As a former public-school teacher, I know that my students sometimes acted out when they didn’t receive the additional educational supports they needed. Too often they then faced a choice: Get your licks or go home.

 “Licks” meant an assistant principal beat their backsides with a paddle. “Go home” meant suspension. Those who chose the former would come back to class dejected, disengaged and depressed.

Many people may assume that what I saw is an outlier, but the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) shows that at least 19,395 students experienced corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year. Every time the CRDC data is released, I am reminded that corporal punishment continues in our schools today, and I am convinced it can be put to an end tomorrow.

To make this change, advocates must demand that their education leaders end this inhumane practice.

Corporal punishment has been banned in a majority of states since the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, during the 2017-18 school year, the CRDC reported, 69,492 students received corporal punishment, on top of 92,479 students in 2015-16. The most recent number is much lower mainly because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic.

Corporal punishment remains expressly legal in 16 states. Banning the practice in just 10 of those states, including the one I taught in, Alabama, along with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would reduce the number of schools using corporal punishment by over 99 percent. Despite the small number of cases in the remaining six states where it is legal — Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Wyoming — it is still important to ban corporal punishment there to prevent individual schools from continuing the practice.

Additionally, explicitly prohibiting corporal punishment in states that have not yet done so (Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and South Dakota) would protect future generations.

Related: State-sanctioned violence: Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddles students

Corporal punishment needs to end because there is no evidence that retaining it decreases misbehavior. In other words, in the states that allow it, corporal punishment is not helping students control their behavior.

Instead, corporal punishment is associated with unintended negative consequences. These include higher rates of mental health problems, more negative parent-child relationships, lower cognitive ability, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem and higher risk for physical abuse.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now.

Ending corporal punishment is also a civil rights issue: It is disproportionately used against Black students, students with disabilities and male students. News reports have highlighted that Black students receive physical punishment at twice the rate of white students nationwide; research shows that educators’ perceptions of student behavior are based on the students’ race — rather than the actual behavior — and that these perceptions contribute to the disproportionate rates in school discipline.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now that millions of students have not returned or are continuing to miss school since pandemic-based disruptions.

While states revisit their discipline policies, they should also reduce the “go home” exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions), which can undermine children’s attachment to school. Such harsh punishments increase the chances of students dropping out and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to those punishments increasing the number of school days students miss, research shows that exclusionary discipline can decrease students’ likelihood of accumulating course credits, reduce their likelihood of graduating and lower their chances of earning a postsecondary credential.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

In my experience observing its impacts, corporal punishment has a similar distancing effect on students as suspensions and expulsions — making school feel like a place where they do not belong.

Schools still need to address misbehavior, of course, but there are better ways to do this. They can replace corporal punishment with evidence-based practices that help create safe and inclusive learning environments for all students. Such practices — including advisory systems, in which students meet regularly with a staff member about academic challenges, and “looping,” in which students have the same teacher for multiple years — build positive school-student relationships. These positive relationships can help prevent physical violence and bullying.

Restorative practices, also backed by research, typically foster dialogue in “circles” or “conferences” in which educators help students listen to each other and to teachers in order to resolve conflict and build community. For me, this often meant chatting with students in a hallway about why they acted out, giving them a chance to share their side of the story, regroup and refocus on school.

Recent research shows that investing in student supports, including social and emotional learning and mental health, is a better way to make schools truly safe, along with professional development for teachers and school staff. States should act quickly to make these alternatives more widely available and make schools less like prisons and more like everywhere else.

Corporal punishment is prohibited in almost every facet of life in the U.S. except schools. It is banned in military training centers, child care centers and juvenile detention facilities, and cannot be carried out as a sentence for a juvenile crime. The vast majority of children (76 percent) across the globe are protected by law from corporal punishment. Let’s use this current round of CRDC data to spur action to give our students better choices than the one my students faced.

