college. “Do they put it on their credit card? Do they just give up?”

Historic trends in net price by income and other information about universities and colleges nationwide are available in the Hechinger Report’s newly updated Tuition Tracker tool.

At two out of three colleges and universities where the net price increased for both low- and high-income students over the last decade — that is, the amount paid after discounts and financial aid — it rose faster for the lowest-income ones, increasing by about 70 percent versus 27 percent, on average, the federal data show.

At 80 universities and colleges, net price more than doubled for the lowest-income students, while at 19 it more than tripled and at 10 it quintupled. At 90, including 14 public universities, net price went up for the lowest-income students while going down for the highest-income ones.

Bradley increased the net price for its students from families earning under $30,000 by 36 percent, more than three and a half times the rate of increase for its students from families that make $110,000 a year or more.

Asked about this, Justin Ball, Bradley’s vice president of enrollment management, said in a statement: “Filtering financial aid packages by a few key metrics alone does not paint the full picture of what can be offered to prospective students.” A university spokeswoman said Ball was not available to elaborate on what that meant.

Related: As enrollment falls and public skepticism grows, some colleges are cutting their prices

“As low-income students, we’ve grown to know that this is just the way the system works, and we’ve had to figure out ways to navigate through it,” said Agyei, who ultimately graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sports communications and got a part-time internship with the Chicago Fire Major League Soccer team.

“You can’t keep raising the price of tuition for students who are barely making it. It’s just not fair,” he said.

As their costs rise, lower-income students become more reliant on student loans to pay for college, but struggle to repay their debt. Students who got federal Pell grants, which generally go to families earning $40,000 or less, are five times more likely to default on their loans within 12 years of entering college than their higher-income classmates, according to The Institute for College Access and Success. Black students and students who were the first in their families to go to college are also more likely to default.

The most common reason cited for this trend of rising costs for poorer students — even by several of the colleges themselves — is the intensifying competition for students from high-income families, who contribute badly needed revenue and who increasingly expect to receive scholarships and discounts that siphon financial aid away from students who meet the federal definition of financial need.

Colleges and universities depend on money coming in, said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, or NASFAA. That’s “the bottom line and the real challenge.” Sophisticated enrollment management strategies, he said, “are driving at one thing: staying afloat.”

Trying to attract students from one socioeconomic category “might decrease them [from] another,” Draeger said. “It would be natural, then, that in this enrollment-constrained environment, the people bearing a disproportionate impact of that would be needy students.”

Related: Some people going into the trades wonder why their classmates stick with college

Montreat College in North Carolina, for example, has “shifted to prioritize merit-based awarding,” said Sara Baughman, the college’s vice president of marketing and communications, using the term for the type of financial aid that goes to students who don’t meet the federal definition of financial need.

Montreat has increased its net price for its lowest-income students by 42 percent while lowering it by 16 percent for its highest-income students.

“There’s only so much money to spread around,” said Duane Bonifer, associate vice president for communications at Monmouth College in Illinois, a small, private liberal arts institution that has raised the net price for its lowest-income students by 57 percent while lowering it by 3 percent for its highest-income students.

At 90 universities and colleges, including 14 public universities, net price went up in the last decade for the lowest-income students while going down for the highest-income ones.

“For every college in America that’s like Monmouth, which is a lot of them, they’re struggling to deal with the same issue,” Bonifer said. “Your heart breaks that you can’t do more, but there are certain economic realities. You have to be well in order to do good, and that’s a harsh reality for a lot of colleges.” Monmouth has just completed an $80 million fundraising campaign, $11 million of which will go to financial aid, he said.

Some institutions, such as Wheaton College in Massachusetts, are also consciously trying to move more financial aid to middle- and upper-middle-income families who may also struggle to pay, said Jeff Cutting, Wheaton’s associate vice president for enrollment and strategic analyst. And small colleges’ resources, Cutting pointed out, are finite. Wheaton has increased the net price for its lowest-income students by 35 percent while lowering it by 17 percent for its highest-income students, federal figures show.

The federal Pell Grant, which mostly goes to families with annual incomes under $40,000, now covers about 25 percent of college costs, down from 70 percent in the 1970s.

The proportion of financial aid awarded by Michigan's Kalamazoo College on the basis of merit, as opposed to need, “increase[s] yearly to keep up with market trends,” said Becca Murphy, its dean of financial aid.

Federal data show that the net price for Kalamazoo’s highest-income students fell 5 percent while rising 26 percent for its lowest-income students. But Murphy said that those figures do not account for money that goes to low-income students who qualify for the Kalamazoo Promise program, under which resident graduates of local public schools get all or part of their tuition paid for. If that money were included, Murphy said, the net price for students from families earning less than $30,000 would decrease by an average of $1,300.

Even after subtracting this amount, however, Kalamazoo’s average net price for its lowest-income students has still increased by about 15 percent since the Promise program started in the 2015-16 academic year, the federal figures show. Asked if Murphy would discuss this further, a spokesman did not respond.

Related: Bachelor’s degree dreams of community college students get stymied by red tape — and it’s getting worse

The federal data shows that Beloit College in Wisconsin increased the net price for its lowest-income students by 82 percent while reducing it by 19 percent for its highest-income students. The college said the information it had submitted to the federal government was incorrect, but did not respond when asked to provide the correct figures.

The net price for the lowest-income students at Connecticut College rose 235 percent in the last decade, compared to 9 percent for the highest-income students. The lowest-income students at Oklahoma Wesleyan University saw their net price go up by 69 percent while it fell by 37 percent for their highest-income classmates. At Gustavus Adolphus College, the net price went up by 45 percent for the lowest-income and down by 27 percent for the highest-income students.

None of the schools responded to repeated requests for comment.

Like these private universities, a few public universities have also raised the net price for their lowest-income students while lowering it for their highest-income ones. At Louisiana State University of Alexandria, for instance, net price fell for the highest-income students by 22 percent while rising 4 percent for the lowest-income students. After agreeing to speak about this, the university’s vice chancellor for finance and administration stopped responding to requests to schedule a conversation.

One more major reason lower-income students are seeing their net prices rise more quickly than higher-income students is that the principal federal grant meant to help them pay for college hasn’t kept up with the cost of it.

The federal Pell Grant, which mostly goes to families with annual incomes under $40,000, now covers about 25 percent of college costs, down from 69 percent in the 1970s, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The maximum Pell Grant this year is $6,895 per student. That’s up 15 percent since the mid-1970s, when adjusted for inflation, a period during which the inflation-adjusted cost of four-year public colleges rose 157 percent, the Pell Institute and University of Pennsylvania report. Advocacy and professional organizations including NASFAA have called for the maximum Pell Grant amount to be doubled.

“We’re largely just treading water,” NASFAA’s Draeger said. “Meanwhile, costs keep going up. And when the Pell Grant fails to keep up with inflationary costs, that’s often going to be felt by the neediest students. It’s doubly unfortunate because for those students, price sensitivity doesn’t just impact their choice of where they’ll go to college, it impacts whether they’ll go to college.”

Related: Why aren’t flagship universities enrolling more of their own states’ Black students?

Most states have financial aid programs, too, which in many cases also have not kept pace with the rising cost of college.

In Massachusetts, for example, state-funded financial aid has been cut by 47 percent in the last two decades, when adjusted for inflation, a period during which tuition and fees at public universities and colleges rose by 59 percent, a new study by the Hildreth Institute shows.

While the largest state grant was enough in 1988 to pay for 80 percent of the average recipient’s cost for public higher education in the state, the research and policy center says, today it covers only 12 percent. That leaves the overwhelming majority of students at public four-year universities with $12,000 or more per year in unmet financial need.

Other state financial aid has shifted to increasingly benefit higher-income more than lower-income families.

At two out of three colleges and universities where the net price increased, it rose faster in the last decade for the lowest-income students than for the highest-income ones.

After an income cap was removed from the principal state scholarship for students in Louisiana, the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, the money started flowing disproportionately to the children of higher-income families who are more likely than lower-income ones to live in places with well-resourced public schools whose graduates meet the scholarship’s academic requirements.

The number of recipients from families earning $150,000 or more has increased 56 percent since 2010, while the number from households with incomes under $15,000 fell by 11 percent, the Louisiana Board of Regents reported in late 2021. More than twice as many students whose parents make more than $100,000 get the money than students whose parents earn less than $35,000. The median household income in Louisiana is $53,571, the Census Bureau says.

After criticism of this trend, the legislature and the governor imposed the solution last year of ordering that the state stop reporting the family income of the scholarship’s recipients.

Among the students who get the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship, which is funded largely by state lottery proceeds, three out of four are from families that make $103,000 a year — nearly twice the state’s median household income — the Arkansas Times reports.

Higher-income students enjoy several other little-known advantages in the financial aid process.

The federal formula used to calculate financial aid, for example, does not take into account home equity and retirement savings, disproportionately benefiting higher-income families, who are increasingly more likely to have such assets. This reduces the amount the formula determines they can afford to pay, thereby awarding them more financial aid, according to researchers from Wellesley College and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, resulting in a subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually for families earning above the national median income.

College junior Chase Brown has been watching her wealthier classmates enjoy advantages like that from the time she was in high school. While she was spending her free time searching for colleges with the most generous financial aid, for example, her friends would tell her, “We’re going to take a flight down to Florida and go on some campus tours.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Brown ended up at Rice University, one of a minority of universities and colleges where federal data show the price for the lowest-income students has stayed flat while it’s gone up for the highest-income students. The university’s Rice Investment program guaranteed her free tuition, and she also got some financial aid toward room and board.

