When you're comparing data points, it's important to make sure the categories are actually parallel. Thus I was troubled yesterday at the forum on out-of-school suspension by a chart comparing Worcester's out-of-school suspension rate with other districts.
The Worcester Public Schools do not expel students. We haven't for years. The most harsh punishment we met out is a long term out-of-school suspension (for, say, a year or half a year) with alternative placement (meaning that the student is placed in one of the alternative programs).
Thus our out-of-school suspension rate is equivalent to expulsions PLUS out-of-school suspensions for the districts that do expel students, like Boston.
That comparison wasn't made yesterday, nor in today's headline.
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None of which is to say, incidentally, that we don't have problem. The percentage of students that are out-of-school suspended is skewed off from the makeup of the student body; Latino boys are most often suspended, entirely out of proportion to their percentage of the student body. The number of students in the younger grades--that we even have students being suspended in the younger grades!--is definitely a problem.
There have been conversations in the past about this. They haven't gone anywhere. You'll be hearing more.
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