Stephen Kostyo is an Impact Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Before working in education policy, Kostyo taught middle and high school math and science — and was recognized as a high school Teacher of the Year by his peers in 2015.

This story about corporal punishment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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It wasn’t the first time Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter had gotten into trouble at school. A seventh grader at a charter school in St. Louis, Missouri, she had a long history of disrupting her classes and getting into confrontations with teachers. Several times, the school issued a suspension and sent Curry’s granddaughter home. 

In each instance, the school followed state law: The punishment was officially recorded and assigned a set length of time, Curry was formally notified and she and her granddaughter had a chance to appeal the decision.

But one day in February, after refusing to go into her classroom and allegedly cursing at her teachers, the seventh grader was sent home to learn online indefinitely. Curry said she wasn’t given any sense of when her granddaughter would be able to return to the classroom, just that the school and administrators would determine the best learning environment for her. In the meantime, the middle schooler would be left to keep up with her schoolwork on her own, on a district-issued tablet that Curry says would often lock her granddaughter out. 

“They’d rather send her home than work on the issues she was going through,” Curry said. “She missed out on a lot of work, a whole lot. It makes me feel bad. It wasn’t fair at all, the way they were treating her.” 

“There’s a pattern that the easiest solution is to remove a student rather than deal with the underlying issues.”

Sabrina Bernadel, legal counsel at the National Women’s Law Center

Lawyers and advocates across the country say that the practice of forcing a student out of the physical school building and into online learning has emerged as a troubling — and largely hidden — legacy of the pandemic’s shift to virtual learning. Critics charge that these punishments can deprive students and their families of due process rights. Students risk getting stuck in deficient online programs for weeks or even months without the support they need and falling behind in their academics. Sometimes, there is no system in place for tracking how many students are being punished this way or how many days of in-person classroom learning they are forced to miss. 

“We are speaking about an equal right, an equal opportunity to access education,” said Sabrina Bernadel, legal counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “Instead of taking traditional or legal pathways,” she said, “there’s a pattern that the easiest solution is to remove a student rather than deal with the underlying issues.” 

Related:Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

In 2020, nearly every school district in the nation was forced to come up with a way of providing education online. Later, as students returned to in-school learning, that infrastructure remained, making it easier than ever for districts to remove students from the classroom but say they were still educating them. The pandemic showed, however, that the quality of virtual instruction varies greatly and that online classes work best for only a minority of students; vast learning loss and student setbacks resulted. 

Still, districts nationwide are now placing students in online learning in response to misbehavior, in a process referred to in certain circles as “virtualization.”

Some school districts consider virtual learning an alternative to discipline — not a form of discipline itself. Other districts embrace virtualization as a disciplinary measure and have started to develop official policies around using this punishment. 

In Clayton County School District, outside Atlanta, “misdeeds” committed by a student can lead to mandatory online learning until “behavior challenges are identified and mitigated,” according to a statement provided over email by Charles White, a district spokesperson. He said that virtual assignments are intended to be temporary and not to serve as in-school suspensions “or elimination of the expected learning experience.” 

In Toppenish School District in Washington State, serving Yakima County, however, the transfer of a student to online learning for 10 to 20 school days is used as a top-tier disciplinary sanction, according to its student handbook. This action is considered a “long-term out-of-school suspension” and is to be used only after a number of other less drastic methods have failed to achieve behavior change, the handbook says. The district did not respond to requests for comment.

“I have worked on a lot of cases where the attorney gets involved, and suddenly the school lets the kids back in, no questions asked. They aren’t making any arguments as to why the child should be out of school — because they have none.”

Maggie Probert, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

Paula Knight, superintendent of Jennings School District in Missouri, said students can be placed in online learning for anywhere from a few hours to a full semester as a punishment, calling the virtual option a “game changer” in how the district is able to deliver instruction. 