Even with that, however, Brown had to work at Target in the summer to cover the rest of her food and housing, plus her other expenses, and at one point balanced three jobs with her studies.

“All those costs pile onto you, while your peers have the resources to pay for them,” said Brown, whose parents are a teacher and a graphic designer and who is majoring in political science and Spanish with plans to get a graduate degree in public policy or political science.

“I used to think the education system was going to close the gaps between social levels. It’s supposed to be the great equalizer,” she said. But “it can put an even bigger divide between those groups.”

That this gap is getting wider “doesn’t entirely surprise me,” Brown said. “My entire life, my educational experience has been that the very privileged are always getting the benefits and getting a leg up. It reflects on what’s happening everywhere: The poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer.”

This story about college costs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post Why are prices rising more for lower-income college students than their higher-income peers? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In April 2020, as the death toll from COVID mounted across New York City, an elementary school teacher at P.S. 343, the Children’s Lab School, in Sunnyside, Queens, organized a virtual dance party to give her second-grade class some levity. One student, 8-year-old Yarely, had trouble signing on to the remote classroom.

“My dad is the one who is good with computers,” she told her teacher, “but he’s sick in bed.”

The student’s father, 32-year-old Diego Vintimilla, was a fixture at parent-teacher conferences and often helped Yarely with her classwork. That day, Vintimilla, an immigrant from Ecuador, managed to fix his daughter’s computer connection from his bed. He was hospitalized with COVID the next day.

Vintimilla died two weeks later.

Yarely returned to school the day after she was told of her father’s death, confused by what had happened to him. She asked her teacher where her father was.

Wanting to support her student, Yarely’s teacher met on video calls with the school social worker, parent coordinator and principal, but no one knew what to do, she recalls. She searched online, using phrases like “how to help grieving students” and cobbled together handouts. But she found herself struggling to help.

Yarely is one of more than 8,700 children in New York City who have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March 2020, nearly double the national rate.

These losses, like the coronavirus itself, have disproportionately struck families of color and immigrants. Black, Hispanic and Asian children in the city were roughly three times more likely to lose a caregiver in the home to COVID compared to white children, according to an analysis done in May by the COVID Collaborative, a public health effort to address the pandemic.

THE CITY, Columbia Journalism Investigations, Type Investigations and City Limits have spent a year documenting the NYC Department of Education’s response to COVID-bereaved children in public schools. We discovered that decades of underfunding mental health care left schools unprepared to handle the spike in needs during the pandemic. Amid that crisis, grieving students were largely overlooked and often didn’t get the help they needed.

Grief at School

We contacted dozens of immigrant families with children who lost parents or caregivers to COVID, using THE CITY’s Missing Them project and the GoFundMe pages that friends and families set up for funeral expenses. Of the 10 families we interviewed, roughly half said they had little to no grief-related support from their schools. Some sought help and didn’t receive it. Others were provided with counseling through their school, only to lose it a few months later.

Still others said they did not inform their schools of the loss because they doubted that they would get any support. Children who did find support, including Yarely, relied on individual teachers and school staff who used their own resources and personal time to tend to their grieving students.

A parent’s death is a monumental event in a child’s life. Research shows that most children can cope if they have support from their family and community. But for some children, losing a caregiver will have long-term consequences. They may struggle to stay in school, or face depression and anxiety as adults.

Experts say that schools can help mitigate such harms by providing immediate care and access to clinical assistance. Noting that schools are a “nearly universal touchpoint for school-aged children,” a December 2021 report from the COVID Collaborative recommends that schools be part of a “coordinated strategy” to identify and support COVID-grieving students.

New York City schools have yet to do that. In a recent interview with THE CITY and its partners, former mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged that the Department of Education didn’t try to distinguish these students’ mental health needs from those of their peers at first.

Related: Nation’s skeletal school mental health network will be severely tested

“The situation was so profoundly troubling across the board,” de Blasio said. “The idea was that the need was so great: set up a system for everyone, and then individualize the solutions.”

But it’s not clear that an individualized response ever materialized. In interviews and survey responses, more than a dozen public school teachers, social workers and administrators described inadequate staffing for mental health support, limited training and a lack of clear guidance from the department. Many said the problems persist even now, nearly three years later.

Still Lacking Social Workers

The dearth of care for grieving students partly stems from an overall shortage of mental health support in New York City schools. Before the pandemic, the DOE employed only one full-time social worker for every 648 students attending public schools, a ratio more than twice as high as what is recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

When the pandemic hit, zip codes with high concentrations of people of color and immigrants bore the brunt, seeing more cases of COVID illness ending in death than elsewhere, our analysis of city health and demographic data shows. And many schools in these areas were among those with inadequate staffing.

Western Queens, where the Children’s Lab School is located, had one of the highest COVID death rates in the city, and the worst ratio of school social workers to students in the city, before the pandemic. Across the city, 40 percent of traditional public schools had no full-time social worker, city data shows.

De Blasio said he knew about these deficiencies. As COVID-19 continued to spread, it became even more apparent to him and DOE officials. “Everyone was already perfectly [aware] that we were sitting on top of a huge problem,” he said.

In April 2021, a full year into the pandemic, he announced measures to tackle this shortfall. His administration budgeted approximately $300 million in COVID-relief federal funding over four years for school-based mental health services that could help all pandemic-impacted children. The DOE promised to hire 500 additional social workers and conduct social-emotional screenings of students.

Related: ‘Right now is not my time’: How Covid dimmed college prospects for students who need help most

Despite hiring hundreds of social workers in the fall of 2021, however, the ratio is still significantly higher than recommended. The number of bilingual-licensed social workers employed by the DOE has actually declined slightly during the pandemic even as the number of English language learners increased.

Recent reports reinforce our findings. An August 2022 audit by the New York state comptroller’s office found DOE officials haven’t hired enough mental health professionals or provided adequate training to school staff to address New York City students’ mental health issues.

Bereaved but Unknown

Tamara Mair, a senior director with the department, said DOE officials worked to tailor mental health support for grieving children to address what she calls “the tremendous amount of loss that was happening through the pandemic.” In an interview, the department highlighted the presence of crisis teams and voluntary teacher and staff trainings on grief sensitivity.

But crisis teams and other school staff can’t respond to grieving children if they aren’t identified. Crucially, the DOE did not implement universal screenings to identify bereaved students.

“I know that the Department of Education cares deeply about figuring out how to identify and serve these children,” said Catherine Jaynes, a senior director with the COVID Collaborative. “But they have to know about them to serve them.”

For some families we interviewed, children fell through the cracks due to this lack of screening. These families said they were reluctant to confide in school staff and received little encouragement to do so.

One mother from Queens, whose family is from Mexico, said her 17-year-old son floundered in his studies after his grandfather and two great-uncles died from the coronavirus over a span of months in 2020. She noticed her son growing more aloof and withdrawn at home; he had trouble concentrating on school work and his grades dropped. Yet she avoided telling his teachers about the deaths, she said, partly because she felt that educators at the Richmond Hill high school were overwhelmed by the challenges of remote learning and gave no indication of offering any resources to COVID-bereaved students.

“The schools did not give any emotional support to the children who lost family members,” she said. “They didn’t send emails or anything. There was no communication.”

Grasping for Support

In cases where the schools did know about the students’ losses, some families said staff failed to respond in a sensitive way.

Eleven-year-old Ibrahim started acting out in school after his mother, Fatma Atia, died of COVID in April 2020. He became loud and disruptive in class and got into arguments with other kids. At times, he felt the need to get out of his chair. “I would just think of my mom and just have a little mental breakdown,” said Ibrahim, who was born in the U.S. to parents who immigrated from Egypt.

The staff at his South Bronx middle school often complained about his behavior, said his father, Ashraf. A guidance counselor suggested counseling off-site, but the recommended psychologist had a wait list.

Related: Schools use art to help kids through trauma

Ibrahim began counseling four months later and was prescribed medication. Since then, he has had fewer behavioral issues at school, Ashraf said, but the family is still struggling. “We try to live, we try to keep up with schoolwork,” he said, “but deep inside we’re all destroyed.”

Other families who did receive mental health support at school had trouble maintaining it.

Fourteen-year-old Carol had trouble sleeping for almost two months after her stepfather died from COVID in April 2020. She spent her days and nights watching TV with her mother, an immigrant from Ecuador, making sure that her mother ate. “I don’t remember cooking for a long time,” said Margarita Rivas, Carol’s mother. “She was the one giving me spaghetti. And she told me: ‘Eat. I prepared this for you.’”

Carol saw a counselor through her high school in Fresh Meadows, Queens, Rivas said. But the arrangement only lasted a few months. When the sessions ended, Rivas struggled to find a private therapist that took her insurance. Carol saw a string of different therapists but gave up, Rivas said, because she was tired of “repeating the same thing every single time.”

Thirteen-year-old Joshua had been visiting a guidance counselor at his Washington Heights middle school every week to help him adjust to seventh grade. But Joshua lost his regular sessions when his counselor took a leave of absence — just before his stepfather died of COVID in April 2020. “He was distant,” said his mother, Charlene Budreau Simon. Joshua often skipped out on remote learning or refused to turn on his web camera when his teachers asked. “He was just like, ‘I can’t function like this right now.’”

