Where Will the Senate ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’ Hearing Lead?
The Senate hearing at which I testified yesterday, chaired by
Sen. Dick Durbin, seemed designed to raise support for
legislation imposing federal mandates on states or districts to
curtail the use of out-of-school suspensions, to make suspension
policies uniform across schools, or both.  The motivations for
such legislation are understandable. Out-of-school suspensions
do little to help the suspended students educationally and they
are correlated with arrests and incarceration. The Judiciary
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human
Rights, which Sen. Durbin chairs, is particularly interested in
these facts because African American students are much more
likely to be suspended than whites.  But the facts do not
support the kind of legislation that seems to be under
consideration. Two recent and highly sophisticated studies by
Rochester University professor Joshua Kinsler shed new light on
the well-established trends noted above.