An afternoon away from the classroom in virtual learning is “almost like a restoration practice, giving them an opportunity to cool down or cool off,” Knight said. For other students, virtualization has its “pluses and minuses,” she said. “It just depends. When the kids are academically on target, for example, you don’t want them to lose that momentum, and we allow [virtual] as an option.”

Knight said that online learning has not yet been written into the district’s disciplinary code, but that there are plans to incorporate it more formally at some point. Currently, students are recommended for involuntary virtual learning by the principal, she said, and these placements are tracked aggregately along with suspensions, which makes identifying the particular impact of virtualization difficult. 

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

Rosalind Crawford moved her five young boys, all in elementary and middle school, to Jennings, just north of St. Louis, in the spring of 2022. A single mom, Crawford left her longtime home of Memphis to get her family away from gun violence near their home. She enrolled her boys in the local schools that April. 

It wasn’t long before she started hearing about two of the boys getting into trouble. Crawford said she could see that they were dealing with trauma and struggling to behave in school as a result. She also believes they were being bullied. She says she met with administrators several times to raise concerns about her kids’ relationships with their peers and their performance in school. 

After a fight broke out involving two of her children and other classmates in October 2022, Crawford and her lawyers say all five of her kids were placed on virtual learning. 

Jennings School District officials did not respond to follow-up questions about Crawford’s case, but a letter addressed to the family said that the boys were transferred to home-school learning at Crawford’s request. She denies making this request and says she sought legal help to get them back into school. 

In the meantime, Crawford said, the boys were provided with laptops and Google Classroom access. 

For the better part of the school year, they tried to learn from home. Crawford says that sometimes they only received two lessons per week and that there was no teacher instruction, which made it hard for them to learn. She watched as they fell behind in everything from academic courses to physical education. Her sixth grader soon was at risk of being unable to move up to seventh grade in fall 2023. 

“I feel like a failure. How do you tell your kids — when you see the devastation — that this isn’t their fault?” Crawford said. “Virtual learning is basically putting the kids somewhere [the school doesn’t] have to deal with them.” 

“I feel like a failure. How do you tell your kids — when you see the devastation — that this isn’t their fault.”

Rosalind Crawford, parent of children placed on virtual learning

Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter was also in danger of falling behind due to the amount of schoolwork she missed while learning virtually, her grandmother said. In all, she missed nearly a month of school. 

“They never gave her homework. I was calling every day asking if they could give me a package of her work,” she said. “They were telling me she might have to repeat the same grade.” 

The school did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Related: How the pandemic has altered school discipline — perhaps forever

The stakes of such discipline playing out in schools across the country “are fairly enormous,” said Sara Zier from TeamChild, a youth advocacy organization in Washington State that also provides legal services. Lost classroom time reduces social and emotional skills, hinders academic progress and can decrease a student’s likelihood of graduating; lower levels of education can lead to lower employment and financial prospects in adulthood. “It’s not something we can solve by representing one kid at a time,” she said. “It’s a much bigger challenge.” 

Yet because many schools don’t separate virtualization from other suspensions or, in some cases, even record it as a removal from the classroom, it’s almost impossible to know how often it’s happening and to whom. 

For example, although Clayton County uses virtual learning as a disciplinary tool, the district has no records of how many students have been put into online programs involuntarily.

Hopey Fink, a lawyer at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, said, “We suspect that there is an attempt to obscure and euphemize the suspension data that’s kind of embedded in part of this” in order to evade accountability. Without data, advocates like Fink worry that disproportionate disciplinary measures against already-marginalized groups could be hiding in plain sight. 

In the 2015-2016 school year, Black students lost 103 days of learning per 100 students, 82 more days than their white peers.

Typically, discipline overwhelmingly and disproportionately affects students of color and students with disabilities. Research from the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies, using data from the 2015-16 school year, concluded that Black students lost 103 days of learning per 100 students, 82 more days than their white peers. Another study found that Latino students were more likely to receive disciplinary action than white students. U.S. Department of Education data from the 2017-18 school year shows that students with disabilities accounted for 16 percent of total enrollment but received 25 percent of in-school suspensions and 28 percent of out-of-school suspensions. Disparities for Black students with disabilities were even worse. 

