Fort Worth ISD tried a new discipline plan to reduce suspensions. Did it work?

A year after implementing a new plan, Fort Worth Independent School District officials can point to signs that an effort to keep students in school and give them a chance to work through behavior issues is paying off.

But district records show the same racial disparities that existed in Fort Worth ISD’s current discipline system played out in the new model, as well.

Last year, Fort Worth ISD began using a new model for discipline at Metro Opportunity School, the district’s alternative school. Under the new model, students who committed low-level offenses like using profanity were sent to a reset center, a designated room on campus where staff members trained in de-escalation were on hand to help them work through whatever problems were behind their behavior issues.

When district leaders polled students who had been referred to the reset center, nearly half said the visit left them feeling less stressed and frustrated, and helped them go back into the classroom successfully later that day, said Karen Molinar, the district’s deputy superintendent.

District officials hoped the plan would help schools deal with a long-standing disparity in suspensions between Black students and their classmates. But data released by the school district in response to a record request by the Star-Telegram show that the same inequities existed under the new model: Black students made up a disproportionate number of referrals to the reset center last year.

Black students suspended more often in FWISD, nationwide

Fort Worth ISD launched the pilot program last year as one of several strategies for addressing disparities in discipline. For at least the past decade, Black students have represented nearly half of the district’s suspensions, even though they made up only 20-25% of its overall enrollment, according to figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education and data released by the district last year in response to an open records request by the Star-Telegram. During the 2021-22 school year, 46% of the roughly 6,000 students the district suspended were Black, records show. But Black students made up only about 21% of the district’s student body.

That disparity isn’t unique to Fort Worth. Across the country, Black students have made up a disproportionate share of out-of-school suspensions for years. According to a data snapshot released by researchers at New York University and Georgetown University in 2020, Black girls were more than four times as likely to be suspended as white girls during the 2017-18 school year.

But in the reset center program’s first year, Black students still made up an outsized share of the school’s referrals to the center, district data show. One hundred of the 170 students who were referred to the reset center were Black, records show, or about 59%. About 47% of the students enrolled at the school last year were Black, district records show.

Also noteworthy is the fact that Black students were drastically over-represented at the alternative school. While Black students generally represent about 20% of the district overall, they made up the largest single demographic group at Metro Opportunity last year. Latino students were a close second, with about 45%.

But Molinar said not all of those reset center referrals were mandatory. In some cases, teachers sent students to the center because they were misbehaving, she said. But in other cases where a student wasn’t behaving badly but seemed to be having a hard time, teachers offered them the option of going to the center to work through their problem, she said. How long students stayed in the center depended on what they needed, she said. Some students only stayed for a few minutes. Others were there for an hour or more, she said.

“Our goal is to keep them on the campus that day, and to get them back in the classroom,” she said.

District officials launched the program with the possibility of a future expansion in mind. Although that expansion is still possible, Molinar said it’s on hold following the administrative shakeup in Fort Worth ISD’s central office. District leaders are giving the new student support service team a chance to evaluate all of the district’s current programs before moving forward, she said.

Among other strategies, the district also began working with students with behavior issues to find solutions other than suspension. For example, if a student got into trouble for fighting, the principal might talk to the student about what caused the altercation rather than suspending them automatically. If the fight was the result of a misunderstanding, principals might bring in intervention specialists to help students work through the conflict without suspending anyone.

Molinar said the district saw a 3% decline in suspensions of Black students last year. Although she acknowledged that a decline of only 3% is nothing to trumpet, she said district officials hope it’s an indication that those strategies are beginning to work.

Dallas ISD reset center plan also saw racial inequities

The pilot program was modeled after a similar plan in the Dallas Independent School District, where school board members voted in 2021 to stop suspending students for low-level offenses and instead send them to reset centers. As in Fort Worth, school officials in Dallas hoped the plan would help narrow the disparity in suspensions. Before the change, nearly 52% of the students the district suspended were Black, but Black students made up only about 21% of the district’s enrollment.

At the end of the first semester after the change was implemented, district officials said there were indications that fewer students overall were being disciplined. But the same inequities existed under the new model: 45% of the students referred to reset centers were Black, compared to just shy of 20% of the district’s enrollment, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Racial backgrounds of teachers play a role in discipline rates

Often, when school districts introduce a program as an alternative to more severe discipline consequences like suspension, the same inequities that existed in the traditional model of discipline show up in the alternative program, as well, said Sarah Woulfin, a professor in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. So a district that suspended Black students disproportionately is likely to see Black students referred to an alternative program disproportionately, as well, she said.