The school’s only other counselor reached out to Joshua a few times, Budreau Simon said. But Joshua found it hard to communicate with her, and the school had no social workers on staff. Neither his school nor the others referenced above responded to requests for comment.

After Joshua finished eighth grade, the family moved to New Jersey where Budreau Simon said Joshua has access to a guidance counselor, a social worker, and a caseworker. “It’s so different from New York.”

Training Educators

The last time New York City schools faced widespread grief among students was after 9/11, when about 3,000 children, many of whom lived in the city, experienced the death of a parent.

The city moved quickly. In Staten Island, for instance, schools were told to report the names of children who lost someone close, according to Dominick Nigro, former director of the Office of Student Services for Staten Island Public Schools, who managed the borough’s response after the attacks. Those families were then offered individual and group grief counseling at school or within the DOE, Nigro said.

DOE also commissioned Dr. David Schonfeld, a pediatric bereavement specialist, to hold more than 50 full-day crisis response trainings for superintendents and other DOE staff members over the next two and a half years.

Related: Homeless students set adrift by school closures face crisis after crisis

“I remember somebody came up to me and said, ‘We really should give this training for all the educators in the school system,’” Schonfeld said.

For a moment, given the sheer scale of 9/11, it seemed like that might come to pass, but DOE didn’t offer widespread grief-sensitivity training until more than a decade later.

In 2018, some city schools began to participate in the “Grief-Sensitive Schools Initiative,” a national program to train educators to recognize signs of grief and potential triggers, and improve access to relevant services. In 2019, it tapped Schonfeld and the New York Life Foundation to offer that training to all city schools.

Then in early 2020, New York City quickly became the epicenter of the COVID pandemic. With DOE’s blessing, Schonfeld adjusted the trainings to focus on pandemic-related stress and grief. He said his work was particularly challenging at a time when children were attending school remotely, and when people dying of COVID or other conditions were isolated from their family members, putting traditional mourning rituals on hold.

More than 6,500 DOE staff members participated in the trainings between March 2020 and June 2022, according to the department. The DOE also has offered professional development seminars for school staff on how to support students coping with grief and loss, a spokesperson said. The agency estimates that approximately 75,000 staff and community members participated in those sessions from 2021-2022. (It declined to specify how many of those were school staff.)

Related: Will the students who didn’t show up for online class go missing forever?

Yet trainings like these are optional — a problem highlighted in the comptroller’s report, which recommended mandatory mental health training for all school staff members who interact with students daily.

Even Schonfeld’s initiative has failed to reach most staff, a disappointing coda to a bold plan. The organizers reported that just over 1,000 city schools underwent the training between April 2020 and June 2021, but only 20 percent of participating schools managed to train five or more employees.

‘Our Kids Are All in Crisis’

Many school staff members say their struggles to help COVID-grieving students were compounded by the education department’s failure to supply clear guidelines. No one we spoke with expected to see such standards handed down during the pandemic’s early days. But as it dragged on, the continued lack of guidance felt more surprising, they said.

DOE confirmed that it has avoided what it calls a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Instead, it noted that crisis teams, composed of school social workers, counselors and administrators, often are a “first line of defense” for grieving students.

Emily George, a former school social worker, remembers school social workers turning to the professional listserv that she moderates to find help during the pandemic. Many sought to fulfill urgent requests from their students’ families for food, housing and funeral assistance. Some wanted advice on legal services for immigrants; others on grief counseling for teens.

“Once the pandemic hit, everyone was like ‘Oh, mental health, what are we going to do?’” George said. “Our kids are all in crisis.”

Related: Parents fighting, teachers crying — Grownup stress is hitting kids hard

Among the families we interviewed, 8-year-old Alejandro’s experience represented a rare example of a student who got adequate and consistent support at school. Alejandro lost his uncle, Victor Humberto Heras, to COVID-19 in April 2020. They were close: Humberto dropped him off at school every day and would make meals for him.

Alejandro has been receiving counseling through his elementary school in Washington Heights — individual sessions two times a week at first, and now group sessions. The sessions have helped him manage his grief and anger and come to terms with his uncle’s death, he said.

Most families who had a positive experience, however, attributed it to a teacher or social worker who extended themselves personally, often outside of regular working hours.

At the Children’s Lab School, Yarely’s teacher said she tried her best to help. After her father’s death, Yarely often showed up early to her online classes, clutching a stuffed animal. Frequently, she asked her teacher to stay behind after lessons had ended.

“Usually we would talk about my dad and how I felt about all that,” said Yarely.

Yarely took her teacher on virtual tours of her home, pointing the camera toward candles and photos in memory of her dad. She worried about how her mother would manage family finances, including payments for her father’s truck. “She was clearly just soaking up all kinds of fears and worries and concerns from everyone around her,” said Yarely’s teacher.

Yarely was obviously suffering. With her father gone and her mother working full time, she struggled to understand her schoolwork and stay motivated, said her mother, Adriana Culcay. The situation became dire in the summer of 2020, when a relative told her mother that Yarely had threatened to jump out the window to be with her father.

“She was just crying, crying, crying,” Culcay said.

Speaking Your Language

Not long after that incident, Culcay arranged virtual counseling sessions for Yarely through school. At the time, our analysis shows, the Children’s Lab School had one full-time social worker on staff — relatively uncommon among its west Queens counterparts. In the 2020-21 school year, DOE data shows that more than a quarter of traditional public schools did not have full-time or part-time social workers; another 11 percent of schools only had access to a part-time social worker.

In March 2021, de Blasio appointed Meisha Porter — a former Bronx teacher, principal and administrator — as education chancellor. In an interview, Porter said she had seen how COVID losses overwhelmed schools in her district and felt strongly about incorporating mental health support into DOE’s reopening plan.

Related: How one school is coping with mental health — Social workers delivering technology, food and counseling to kids at home, and open office hours all day — even when school is out

Under Porter’s guidance, the department rolled out a plan to hire the 500 social workers, targeting schools hardest-hit by the pandemic.

By December 2021, eight months into the plan, around a third of public schools in neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID still did not have a full-time social worker, according to our analysis of DOE data.

Others had social workers but struggled to meet the needs of non-English speaking families. Studies show counseling is twice as effective if it’s in the language of the person seeking it.

DOE offers comprehensive translation services by phone that allowed social worker Jessica Chock-Goldman, who worked at Stuyvesant High School until July 2021, to communicate with non-English speaking parents about getting support for their children. But speaking through a translator makes it harder to talk about sensitive topics, like grief. “I remember in the beginning, we had so many kids who lost parents” to COVID, Chock-Goldman said, but she found it difficult to help them.

Typically, she arranges for clinicians with a shared ethnicity to talk with parent groups about ways their kids can work through stigmas related to mental health.

“A lot of these families, in their country of origin for the parents, therapy is not the norm,” she said.

Carolina Nudo, the former social worker at Yarely’s school, has seen the benefits of language-specific counseling firsthand. At Children’s Lab School, more than half of the nearly 450 students are Latino and around a quarter are learning English. Nudo speaks Spanish and was able to communicate with Yarely’s family directly, including her mother Culcay, whose primary language is Spanish.

Yarely remembers learning breathing exercises during counseling sessions and being encouraged to do something that she loved as a way to feel better. She enjoys painting, so she recreated a beach sunset that she once watched with her father.

But Yarely missed some counseling sessions and her grades dropped while her mother worked at a new job for nearly 12 hours a day to make up for her late husband’s income. “I hardly paid attention,” Culcay said.

Related: A year like no other: The class of 2021 played ‘the hand we were dealt’

For grieving children from undocumented families, it can be harder to get help, said Jeanette Rodriguez, a counselor through a partner organization at I.S. 145 in Jackson Heights, where more than 90 percent of students are Hispanic. At least five of her students lost a parent or caregiver to COVID, she said. Undocumented parents may not know how to access health insurance, for instance, and can be too afraid to enroll their children in public services, for fear that the information might be shared with authorities.

“We tell them, ‘When you come here, you’re protected,’” Rodriguez said of undocumented parents. “We want them to feel safe.”

‘Grief is Not a Behavioral Problem’

Though some families we spoke with had positive encounters with their schools, others say they encountered obstacles that left them feeling stigmatized for seeking grief support.

Veronica Fletcher lost her husband, Joseph Trevor Fletcher, an MTA worker and immigrant from Grenada, to COVID in April 2020. When her three children returned to their Brooklyn public schools for in-person learning more than a year later, they each demonstrated signs of trouble.

Her oldest, Joshua, then 16, became hyper-focused on his studies, determined to graduate from high school early. His brother, Ziggy, then 13, had nearly failed a class soon after their father’s death, and continued to be sad and distracted in school. And Maddie, then 9, seemed increasingly lonely. Frequently, she visited the schoolyard’s “buddy bench” to signal that she wanted company.

In October 2021, just weeks into the new academic year, Fletcher received a phone call from her younger children’s school, P.S. 207 in southeast Brooklyn, where COVID deaths have ranked among the highest in the city. She learned that Maddie had started crying during recess and, hours later, was still inconsolable. The teacher advised her to wait until pick-up to see her daughter, which struck Fletcher as insensitive. “When she came in the car, I just held her,” said Fletcher. “Her body was just racking with sobs.”

The school counselor referred Fletcher to a nonprofit that offers bereavement support and held a virtual meeting with Maddie in fall 2020. But for the sessions to continue, Fletcher said she was asked to submit a letter stating that her children needed “at-risk” support. Concerned that could harm her children’s school records, Fletcher said she was reluctant to do it.