“We can only extrapolate” that disparities are comparable in other newer forms of discipline, such as virtualization, said Bernadel of the National Women’s Law Center. “Without formal data, we can’t speak to that directly and address that problem, and it’s a huge issue.” 

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

Getting back into the classroom after being placed on virtual learning can be more difficult than returning after a suspension. Lawyers in Washington State say clients have been required to make behavioral and academic improvement in a virtual setting before returning to the classroom, and when students do return, they’re typically saddled with cumbersome and alienating rules. 

Documents show a laundry list of requirements that a middle-schooler in Washington’s Toppenish School District would need to re-enroll in brick-and-mortar classes: pick-up and drop-off in the main office; random student searches; escorted transition times five minutes before class is over; and chaperoned bathroom trips with a staff member, among others.

For Crawford’s children to return to the classroom in the Jennings School District, she and two of her sons were required to participate in a conflict resolution program through the St. Louis County Juvenile Courts, according to a November 7, 2022, letter from the Jennings School District superintendent and security director. Failure to do so risked “further disciplinary action” that could result in “virtual learning for the remainder of the 2022-2023 school year.” 

In all, it took nearly five months and a lawyer’s involvement for Crawford to get her kids reenrolled. The boys also needed to sign a behavior contract, but were ultimately admitted back into the classroom in March.

Indeed, family and student advocates say that the legal credibility of this practice of virtualization is fragile. If families are able to get legal support, school districts tend to quickly allow the student to reenroll, said Maggie Probert from Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. But even free legal aid can be difficult for already-vulnerable families to access. 

Probert worked with Curry to get her granddaughter back into her regular classes after more than three weeks of online learning. 

“I have worked on a lot of cases where the attorney gets involved, and suddenly the school lets the kids back in, no questions asked,” Probert said. “They aren’t making any arguments as to why the child should be out of school — because they have none.” 

This story about online learning and school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Jesse Wiese spent seven years in prison; when he left the Iowa facility in 2006, he thought his debt to society had been paid. While inside, Wiese had earned an undergraduate degree and puzzled over how he might do right in the world. He started studying for the law school admissions test, thinking he could become a lawyer and maybe, one day, a judge.

In 2008, Wiese moved to Virginia to attend Regent University School of Law. He loved it, and he did well. Three years and $150,000 in federal and private student loans later, he graduated, and turned his attention to passing the bar. Like the majority of his classmates, he spent the summer foregoing gainful employment to study full-time for the two-day exam. Except, unlike his peers, passing the bar would not be Wiese’s biggest hurdle to becoming a lawyer. Indeed, he could pass the difficult exam and still be denied a license to practice law by the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners.  Before it considers awarding a law license for any otherwise eligible candidate with a felony conviction, the board holds a character and fitness screening.

For Wiese, it was all a big, expensive gamble — and, in one form or another, is one millions of people with criminal records take every year as they pursue education and workforce training on their way to jobs that require a license. Yet that effort might be wasted thanks to the nearly 14,000 laws and regulations that can restrict individuals with arrest and conviction histories from getting licensed in a given field.

The rules that govern these barriers to entry are patchwork, scattered across federal, state and regulatory codes, and they can vary from field to field within a state. That means some people are inadvertently steered toward training programs that, for them, are dead ends. At other times, as in Wiese’s case, people have no choice but go through time-consuming and often expensive courses before discovering whether they can work in their chosen field. Advocates say these barriers keep people from good jobs, not only reducing their chances of staying out of prison but robbing the nation of their productive labor.

“The focus should be on rehabilitation and putting people back out in the community so they can participate and be productive and thrive in their communities,” said Caitlin Dawkins, co-director for the national re-entry resource center at the American Institutes for Research.