One major factor driving that trend could be the racial backgrounds of teachers, Woulfin said. There’s research that suggests that Black teachers are less likely to refer Black students to the principal’s office than white teachers are, she said. In a district like Fort Worth ISD, where about half the teachers are white and nearly nine out of 10 of students are non-white, that mismatch could go a long way toward explaining the disparity, she said.

It’s ultimately difficult to pin down exactly what’s driving the disparity without more insight into what infractions get students suspended, Woulfin said. There’s a big difference between a student being suspended for talking back to a teacher and another being removed for throwing a desk, she said. School districts generally track and report broad categories of behavior that lead to suspensions, but they don’t typically do so with specific details about each incident.

Even though being referred to a reset center is less detrimental to a student’s education than a suspension, Woulfin said the disparity in referrals between Black students and their classmates is still a problem. By being pulled out of their home campuses and sent to an alternative school, students are already being removed from their regular classroom environment. When they’re pulled out of class and sent to a reset center, that places them a second step removed from the academic instruction they should be getting, she said.

Reset center model doesn’t address underlying issues

Dorinda Carter Andrews, a professor in the College of Education at Michigan State University, said the reset center model isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but by itself, she thinks it’s insufficient. The model places the responsibility for correcting behavior issues with the student. In some cases, that’s appropriate, she said — some kids do have behavioral problems that need to be addressed. But the model doesn’t do anything to deal with the systemic issues that led to racial disparities in suspensions in the first place, said Carter Andrews, who studies racial inequities in school discipline.

Even if the model is designed to be less punitive and more supportive than traditional discipline methods, Carter Andrews said it still sends a message to the student that they don’t belong in a classroom. If that message gets reinforced over and over, it can have the opposite effect to what district leaders are looking for, she said: Research indicates that students who think their teachers see them as a problem are more likely to act out in class.

The trend of Black students being suspended disproportionately is due at least in part to teachers misunderstanding benign behavior because of cultural nuances, Carter Andrews said. Most people, teachers included, have a script in their head for what respectful behavior looks like, she said. The majority of teachers in American schools are white, so for most, those mental scripts are based on what behavior is considered normal among white people.

Those preconceived ideas about what behavior is acceptable can lead teachers to perceive a threat where none exists, Carter Andrews said. If a Black male student adopts a certain posture and his teacher feels threatened, the student could end up in the principal’s office, she said. Although that office referral could be the product of bias on the teacher’s part, it’s often a bias teachers are unaware of, she said. Ideas about what good behavior looks like are deeply rooted in a person’s upbringing and cultural context, she said.

“It’s often unconscious,” she said. “We’re socialized into these perceptions and stereotypes.”

While the fact that those biases are unconscious doesn’t make them any less harmful, it does make them harder to manage, Carter Andrews said. Intensive training can help teachers recognize their own biases and work to mitigate them, she said, but districts can’t just offer a one-time seminar and assume the problem is solved. Unconscious bias is deeply entrenched in the way people make their way through the world, and it takes a long time to unlearn, she said. So any training districts offer to help teachers identify and overcome those biases needs to be offered repeatedly over time, she said.

Carter Andrews and other researchers are in the middle of a project in which they give teachers in grades kindergarten through five 18 hours of training, split up as six three-hour sessions, designed to help them understand race and racism and develop empathy for students from different backgrounds than their own. After the training, teachers look through discipline data at their own schools to see how what they’ve learned helps them better understand what’s going on in their building.

That last piece is critical, Carter Andrews said — if the training is to do any good, teachers have to use it to reflect on the ways they manage their own classrooms, including how their decisions are influenced by unconscious bias. It can also be helpful for teachers to talk through those issues with colleagues and friends who can support them and hold them accountable when they misstep, she said.

“That is lifelong work,” she said. “It’s not like ‘Hey, I went to one workshop, and now the veil has been lifted.’”

But the disparity in discipline isn’t the only issue demanding school leaders’ time and attention. Across Texas and nationwide, many districts are in the middle of a major shift in the way they teach students to read, a change that also requires a great deal of training for teachers. Most districts are also still struggling to help students regain academic ground they lost during school shutdowns and work through mental health issues they suffered as a result of the pandemic.

In that context, have any school districts tackled the problem in a way that’s done long-lasting good?

“Um, you know,” Carter Andrews said, pausing a moment before she answered. “No.”