In April 2022, she wrote to P.S. 207 Principal Neil McNeill, again asking about bereavement support. “Please, let me know what programs are in place at either the school or with DOE for my grieving children,” she wrote in the April 14 email. “If full grown adults often have difficulty with grieving a lost parent, imagine how much more traumatic it is for children to do so in a pandemic.”

Related: ‘I can’t do this anymore’: How four middle schoolers are struggling through the pandemic

In response, McNeill reminded Fletcher that she had effectively declined “at-risk grief counseling.” He invited her to tell him if the children wanted to speak with the school counselor or needed to walk out of their classrooms for a break. “We are here to support the kids in any way that we can,” he wrote. (The DOE declined to make McNeill available for an interview or respond to questions about the policy.)

But Fletcher’s position wouldn’t change. “Grief is not a behavioral problem,” she said, explaining why she objected to submitting an official request. “It’s not a mental illness.”

Fletcher had similar concerns when she heard about a new multimillion-dollar screening tool being used to evaluate children for mental health needs, known as the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment or DESSA.

Launched in 2021, the social-emotional assessment consisted of teachers filling out an online questionnaire using a five-measure scale from “never” to “very frequently” to rate a child’s behavior in roughly 40 scenarios. The questions include things like: “During the last four weeks, how often did the child carry himself/herself with confidence?” and “How often did the child show good judgment?”

But teachers and parents say these types of questions can fail to identify students who are experiencing the unique struggle of grieving a family loss. Instead, the COVID Collaborative recommends screenings designed specifically to find children who are bereaved.

De Blasio noted that the DESSA screener was always meant to be only one step in the process. “There was not an assumption that a single universal screener would answer all questions, but it would be the beginning of identifying who needed further evaluation,” he said.

Former schools Chancellor Porter defends the DESSA, noting that she chose it, in part, because it emphasized positive traits like confidence and self-esteem rather than negative behaviors. But she said that schools could have used more support in implementing it. “It was a lot that had to happen,” she said.

New Administration Slashes School Budgets

Since Eric Adams took over as mayor in January 2022 and appointed David Banks as education chancellor, the two have said little about how the new administration will address the city’s COVID-grieving schoolchildren. The Department of Education declined to make Banks available for an interview for this story.

In September, Adams and Banks announced that 110 social workers would be reassigned from the early childhood division to the city’s public schools, a DOE spokesperson said. It is unclear what, if any, impact the move will have on schools in the neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19.

Related: Middle school is often difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine

Last fall, Yarely started fifth grade. She enjoys math, she said — it reminds her of how her father used to help her with homework.

Culcay said her daughter’s academic performance is still not at the level it was at before her husband died. And since social worker Nudo has retired, Yarely stopped receiving any counseling in school. “I only tell her the stuff,” Yarely said.

But she has grown to accept her father’s death —something Culcay credits the school with helping her realize.

In February 2021, Yarely and one of her father’s cousins traveled back to Ecuador with her father’s ashes. Recently, Yarely has learned to cook rice with sausage and eggs and fold her laundry while her mother is at work. People comment on how mature she’s become, Culcay said. “I say, ‘Yes because [her] father is no longer there and it’s just me.’”

Veronica Fletcher says her children are beginning to adjust to life without their father. She moved to Georgia in August. When the new school learned that their father had died, the counselor recommended a weekend-long grief camp, which her kids all attended in October. “I had to move to another state for someone to offer my children an opportunity that I asked for in New York.”

Fletcher still feels disappointed by the lack of support she received from the city’s school system. “They are children who have suffered loss. They get through it with support,” she said, “and the support should not be absent in a place where they spend most of their day.”

Liz Donovan and Fazil Khan produced this story as reporters, respectively, for City Limits and Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. It was produced in partnership with THE CITY and Type Investigations, two nonprofit newsrooms that provided reporting, editing, fact-checking and other support.

Type Investigations freelance reporter Muriel Alarcón and CJI reporting fellow Chris Riotta contributed reporting. Research by Columbia Journalism School’s Shannon Rose Geary, Shelby Jouppi, Amanda Torres and Jessica Vadillo and THE CITY’s intern Emi Tuyetnhi Tran. Translation by freelance journalist Lila Hassan and City Limits reporter Daniel Parra. Fact-checking by Paco Alvarez and Ethan Corey for Type Investigations.

THE CITY’s MISSING THEM project is supported, in part, by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School. Do you know a child who has lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19? Tell us more here. If you know someone who died due to COVID, share their story here or email us at memorial@thecity.nyc.

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

Reproduction of this story is not permitted.

The post The pandemic robbed thousands of New York City children of parents. Many aren’t getting the help they need appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Este artículo acerca de sesgo racial en la disciplina escolar fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, y el Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, una sala de redacción independiente, no partidista y sin fines de lucro dedicada a la investigación basada en datos en todo el estado.

GLENDALE, AZ. — Camron Olivas ha sido suspendido al menos cinco veces en el último par de años por llegar tarde a clase. Mientras su mamá cuida a su hermana pequeña, su hermano mayor lo lleva y con frecuencia llegan después del primer timbre. Durante el día, Camron dijo que a veces se queda demasiado tiempo en los pasillos entre clases, hablando con sus amigos.

Los castigos por las tardanzas del adolescente se han intensificado desde advertencias hasta suspensiones en la escuela a suspensiones fuera de la escuela.

Camron, de 15 años, asiste a Deer Valley High School, al oeste de Phoenix, donde es uno de los muchos estudiantes hispanos que han sido suspendidos por infracciones de asistencia, según datos del distrito. Camron, quien también es nativo americano, recientemente pasó un día en la sala de suspensión de la escuela en octubre, un castigo que lo obligó a faltar a siete períodos completos por llegar ocasionalmente unos minutos tarde a algunos de ellos. Al día siguiente, tenía que ponerse al día con lo que se había perdido, al mismo tiempo que aprendía nuevas lecciones.

“Nunca pensé que tuviera sentido”, dijo Camron sobre el castigo.

Los estudiantes de todo Arizona son suspendidos por no presentarse a clase, ya sea porque llegan tarde, salen del campus al mediodía o no asisten, según una investigación realizada por The Hechinger Report y el Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting (AZCIR). Según muestran los datos, los estudiantes afroamericanos, latinos y nativos americanos con frecuencia están sobrerrepresentados entre los que no pueden asistir a clases por faltar a clase, lo que algunos argumentan es evidencia de una posible violación de derechos civiles.

A nivel nacional, los investigadores han relacionado disparidades disciplinarias similares con las políticas de asistencia escolar y la aplicación desigual del castigo. Las políticas tienden a aceptar más las razones por las que los estudiantes blancos tienen más probabilidades de faltar a clase y los educadores asignan desigualmente sanciones de todo tipo, lo que permite que se introduzcan prejuicios. Las consecuencias pueden ser pronunciadas: estas desigualdades en la disciplina escolar — lo que algunos investigadores han denominado la “brecha de castigo”— contribuyen directamente a las diferencias raciales en el rendimiento académico.

“Los estudiantes tienen derecho a ser tratados en igualdad con sus compañeros, y cuando hay una desproporcionalidad inexplicable, realmente les corresponde a las escuelas entender por qué existe esa desproporcionalidad y trabajar para rectificarla”, dijo Darrell Hill, abogado y director de políticas de la American Civil Liberties Union de Arizona.

Los estudiantes de grupos históricamente marginados que reciben suspensiones excesivas en respuesta a tardanzas o ausencias injustificadas podrían “ciertamente” tener motivos para un reclamo de derechos civiles, dijo Hill.

“Me vas a suspender por llegar tarde, y luego vas a hacer que me atrase más en clase. ¿Cuál era el punto?”.

DaMarion Green, estudiante de Dysart High School

La investigación de Hechinger/AZCIR ofrece uno de los análisis más profundos jamás realizados sobre suspensiones por infracciones de asistencia. Debido a que la mayoría de los estados y el gobierno federal no recopilan datos detallados sobre los motivos de las suspensiones, el alcance de esta controvertida práctica ha permanecido oculto durante mucho tiempo.

El análisis reveló casi 47.000 suspensiones por infracciones de asistencia en los últimos cinco años escolares, en más de 80 distritos que suspendieron a estudiantes por faltar a clase. Es probable que la verdadera escala del problema sea mucho mayor, ya que casi 250 distritos no proporcionaron datos completos en respuesta a las solicitudes de registros públicos.

Acumulativamente, los estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos estaban sobrerrepresentados entre los castigados cada año, entre 20 distritos que proporcionaron datos demográficos utilizables. (Juntos, representaron el 90 por ciento de todas las suspensiones relacionadas con la asistencia en la muestra). El año escolar pasado, por ejemplo, los estudiantes afroamericanos representaron el 6 por ciento de la inscripción total en los 20 distritos, pero recibieron el 15 por ciento de las suspensiones. Los estudiantes hispanos constituyeron el 43 por ciento de la matrícula pero recibieron el 68 por ciento de las suspensiones.

Mientras tanto, los estudiantes blancos estaban en gran medida subrepresentados, con el 37 por ciento de la inscripción y recibiendo el 23 por ciento de las suspensiones.

Entre la docena de distritos con suficientes datos para evaluar la representación de los estudiantes nativos americanos, estos estudiantes a veces representaron el doble o el triple de la proporción de suspensiones que se esperaría en función de su proporción de inscripción.