Related: ‘Wasted money’: How career training companies scoop up federal funds with little oversight

Although licensing requirements vary from state to state, about one in five people in this country need occupational licenses to do their jobs — licenses they get only after completing a designated amount of training and education in their fields. In addition to lawyers, professional drivers must be licensed, along with health professionals, public accountants, teachers, electricians, firefighters, social workers, realtors and security guards.

According to a 2020 study by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, 31 states allow licensing boards to deny applicants based on their character alone for at least some occupations, leaving room for denials based on any criminal behavior, no matter how minor or how far in the past. Advocates say it’s not uncommon for people to pursue training programs and submit their licensing applications without recognizing the risk. Just 21 states allow people with criminal records to ask licensing boards whether their records will disqualify them from getting a license before enrolling in any required training.

Yet the case for education as a counter to recidivism is so convincing the federal education department earlier this month announced a massive expansion of Pell grants for people pursuing higher education from behind bars. About 30,000 of these individuals are expected to get $130 million worth of the federal aid each year, a cost that researchers have found is far less than detaining reoffenders.

Higher educational attainment is directly correlated with a lower likelihood of being reincarcerated, as is stable employment. Both pieces of evidence have swayed policymakers nationwide. The Institute for Justice found 40 states have eased or eliminated some of their laws keeping people with criminal records from getting employment licenses since 2015. Yet with every type of license bearing its own local, state or federal limitations, many thousands of collateral consequences remain.

Wiese, now 45, went to prison for armed robbery of a bank. He passed the bar on his first try and moved on to the character and fitness screening required because of his prior conviction.

“It was like a mini trial,” Wiese said. He flew people in to serve as character witnesses in front of an initial committee, which ultimately recommended he be licensed. “I was like, ‘Awesome! This is amazing.’ Then their decision was unanimously overturned.”

The Virginia Board of Bar Examiners wasn’t convinced Wiese should be allowed to practice law, considering his criminal history. It told him to reapply in two years. He did, but the same thing happened — there was an initial committee recommendation for licensure followed by a state board denial.

“They said it may be impossible to prove rehabilitation,” Wiese remembered. He appealed to the state supreme court, but it ruled against him, too.

The Virginia Board of Bar Examiners did not comment on Wiese’s case or how the agency considers prior criminal history in its licensing decisions.

Related: ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

Many of the county’s laws seem to dictate that the lives of people with criminal records are governed by two competing beliefs — that crimes are proof of character flaws that can never be outgrown and that a criminal sentence should be the full extent of any punishment.

The view that crime is proof of character, which can never be reformed, has received legal support for at least 125 years. The U.S. Supreme Court first affirmed the right to discriminate against people with criminal records in an 1898 decision in Hawker v New York, which held that “character is as important a qualification as knowledge.”

Ronald Day came across this court decision while writing his dissertation as a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the City University of New York. Day has been involved in prisoner re-entry work for about 15 years, since he finished his own sentence and found himself navigating life on the outside. He received his doctorate in 2019 and now serves as vice president of programs for The Fortune Society, an education, service and advocacy organization focused on criminal justice and re-entry.

“The focus should be on rehabilitation and putting people back out in the community so they can participate and be productive and thrive in their communities.”

Caitlin Dawkins, co-director for the national re-entry resource center at the American Institutes for Research.

Day’s time in the archives introduced him to the ongoing legal dispute over the rights of those who are incarcerated, or who used to be incarcerated, taking him on a journey from the Supreme Court’s views in 1898 to the fallout from a 2015 decision by New York District Court Judge John Gleeson. Gleeson ruled in favor of expunging the conviction of a woman who had committed healthcare fraud and, after serving her sentence, found her record a constant barrier to getting and keeping jobs as a home health aide. In approving the expungement, Gleeson wrote, “I sentenced her to five years of probation supervision, not to a lifetime of unemployment.” But even support from the district court judge who sentenced her wasn’t enough. A Federal Court of Appeals overruled Gleeson.

According to the Institute for Justice study, in five states, including Arizona, Tennessee and Virginia, any licensing board can deny an applicant based on a felony, even if it’s completely unrelated to the license. In 30 states, an arrest alone can disqualify applicants. In seven states, there’s no right to appeal after a license is denied.

When the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners denied Wiese’s license a second time, he was told he could try again in two years, but that he would have to re-take the bar because so much time had passed. With the support of his wife, Wiese took time off to study, and passed the test a second time. Once more, he applied for a license, jumped through the hoops at his hearing and was recommended for a license.

But for the third time, the state board denied his application.

Related: Prisons are training inmates for the next generation of in-demand jobs

Wiese appealed the decision of the state licensing board, again taking his case to the Virginia State Supreme Court. This time, it ruled in his favor. Ten years after graduating from law school, Wiese got his license to practice.

Looking back, it didn’t seem like a triumph.

“In my younger days, I would say you can overcome anything. You can outwork it,” Wiese said. He doesn’t believe that anymore. “This is called the second prison. Literally, you walk out of one and you walk into another one.”

Sometimes people with criminal records reach out to him and say they heard about his case and they want to go to law school too, but Wiese doesn’t think he opened any doors. “I feel bad for the next person that’s coming in line behind me,” he said.

31 states allow licensing boards to deny applicants based on their character alone, leaving room for denials based on any criminal behavior, no matter how minor or how far in the past.

Because the laws and regulations are so scattered, they can be difficult for anyone, not just those exiting prison, to navigate. Every field has its own state-level licensing board and related policies. “Just because of the lack of coordination, they’re often unknown for even the people who are responsible for administering and enforcing them,” said Dawkins, of the American Institutes for Research. 

In some states, people serving time can fight fires as part of a prison work crew but can’t get licenses to work as firefighters in local fire departments after they get out. They can cut hair in prison but can’t get cosmetology licenses on the outside. They can do landscaping on city property through a prison work crew, but — with a criminal record — can’t get a government job.

Cosmetology, in many states, is considered “second-chance friendly” and a good path for people coming out of prison. In Virginia, by contrast, applicants can be denied cosmetology licenses for having specific misdemeanor convictions or any felony.

Related: Propelling prisoners to bachelor’s degrees in California

A number of organizations across the country have stepped up to advocate for policy change and to support those with criminal records as they seek to rebuild their lives outside of prison. Jobs for the Future this year put out a framework called “Normalizing Opportunity,” calling on policymakers to remove barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated individuals.

“There’s a multiplying effect there,” said Brandi Mandato, a senior director at Jobs for the Future who helped write the framework. “If we don’t have access to good jobs, we don’t have access to health care, housing, all of these things that are important to launching a life and building community and keeping people safe.”

Such advocacy has bipartisan support. John Koufos, who has led criminal justice advocacy work at organizations across the political spectrum and himself navigated re-entry, said the effort to eliminate employment barriers has galvanized one of the most diverse coalitions in criminal justice.

Just 21 states allow people with criminal records to ask licensing boards whether their records will disqualify them from getting a license before enrolling in any required training.

“[Occupational licensing] serves as an exclusionary barrier to people and to prosperity,” Koufos said.

At a time with very low unemployment and major demand for skilled employees, advocates say the business case for eliminating these barriers is as strong as the humanitarian one.

Wiese is now the vice president for research and innovation at Prison Fellowship, an organization that helps individuals and families affected by incarceration and which gave him his own sense of purpose and possibility while he was in prison. Early in his career with the organization, Wiese managed a caseload of about 70 men who were navigating re-entry. Over and over again, he saw them stop chasing their dreams, confounded by barriers to stable employment. The message they got, he said, was “don’t take the initiative.”

“It really limits people’s ability to make a difference and to contribute,” Wiese said, “and we miss out.”