Cuando se le presentaron los resultados del análisis, Kathy Hoffman, superintendente de instrucción pública de Arizona, emitió un comunicado diciendo que los hallazgos confirmaron “por qué es vital que Arizona se centre en el trato justo y equitativo de todos los estudiantes”. Pero no abordó el papel del estado durante su mandato de cuatro años, sino que instó a su sucesor recientemente electo a “trabajar con nuestras escuelas para encontrar soluciones que animen y apoyen a los estudiantes de color en Arizona” una vez que preste juramento.

“Cuando los estudiantes de color son disciplinados de manera desproporcionada, afecta el tiempo que pueden pasar aprendiendo en el salón de clases y obstaculiza su capacidad para tener éxito académico”, dijo Hoffman.

Bajo la administración de Obama, los departamentos de Justicia y Educación de Estados Unidos emitieron una guía conjunta para las escuelas sobre las disparidades raciales en la disciplina escolar. Advirtieron que una política disciplinaria que tuvo un impacto adverso en los estudiantes de una raza en particular y que “no era necesaria para alcanzar una meta educativa importante” violaba la ley de derechos civiles.

Las agencias destacaron las suspensiones fuera de la escuela por faltar a la escuela como motivo de especial preocupación.

“Una escuela”, decía la guía, “probablemente tendría dificultades para demostrar que excluir a un estudiante de asistir a la escuela en respuesta a los esfuerzos del estudiante por evitar la escuela era necesario para alcanzar un objetivo educativo importante”.

La administración Trump rescindió la guía en 2018, diciendo que iba más allá de lo que requería la Ley de Derechos Civiles. Pero los departamentos afirmaron que “las sólidas protecciones contra la discriminación por raza, color y origen nacional… permanecen sin cambios”.

Bajo la administración de Biden, la Oficina de Derechos Civiles del Departamento de Educación aún no ha emitido una nueva guía sobre el tema. Pero la subsecretaria Catherine Lhamon, quien primero dirigió la oficina bajo Obama, dijo que su personal usaría el mismo proceso que usó entonces para evaluar si las disparidades en la disciplina constituyen discriminación ilegal.

La Oficina de Derechos Civiles considera más que solo datos al decidir si hubo discriminación o no. Pero Lhamon dijo que los números descubiertos por el análisis de Hechinger/AZCIR ofrecen justificación para una investigación. “Las disparidades de cualquier tipo son notables y vale la pena evaluarlas”, dijo Lhamon.

“Estoy muy preocupada cuando escucho que los niños pierden tiempo de instrucción”, agregó.

El año escolar pasado, los estudiantes afroamericanos representaron el 6 por ciento de la inscripción total en 20 distritos de Arizona que proporcionaron datos demográficos utilizables pero recibieron el 15 por ciento de las suspensiones. Los estudiantes hispanos constituyeron el 43 por ciento de la matrícula pero recibieron el 68 por ciento de las suspensiones.

En algunos distritos de Arizona, el desequilibrio entre quién es suspendido por infracciones de asistencia es extremo.

El Glendale Union High School District, por ejemplo, entregó casi 12.500 suspensiones por infracciones de asistencia en los últimos cinco años escolares. Y aunque los estudiantes latinos constituían alrededor del 60 por ciento de su matrícula, representaron hasta el 90 por ciento de los estudiantes suspendidos. Los estudiantes afroamericanos representaron alrededor del 8 por ciento de los estudiantes matriculados, pero tanto como el 21 por ciento de los estudiantes suspendidos, mientras que los estudiantes nativos americanos representaron alrededor del 2 por ciento de la inscripción y hasta el 6 por ciento de las suspensiones.

Kim Mesquita, portavoz del Glendale Union High School District, no comentó sobre las disparidades en la disciplina escolar por raza. En respuesta a las preguntas sobre el uso frecuente de suspensiones por infracciones de asistencia por parte del distrito, dijo que el distrito estaba “revisando los datos” y “determinando qué es efectivo y qué no”.

Los investigadores han descubierto que las disparidades raciales en cuanto a quién es disciplinado por ausentismo pueden atribuirse, en parte, a las propias políticas de asistencia. Los distritos escolares castigan a los estudiantes solo por ausencias injustificadas, lo que hace que la aprobación del distrito por faltar a la escuela sea crucial. Y los estudiantes blancos tienen más probabilidades que los de otras razas de ausentarse por razones que las escuelas justifican.

“El racismo está tan descaradamente escrito en las políticas”, dijo Clea McNeely, profesora investigadora de la Universidad de Tennessee que estudió las políticas de asistencia en una muestra representativa a nivel nacional de 97 distritos escolares.

“Es un poco cómo te ven. Si sales con ciertos niños, sucede mucho. Sobre todo por llegar tarde”.

Antoine Moore, estudiante de Deer Valley High School

McNeely y su equipo encontraron que los distritos escolares tenían menos probabilidades de excusar las ausencias causadas por circunstancias de la vida que suelen experimentar los niños afroamericanos, hispanos e nativos americanos.

Los estudiantes que van al médico cuando están enfermos tienen más facilidad para que se les justifiquen las ausencias relacionadas con enfermedades, por ejemplo, y es más probable que las familias blancas reciban atención médica. Los niños cuyas familias no pueden pagar un transporte confiable tienen más probabilidades de acumular tardanzas que conducen a suspensiones. Las escuelas a menudo excusarán una ausencia para un niño que visita a un padre en el ejército, pero no para una visita a un padre que está encarcelado. La lista continúa. Siglos de discriminación, a veces patrocinada por el gobierno, han llevado a patrones raciales en torno a la pobreza y el encarcelamiento, lo que hace que las familias afroamericanas, latinas e indígenas tengan menos probabilidades de estar aseguradas, más probabilidades de vivir en la pobreza y más probabilidades de lidiar con el encarcelamiento.

En tres distritos donde el equipo de McNeely estudió las ausencias individuales, el 13 por ciento de las ausencias de los estudiantes blancos se consideró injustificada, en comparación con el 21 por ciento de las ausencias de los estudiantes hispanos y el 24 por ciento de las ausencias de los estudiantes afroamericanos e indígenas.

Los distritos de Arizona tienen políticas similares a las que estudió McNeely. En el distrito escolar de Dysart Unified, por ejemplo, la enfermedad, las citas médicas y las vacaciones familiares aprobadas se encuentran entre las razones por las que los estudiantes pueden calificar para una ausencia justificada.

Los estudiantes afroamericanos representan alrededor del 7 por ciento de la matrícula de Dysart, pero recibieron hasta el 13 por ciento de las suspensiones en los últimos cinco años escolares. Los estudiantes hispanos representan alrededor del 40 por ciento de la matrícula y recibieron hasta el 67 por ciento de las suspensiones.

En un estudio, las ausencias entre los estudiantes afroamericanos fueron injustificadas el 24 por ciento de las veces, en comparación con el 13 por ciento de los estudiantes blancos.

Renee Ryon, vocera de Dysart Unified, dijo que la disciplina por infracciones de asistencia está claramente descrita en el manual del estudiante.

“O los estudiantes llegan a clase a tiempo o se les marca tarde o ausente”, dijo Ryon por correo electrónico. “Dysart se dedica a servir a todos los estudiantes, y seríamos negligentes si no hiciéramos todo lo que esté a nuestro alcance para garantizar que todos estén en clase a tiempo para aprender, independientemente de su demografía”.

Sin embargo, se cuestiona la sabiduría de suspender a los estudiantes por faltar a clase. Algunos estudiantes de Arizona dijeron que sus distritos no deberían suspender por infracciones de asistencia, lógica que coincide con la de los investigadores, defensores y educadores que dicen que el castigo no es la respuesta al ausentismo.

“Todos tienen algo en casa”, dijo DaMarion Green, estudiante de segundo año en Dysart High School. “Puede que estén pasando por algo y por eso llegan tarde, y esto no ayuda en nada”.

DaMarion, quien es afroamericano, dijo que ha sido suspendido unas cuatro veces por llegar tarde en las mañanas. Para él, todo parece ilógico.

“Me vas a suspender por llegar tarde, y luego vas a hacer que me atrase más en clase”, dijo DaMarion. “¿Cuál era el punto?”

A veces, las disparidades en la disciplina escolar se pueden atribuir directamente a quienes toman las decisiones sobre si aplicar o no los castigos. Dos décadas de investigación han demostrado que los estudiantes afroamericanos, aunque no tienen más probabilidades de portarse mal, tienen más probabilidades que sus compañeros blancos de ser remitidos a la oficina del director, específicamente por ofensas subjetivas, como una actitud desafiante.

El equipo de McNeely encontró un patrón similar en el castigo por ausentismo. Los investigadores observaron de cerca las referencias a la corte sobre ausencias y ausentismo escolar en tres distritos escolares y descubrieron que los estudiantes indígenas, afroamericanos e hispanos tienen más probabilidades que sus compañeros blancos de ser enviados a la corte, incluso cuando pierden la misma cantidad de días de clases.

Los estudiantes de Arizona también describieron un nivel de subjetividad en la forma en que los educadores deciden quién es castigado por llegar tarde a clase, incluso si ninguno de los encuestados lo relacionó con prejuicios raciales. En Deer Valley High School, a la que asiste Camron, los niños notaron que algunos estudiantes no enfrentaron ninguna consecuencia por faltar a clase, mientras que otros fueron suspendidos.

El propio hermano de Camron, estudiante de último año de high school, llega tarde con la misma frecuencia que Camron. Pero la clase del primer periodo de su hermano este año es educación física, y el maestro es más indulgente, dijo Camron. Y aunque las tardanzas del mediodía de Camron ciertamente cuentan en su contra, sus compañeros describieron casos similares de trato dispar.

“Es más o menos cómo te ven”, dijo Antoine Moore, de 16 años, quien dijo que nunca ha sido suspendido por infracciones de asistencia, pero conoce a estudiantes que sí. “Si sales con ciertos niños, sucede mucho. Sobre todo por llegar tarde”.

En Deer Valley Unified, la sobrerrepresentación entre los estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos suspendidos osciló entre 2 y 12 puntos porcentuales por encima de su participación en la inscripción de estudiantes en los últimos cinco años.

Gary Zehrbach, superintendente adjunto de liderazgo administrativo y servicios en el distrito, dijo que las suspensiones registradas por infracciones de asistencia “generalmente estaban relacionadas con múltiples infracciones disciplinarias”, pero la frecuencia exacta no está clara en los datos. No respondió a las solicitudes de comentarios sobre las disparidades raciales dentro de las suspensiones.

Aún así, no todos los estudiantes que tienen la costumbre de llegar tarde o tener ausencias injustificadas terminan siendo suspendidos por ello.

Jalen Greathouse, de 16 años, asiste a Valley Vista High School en el distrito escolar de Dysart Unified. Dijo que ser castigado por llegar tarde a clase depende, en parte, del maestro que supervisa esa clase. Los maestros pueden optar por que los estudiantes que lleguen tarde sean “barridos” dentro de un salón de clases donde permanecen sentados el resto del periodo y los administradores evalúan si califican para una suspensión más prolongada.

“Algunos maestros están de acuerdo con eso”, dijo Jalen. “Otros maestros dicen, ‘Un segundo tarde — ve a ‘sweep’”.

Los estudiantes no informan que su comportamiento se haya visto frenado por suspensiones por infracciones de asistencia. El castigo, después de todo, no les da control sobre mucho de lo que les impide ir a la escuela. Y cuando son suspendidos, lo que Jalen no ha tenido hasta ahora, pierden un tiempo de instrucción importante.

Los investigadores han descubierto que faltar a la escuela solo dos días al mes — por cualquier motivo — puede generar problemas graves. Los estudiantes que se ausentan mucho tienen más probabilidades de tener problemas para leer en tercer grado, obtener calificaciones más bajas en las pruebas de lenguaje y matemáticas en la escuela intermedia y abandonar la escuela secundaria. Los estudiantes que son suspendidos ven un rendimiento académico y tasas de graduación igualmente bajos, áreas en las que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos ya tienden a estar rezagados con respecto a sus compañeros blancos.

Un estudio realizado por investigadores de la Universidad de Kentucky y la Universidad de Indiana examinó el impacto de las suspensiones en las diferencias raciales en el rendimiento de lectura y matemáticas, y denominó a la disparidad racial la “brecha de castigo”. Un 20 por ciento de la diferencia en el rendimiento académico entre los estudiantes afroamericanos y blancos, dijeron, puede explicarse por la mayor tasa de suspensiones de los estudiantes afroamericanos.

Cuando la administración de Obama emitió su guía sobre la disciplina escolar, se centró en la suspensión de las disparidades raciales entre los estudiantes. Tanto los partidarios como los críticos atribuyeron a la guía (actualmente “bajo revisión” por parte de la administración de Biden) la reducción de las suspensiones, en parte debido a la amenaza de investigación que implicaba.

En agosto pasado, la Oficina de Derechos Civiles del Departamento de Educación de los Estados Unidos anunció una resolución con el Victor Valley Union High School District de California, en la que el distrito acordó revisar sus políticas de disciplina y eliminar las tardanzas y el ausentismo escolar como motivos de suspensión. La Oficina de Derechos Civiles encontró suficiente evidencia para concluir que el distrito disciplinó de manera desproporcionada a los estudiantes afroamericanos por faltar a clase, entre otras cosas.

Aún así, Lhamon dijo que los distritos escolares tienen la responsabilidad de cumplir la promesa de la Ley de Derechos Civiles, ya sea que su oficina esté investigando o no.

“La obligación es una obligación todos los días”, dijo, “para cada comunidad escolar”.

Este artículo acerca de sesgo racial en la disciplina escolar fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, y el Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, una sala de redacción independiente, no partidista y sin fines de lucro dedicada a la investigación basada en datos en todo el estado.

The post Derechos civiles en riesgo: Estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos son suspendidos más por faltar a clase. appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about racial bias in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Camron Olivas has been suspended at least five times throughout middle and high school for being late to class. While his mother cares for his toddler sister, his older brother drives him in, and they frequently arrive after the first bell. During the day, Camron said he sometimes remains in the hallways too long between classes, talking to his friends.

Punishments for the teen’s tardiness have escalated from warnings to in-school suspensions to multiday out-of-school suspensions.

Camron, 15, attends Deer Valley High School, just west of Phoenix, where he is one of an outsize number of Hispanic students who have been suspended for attendance violations, according to district data. Camron, who is also Native American, most recently spent a day in the in-school suspension room in October, a punishment that forced him to miss seven whole periods for occasionally being a few minutes late to some of them. The next day, he had to catch up on what he missed, while also taking in new lessons.

“I never thought it made sense,” Camron said of the punishment.

Students all over Arizona are suspended for not showing up to class, whether it’s because they arrive late, leave campus midday or fail to make it at all, an investigation by The Hechinger Report and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting has found. And, the data shows, Black, Latino and Native American students are frequently overrepresented among those blocked from class for missing class — what some argue is evidence of a potential civil rights violation.

Nationally, researchers have tied similar discipline disparities to school attendance policies and the unequal application of punishment. The policies tend to be more accepting of reasons that white students are most likely to miss class, and educators unevenly assign discipline of all kinds, allowing bias to creep in. The consequences can be steep: These inequities in school discipline — what some researchers have dubbed the “punishment gap” — contribute directly to racial differences in academic performance.

“Students have a right to be treated in equity with their peers, and when there’s unexplained disproportionality, it’s really incumbent on schools to understand why that disproportionality exists and to work to rectify it,” said Darrell Hill, attorney and policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class

Students from historically marginalized groups who receive excessive suspensions in response to tardies or unexcused absences could “certainly” have grounds for a civil rights claim, Hill said.

The Hechinger/AZCIR investigation offers one of the most in-depth analyses ever conducted of suspensions for attendance violations. Because most states and the federal government don’t collect detailed data on the reasons behind suspensions, the extent of this controversial practice has long remained hidden.

The analysis revealed nearly 47,000 suspensions for attendance violations over the past five school years, across more than 80 districts that suspended students for missing class. The true scale of the problem is likely much larger, as almost 250 districts failed to provide comprehensive data in response to public records requests.

“You’re going to suspend me for being late, and then you’re going to make me fall behind in class more. It’s like, what was the point?”

DaMarion Green, Dysart High School student

Cumulatively, Black and Hispanic students were overrepresented among those punished every year, among 20 districts that supplied usable demographic data. (Together, they accounted for 90 percent of all attendance-related suspensions in the sample.) Last school year, for example, Black students made up 6 percent of the total enrollment across all 20 districts but received 15 percent of suspensions. Hispanic students made up 43 percent of enrollment but received 68 percent of suspensions.

White students, meanwhile, were largely underrepresented, making up 37 percent of enrollment and receiving 23 percent of suspensions.

Among the dozen districts with enough data to assess Native American student representation, these students sometimes accounted for double or triple the share of suspensions that would be expected based on their proportion of enrollment.

Presented with the results of the analysis, Kathy Hoffman, Arizona superintendent of public instruction, issued a statement saying the findings confirmed “why it is vital for Arizona to focus on equitable and fair treatment of all students.” But she did not address the state’s role during her four-year tenure, instead urging her recently elected successor to “work with our schools toward solutions that uplift and support students of color in Arizona” once he is sworn in.

“When students of color are disproportionately disciplined, it impacts the time they can spend learning in the classroom and hampers their ability to succeed academically,” Hoffman said.

Under the Obama administration, the U.S. departments of Justice and Education issued joint guidance to schools about racial disparities in school discipline. They cautioned that a disciplinary policy that had an adverse impact on students of a particular race and was “not necessary to meet an important educational goal” violated civil rights law.

The agencies highlighted out-of-school suspensions for missing school as cause for particular concern.

“A school,” the guidance read, “would likely have difficulty demonstrating that excluding a student from attending school in response to the student’s efforts to avoid school was necessary to meet an important educational goal.”

Related: Inside our analysis of attendance-related suspensions in Arizona

The Trump administration rescinded the guidance in 2018, saying it went beyond what the Civil Rights Act required. But the departments asserted that “robust protections against race, color, and national origin discrimination … remain unchanged.”

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has yet to issue fresh guidance on the topic. But Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon, who first ran the office under former President Barack Obama, said her staff would use the same process it used then to assess whether disparities in discipline constitute unlawful discrimination.

“It’s kind of just how they see you. If you hang out with certain kids, it happens a lot. Especially for being late.”

Antoine Moore, Deer Valley High School student

The Office for Civil Rights considers more than just data when deciding whether or not discrimination occurred. But Lhamon said the numbers uncovered by the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis offer justification for an investigation. “Disparities of any kind are notable and worth evaluating,” Lhamon said.

“I am very concerned when I hear about kids missing instructional time,” she added.