This story about career licenses 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.

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The skirmish last fall began on a Montgomery County, Maryland, school bus.

Someone—no one is exactly sure who—tossed a water bottle from the back of the bus, smacking a sixth grader sitting near the front. The next day, the water victim retaliated by throwing a container of milk to the back, dousing a seventh grader.

The two girls, who live near each other in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., were headed for a fight — and possibly suspension. But their parents called the school for help, and one of Montgomery County Public School’s newly appointed instructional specialists in restorative justice got to work.

With permission from the families, Floyd Branch III, the specialist, brought the girls together for lunch and a “restorative circle” to defuse the tension. Neither of the girls really wanted to target the other, but they were embarrassed by the incident and by kids laughing at them on the bus.

“They were able to talk it out and say they were sorry,” Branch said. “Children can’t learn if they don’t understand what the mistake was, or when there’s no conversation.” The process did not turn the two into friends, he said, but they have been able to ride the bus together without any more fighting.

This situation, and its resolution, is a good example of restorative justice at work, say supporters of this approach to discipline and community building. Instead of focusing on punishment, restorative practices invite those in conflict to talk through the issue so they can understand the harm caused, take responsibility and find ways to move forward.

Elements of restorative justice have long been used in indigenous cultures, and, since the 1970s, as part of alternative sentencing programs in the criminal justice system. The practice spread to schools in the 1990s and accelerated after 2014 as an alternative to “zero-tolerance” suspension and expulsion policies for misbehavior. Those consequences, experts say, are fraught with problems. Exclusionary discipline doesn’t serve as a deterrent and often derails a student’s educational path: Black students, boys, and students with disabilities are more likely to be suspended and expelled than other students, and school administrators often discipline Black students more severely and frequently than white students who engage in the same behaviors.

“If people don’t understand what you’re trying to do, it’s not on them … We have to be open to constructive criticism.”

Damon Monteleone, associate superintendent, Montgomery County schools

In 2019, Maryland legislators passed a law requiring districts to incorporate restorative approaches in their discipline policies. Montgomery County, which at over 160,000 students is the largest school district in Maryland, has leaned into the practice, adding staff whose job is to help to build and repair relationships among all members of a school community — students, teachers, parents and administrators. There are still suspensions for serious offenses, according to the system’s code of conduct, but restorative justice is among the discipline options that schools can use.

Shauna-Kay Jorandby, who oversees school engagement, behavioral health and academics for the district, said that based on the results of a recent survey, students themselves are looking for the supports that restorative justice promises.

“We know that our kids need help communicating, talking and understanding each other. We know that they need help with conflict, whether it’s at school or at home. We know they need help with the stressors in their life,” Jorandby said. “I think that [restorative justice] is one avenue. We have to be able to address that in our schools.”

Related: The promise of restorative justice starts to falter under rigorous research

But the school system’s efforts are coming at a time when there’s been a call among some for stronger penalties for acting out in schools, in response to higher misbehavior rates after kids returned from pandemic shut-downs. In some districts, police, who were banned from campuses in 2020, have been asked to return.

Alternative forms of discipline have often met skepticism. In Montgomery County, some parents, teachers and students have pushed back against restorative justice, saying harsher discipline is sometimes necessary to hold students accountable. Others question the way restorative circles are conducted, noting that the circles are often led by staff from the district’s central office, who the students don’t know or trust. They want to see more training, consistency, and transparency about the process.

The new approach to student behavior is leading to a “free for all” in the schools; kids are getting away with hurting one another, said Ricky Ribeiro, a parent and PTA vice president at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. He wants the district to explain why the restorative approach is better than what’s been used in the past and provide evidence.

“Implementing this system is not going to be easy. It’s unclear if it will be successful, if we even know what success looks like, and if we have enough resources to make it successful,” Ribeiro said. “And yet, MCPS is going all in with the kitchen sink on it and I don’t know that’s a good idea.”