In some Arizona districts, the imbalance in who gets suspended for attendance violations is striking.

Glendale Union High School District, for example, handed out nearly 12,500 suspensions for attendance violations over the past five school years. And while Latino students made up about 60 percent of its enrollment, they accounted for up to 90 percent of students suspended. Black students represented about 8  percent of students enrolled but as much as 21 percent of students suspended, while Native American students made up about 2 percent of enrollment and as much as 6 percent of suspensions.

Kim Mesquita, Glendale Union High School District spokeswoman, did not comment on the disparities in school discipline by race. In response to questions about the district’s frequent use of suspensions for attendance violations, she said the district was “reviewing the data” and “determining what is effective and what is not.”

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Researchers have found that racial disparities in who is disciplined for absenteeism can be attributed, in part, to attendance policies themselves. School districts punish students only for unexcused absences, making district approval for missing school crucial. And white students are more likely than those of other races to be absent for reasons that schools excuse.

“Racism is so blatantly written into the policies,” said Clea McNeely, a University of Tennessee research professor who studied attendance policies in a nationally representative sample of 97 school districts.

McNeely and her team found that school districts were less likely to excuse absences caused by life circumstances more typically experienced by Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.

Students who go to the doctor when they’re sick have an easier time getting illness-related absences excused, for instance, and white families are more likely to receive medical care. Kids whose families can’t afford reliable transportation are more likely to rack up tardies that lead to suspensions. Schools will often excuse an absence for a child visiting a parent in the military, but not one for visiting a parent who is incarcerated. The list goes on. Centuries of discrimination, sometimes government-sponsored, have led to racial patterns around poverty and incarceration, making Black, Latino and Indigenous families less likely to be insured, more likely to live in poverty, and more likely to deal with incarceration.

Across three districts where McNeely’s team studied individual absences, 13 percent of white students’ absences were deemed unexcused, compared with 21 percent of absences by Hispanic students and 24 percent of absences by Black and American Indian students.

Arizona districts have policies similar to those McNeely studied. In Dysart Unified School District, for example, illness, medical appointments and approved family vacations are among the reasons students can qualify for an excused absence.

Black students make up about 7 percent of Dysart’s enrollment, yet they received as much as 13 percent of suspensions over the past five school years. Hispanic students make up around 40 percent of enrollment and received as much as 67 percent of suspensions.

In one study, absences among Black students were unexcused 24 percent of the time, compared with 13 percent for white students.

Renee Ryon, spokeswoman for Dysart Unified, said discipline for attendance violations is clearly described in the student handbook.

“Either students come to class on time, or they are marked tardy or absent,” Ryon said via email. “Dysart is dedicated to serving all students, and we would be remiss if we did not do everything in our power to ensure they are all in class on time in order to learn, regardless of their demographics.”

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions

The wisdom of suspending students for missing class, however, is disputed. Some Arizona students said their districts shouldn’t suspend students for attendance violations — logic that matches that of researchers, advocates and educators who say discipline is not the answer to absenteeism.

“Everyone has something at home,” said DaMarion Green, a sophomore at Dysart High School. “They might be going through something and that’s why they’re late, and this doesn’t help nothing.”

DaMarion, who is Black, said he has been suspended about four times for being late in the mornings. To him, it all just seems illogical.

“You’re going to suspend me for being late, and then you’re going to make me fall behind in class more,” said DaMarion. “It’s like, what was the point?”

Sometimes, disparities in school discipline can be attributed directly to those making decisions about whether or not to dole out punishments. Two decades of research have demonstrated that Black students, while no more likely to misbehave, are more likely than their white classmates to be referred to the principal’s office — specifically for subjective offenses, such as defiance.

McNeely’s team found a similar pattern in punishment for absenteeism. Researchers looked closely at absences and truancy court referrals in three school districts, finding that American Indian, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than their white peers to be sent to court, even when they miss the same number of days of school.

Arizona students also described a level of subjectivity in how educators decide who gets punished for being late to class, even if none who were asked tied it to racial bias. At Deer Valley High School, which Camron attends, kids noted some students didn’t face any consequences for missing class, while others got suspended.

Last school year, Black students made up 6 percent of the total enrollment across 20 Arizona districts that supplied usable demographic data but received 15 percent of suspensions. Hispanic students made up 43 percent of enrollment but received 68 percent of suspensions.

Camron’s own brother, a senior at the high school, arrives late just as frequently as Camron. But his brother’s first-period class this year is physical education, and the teacher is more lenient, Camron said. And while Camron’s midday tardies certainly count against him, his peers described similar cases of disparate treatment.

“It’s kind of just how they see you,” said Antoine Moore, 16, who said he has never been suspended for attendance violations but knows students who have. “If you hang out with certain kids, it happens a lot. Especially for being late.”

At Deer Valley Unified, overrepresentation among Black and Hispanic students suspended ranged from 2 to 12 percentage points above their share of student enrollment over the past five years.

Gary Zehrbach, deputy superintendent of administrative leadership and services in the district, said the suspensions logged for attendance violations were “usually related to multiple disciplinary infractions,” but exactly how often isn’t clear in the data. He did not respond to requests for comment on the racial disparities within the suspensions.

Related: Students can’t learn if they don’t show up at school

Still, not every student who makes a habit of being late or has unexcused absences ends up getting suspended for it.

Jalen Greathouse, 16, attends Valley Vista High School in Dysart Unified. He said getting punished for being late to class depends, in part, on the teacher overseeing that class. Teachers can choose to have students who are late get “swept” into a classroom where they sit out the rest of the period and administrators assess whether they qualify for a longer suspension.

“Some teachers are cool with it,” Jalen said. “Other teachers are like, ‘One second late — go to sweep.’ ”

Students don’t report having their behavior curbed by suspensions for attendance violations. The punishment, after all, doesn’t give them control over much of what keeps them from school. And when they do get suspended, which Jalen so far has not, they miss important instructional time.

Researchers have found missing just two days of school per month — for any reason — can lead to serious problems. Students who are absent that much are more likely to have trouble reading in third grade, to score lower on language and math tests in middle school, and to drop out of high school. Students who get suspended see similarly depressed academic performance and graduation rates — areas where Black and Latino students already tend to trail their white peers.

A study by researchers from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University examined the impact of suspensions on racial differences in reading and math performance, dubbing the racial disparity the “punishment gap.” A full 20 percent of the difference in academic performance between Black and white students, they said, can be explained by Black students’ higher rate of suspensions.

When the Obama administration issued its guidance on school discipline, it focused on racial disparities among students being suspended. Supporters and critics alike credited the now-rescinded guidance, currently “under review” by the Biden administration, with driving down suspensions, in part because of the threat of investigation it implied.

This past August, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced a resolution with California’s Victor Valley Union High School District, in which the district agreed to revise its discipline policies and remove tardiness and truancy as reasons for suspension. The Office for Civil Rights had found enough evidence to conclude the district disproportionately disciplined Black students for missing class, among other things.

Still, Lhamon said school districts have a responsibility to fulfill the promise of the Civil Rights Act, whether her office is investigating or not.

“The obligation is an obligation every day,” she said, “for every school community.”

This story about racial bias in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about attendance-related suspensions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

“Education Suspended,” a collaboration between the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and The Hechinger Report, represents an ambitious, nearly yearlong effort to better understand the impact of school absences on Arizona students. When kids aren’t in class, they aren’t learning, a reality underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This series isn’t just about why students may miss class, though. Our collaborative investigation is more about what Arizona schools do to students who are consistently absent — or, as we ultimately found, what they do even if kids are repeatedly a few minutes late, sometimes through no fault of their own.

Administrators at schools of varying sizes, types and demographic makeups often respond to a range of attendance violations by keeping students out of class altogether, in the form of in- or out-of-school suspensions. Being blocked from class for missing class, however, compounds the problem these officials say they’re trying to solve.

Yet, without comprehensive data readily available at either the state or federal levels, it was initially impossible to see how widespread the practice of suspending students for attendance issues was, or how many additional school days kids were missing as a result.

We also couldn’t tell which districts most frequently used suspensions in response to attendance problems, how heavily they leaned on out-of-school suspensions, which types of attendance violations were being punished most often, and whether students from historically marginalized groups were overrepresented when it came to disciplinary action.

So we submitted hundreds of records requests and used the responses to create an original database to answer those and other key questions.

Here’s a closer look at how we did it, and the decisions we made along the way.

Why were public records requests needed to access this information?

Districts and charter schools periodically collect and report suspension and expulsion data to the U.S. Department of Education as part of the Civil Rights Data Collection, a federal effort to ensure the country’s public schools do not discriminate against protected classes of students. Though Arizona displays the results online as part of its “school report card” system, CRDC data couldn’t address the questions we sought to answer.

The data does not tie suspensions to violations, making it impossible to see whether a school system suspended students for attendance issues in general, or which types of attendance violations it suspends for specifically. CRDC data also does not provide a full picture of suspension lengths, which we needed to determine how long students were being blocked from class as a result of missing class.

The Arizona Department of Education does not collect detailed disciplinary data for all students, either. It does, however, maintain enrollment data and chronic absenteeism data that we used to establish district baselines for comparison.

What information did reporters ask for?

To fill these data gaps — and allow us to see, for the first time, which school systems use suspensions in response to absences, tardies and other attendance issues—AZCIR and The Hechinger Report submitted more than 400 records requests to districts and charter systems throughout the state.

We asked for disciplinary data capturing in-school and out-of-school suspensions, expulsions and transfers that:

• Spanned the 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.
• Included the reason for each disciplinary action.
• Noted, for suspensions, how many days the punishment lasted.
• Was broken down by race/ethnicity, gender and disability status.

We also requested information on truancy referrals, since some schools refer students with excessive absences to the court system.

Were records requests sent to every school system in Arizona?

We excluded the following from our analysis:

• Alternative schools, which explicitly serve at-risk students: those with a history of disruptive behavior issues, for example, or those who have previously dropped out of school or are primary caregivers. Since alternative schools tend to treat discipline differently than traditional campuses (for example, by committing to avoiding highly punitive measures), their data could skew the results of our analysis.
• Accommodation districts. We used a similar rationale here, since these districts also tend to serve student populations with specific needs (such as students in juvenile detention, students experiencing homelessness, students on military bases or reservations) in nontraditional learning environments.
• Career and technical education districts, another type of unconventional educational setting that focuses on preparing students for the workforce. CTEDs require a majority of instructional time to be conducted in a field-based or work-based learning environment.
• Small rural districts that have so few students, the Department of Education redacts any meaningful data.

Did all Arizona school systems provide responsive data?

No. Several school districts were slow to comply, in many cases only providing data after several rounds of follow-up. Hundreds of other districts and charters either didn’t provide usable data or respond at all (a violation of Arizona public records law).

It ultimately took more than six months to get responses from about 200 district and charter systems, and many were incomplete. Some were missing demographic information, or did not specify how long suspensions lasted. A handful did not tie disciplinary actions to violation categories. Others redacted all data points representing numbers smaller than 11, citing student privacy concerns.

School systems also provided responses in a wide range of formats. A portion sent clean databases that could be analyzed immediately, while many more sent spreadsheets or PDFs that required significant standardization before they could be analyzed. Some sent scanned copies of individual incident report forms or other files that included thousands of narrative descriptions. In those cases, we read the descriptions and logged the corresponding data points in spreadsheets.

Why was there so much variation in disciplinary data?

At a basic level, the discrepancies make sense, because schools aren’t required to maintain this data in a uniform way. Districts and charters use a variety of digital student management systems that generate different types of reports, and some smaller schools don’t use a digital system at all.

In other circumstances, the discrepancies were either deliberate or avoidable. For instance, some school systems, acting on advice from their attorneys, converted spreadsheets to PDFs before providing their data. Some districts claimed current employees were not familiar enough with their student management systems to produce responsive reports — one wanted AZCIR/Hechinger to pay more than $400 for employee training in order to get the data (we did not). Others said they could only provide data for certain years because they had switched student management systems and had not retained records from prior systems.

How did you standardize the data?

We first reviewed each school system’s data to determine whether it had suspended students for attendance violations over the past five school years.

Sometimes, it was easy to identify attendance-related violation categories: “truancy,” “tardy,” “unexcused absence,” “excessive absences,” “ditching,” “skipping,” “other attendance violation,” and so on. Other times, we had to make a judgment call. For instance:

• We considered “leaving school grounds/campus without permission” and “elopement” (fleeing the campus) attendance violations, as students were being punished for leaving during the school day.
• We considered skipping an in-school suspension to be an attendance violation, since those occur during class time, unlike out-of-school suspensions.
• We did not consider skipping an after-school detention to be an attendance violation, since that would happen outside of school hours.

If a school system did, in fact, suspend for attendance-related violations, we worked to clean and standardize its data so we could add it to our master database.This involved (1) making basic fixes to ensure data was consistently formatted and (2) using data analysis software to calculate total in-school suspensions, total out-of-school suspensions and days missed as a result, by violation type and school year. When provided, we also calculated demographic totals — by race/ethnicity, gender and disability status — by violation type and school year.

A few things worth noting:

Data for some school systems indicated they doled out partial-day suspensions, such as sending a student home on out-of-school suspension “for the rest of the day.” When districts calculated the time missed for us, we used their numbers. When they didn’t, we calculated estimates ourselves based on details in the incident description. (For example, if a district noted a student was sent to the in-school suspension room the last two of six class periods, we estimated 0.3 days missed. If the incident time indicated a district sent a student home about halfway through the school day, we estimated 0.5 days missed.)

Some school districts listed a minimum duration of one school day for all suspensions, then claimed that many suspensions were actually for less than one day when contacted about total days missed. If districts could not provide more precise suspension durations, we used the data as submitted.

We did not calculate suspension lengths for districts that only listed start and end dates for each incident. Doing so would have required determining total days included in the range, then reviewing both standard and academic calendars for each year to subtract weekend days and school holidays for every suspension.

In at least five cases, we could see a district suspended students for attendance problems, but data integrity issues did not allow us to glean much more. We ultimately excluded those districts from our database, since their data was not usable for detailed calculations.

What did the final AZCIR/Hechinger database include?

Our database included the number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions each district issued, by school year and violation type, as well as how long the suspensions lasted. We also added demographic data for those suspended when available. We distinguished between true zeroes and missing or redacted data points, since those differences matter.

We categorized each violation category as attendance-related or not, so we could analyze the number and rates of suspensions for attendance issues — the most original part of our data-driven reporting. Among other questions, we wanted to know: What proportion of suspensions were for attendance violations overall? Which districts used them most often? Were school systems using in-school or out-of-school suspensions more to punish kids for missing class time? Which types of attendance violations were being punished most frequently? How much additional class time were kids missing as a result of these suspensions?

How did you analyze the data?

We did topline calculations using data from districts and charters that suspended for attendance violations. We first determined the total number of attendance-related suspensions for the five-year review period, as well as the total days lost to those suspensions. We did the same calculations for in-school suspensions specifically, as well as out-of-school suspensions.

Because we received suspension data organized by incident, not by student ID, totals represented the number of suspensions issued, not the number of students suspended. In a group of 100 suspensions, for instance, one student could account for 10 of them.

Because several districts did not provide the lengths of any of all suspensions issued, we also knew total days missed would likely be an undercount.

Though the analysis did not include all Arizona school systems, or complete data for every district that did respond, the calculations offer a better understanding of the proportion of overall suspensions tied to attendance violations, illustrating for the first time just how pervasive the practice of suspending for attendance issues is across Arizona — and what that means in terms of additional days missed, even if approximate.

The in-school versus out-of-school suspension comparison revealed that more than 1 in 5 attendance-related suspensions in our sample were served out of school, a practice experts argue is even more detrimental than in-school suspensions when it comes to student disengagement. It also showed, as we explore in part two of this series, that attendance-related suspensions tend to disproportionately affect Arizona’s Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students.

How did you do the district-level analysis?

At a more granular level, we wanted to better understand which district and charter systems most harshly punished students for attendance issues, and whether that was consistent over the five school years analyzed.

Because student populations varied widely from district to district, though, looking at raw numbers of suspensions issued and the resulting days missed — by district and year — wasn’t a fair comparative measure for every question we were trying to answer.

We instead used Arizona Department of Education enrollment data to calculate annual rates of attendance-related suspensions for each school system. Specifically, we analyzed the number of suspensions issued for attendance violations by district, per 1,000 students, per school year. This allowed us to compare districts, and also to see if and how a district’s use of suspensions for attendance violations changed over time.

We then used ADE’s chronic absenteeism data to calculate annual chronic absenteeism rates for each school system (again, per 1,000 students). We used those rates to determine if districts that most heavily relied on suspensions for attendance issues were the same as those with high rates of chronic absenteeism.

To examine specific subcategories of attendance-related violations — for instance, to see where suspending for tardies was most common — we filtered our database using keywords. In cases where districts grouped multiple offenses leading to a single suspension, we counted that suspension when calculating totals for each subcategory. For example, a suspension for “truancy/tardies” would appear both in the total number of tardy suspensions and the total number of truancy suspensions.

These analyses helped inform our decisions about where to focus our efforts when it came to interviewing district administrators, school officials and students.

How did you check for overrepresentation of certain racial/ethnic groups?

Though roughly 75 school systems provided some level of demographic breakdown for their suspension data, much of the race and ethnicity data was incomplete or heavily redacted.

To ensure our analysis was as accurate and fair as possible, we opted to analyze only the top 20 districts with the highest number of attendance-related suspensions and the most comprehensive demographic data (for both discipline and overall enrollment) for disproportionality. These districts accounted for just over a quarter of the state’s public school population but nearly 90 percent of attendance-related suspensions in the AZCIR/Hechinger sample.

To check for overrepresentation of certain racial/ethnic groups, we compared each group’s share of attendance-related suspensions within a district with its share of district enrollment, as supplied by ADE, for a given year. If the former was higher — for example, if Black students represented 10 percent of a district’s relevant suspensions but only 5 percent of its student population — that group was understood to be overrepresented, and thus disproportionately affected by attendance-related suspensions. This also allowed us to see that white students tended to be underrepresented among those suspended.

Two items worth mentioning:

• Because data for Indigenous students in particular was even more limited, analysis of that group involved about a dozen of the top 20 districts.
• Some school systems differed in how they treated students identifying as Hispanic — whether they listed a student identifying as Black and Hispanic under both Black and Hispanic or under “two or more races,” for instance. We generally had to defer to the school system when it came to race/ethnicity categorizations, which means it’s possible a small number of students appeared more than once in a district’s data.

This story about attendance-related suspensions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post Inside our analysis of attendance-related suspensions in Arizona appeared first on The Hechinger Report.