The district’s restorative justice work was put to the test earlier this year after an antisemitic incident roiled a high school.

The school system is coping with a spate of hate, bias and racist incidents — an average of one per day, which is three times higher than previous years, Superintendent Monifa McKnight told the community in an address April 27.  Last December, two students on the school debate team at Walt Whitman High School allegedly made antisemitic comments about their Jewish teammates on an off-campus trip.

 The offenders were disciplined by the school and the district brought in restorative justice specialists to hold sessions with students. Rachel Barold, who was a ninth grader at the time of the incident, said she felt the process didn’t work in that situation and let the offenders off too easily.

“Restorative justice circles are great for maybe bullying or other offenses at MCPS, but acts of hate against a group of people based on the ethnicity or religion — that is not the place,” said Rachel, who is Jewish. “Restorative justice is a lot about forgiving who did it. And having to sit in the same room with them. It’s really re-traumatizing victims.”

“Children can’t learn if they don’t understand what the mistake was, or when there’s no conversation.”

Floyd Branch III, restorative justice specialist

Restorative justice sessions are voluntary, though Rachel said she and other members of the debate team felt pressures to participate. Going into the restorative circles, students didn’t know the district specialists leading the conversation or what to expect, she said. For example, some students had prepared remarks saved on their cellphones, but were told cellphones weren’t allowed. Afterwards, school administrators acknowledged they had made mistakes. She hopes the district will use the feedback to modify a process that she felt favored the offenders over the victims. The principal of the school did not respond to interview requests, and in other articles has declined to share the results of an investigation or what actions were taken, citing student privacy laws. 

But in an interview with the Washington Post, principal Robert Dodd said the incidents were taken “deeply seriously.” Whitman’s school paper, The Black and White, reported the students received a month-long suspension from the debate team.

Jorandby said restorative conversations don’t take away the hurt, but they can be a first step to healing, even with hate and bias. The district has developed a consent and feedback form for formal restorative conferences that emphasizes the process is voluntary and gives parents the opportunity to decline consent for their child to participate.

Related: Restorative justice isn’t a panacea, but it can promote better relationships among students

The official consent form is among the ways district officials say they are trying to make the restorative justice program more robust. Last school year, the district hired six more restorative justice specialists in the district’s central office, bringing the total to nine. Each specialist is assigned to serve a cluster of schools. The district is also paying a stipend to a staff member in each school to act as a restorative justice coach. All staff are required to take a short restorative justice training session and administrators have been asked to consider restorative approaches when crafting new goals for school climate, culture and student well-being in school improvement plans.

“It’s a work in progress,” said Damon Monteleone, an associate superintendent in the office of school support and well-being for Montgomery County schools. The district’s own data shows this: Nearly three quarters of school leaders who participated in a self-evaluation released in May said they were either early in their development of restorative justice processes or had no processes in place at all. Only 3 percent believed they had a “mature” process in place.

This is not surprising. With the pandemic and its ensuing disruption of in-person learning, 2022-23 was the first “normal school year” for restorative justice in the schools since the 2019 state policy change, Monteleone said. The district itself is still learning what works, but it’s not ignoring criticism, he said.

“You have to involve your loudest opponents in the process,” Monteleone said. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. If people don’t understand what you’re trying to do, it’s not on them … We have to be open to constructive criticism. We have to hear their concerns.”

The district is reaching out to engage the community through school-based information sessions, at which specialists and administrators discuss just what restorative justice is and listen to input from students and their families.

It can take time for restorative justice to take hold in the culture of a school — as much as three to five years, say experts — and, as with any major shift, the process can be controversial. But research consistently shows the approach has a positive impact on students. A recent report indicates restorative practices improve middle school students’ academic achievement, while reducing suspension rates and disparities, misbehavior, substance abuse and student mental health challenges. It’s most successful when all members of the school community are invested in the restorative culture.

“These practices can be powerful, but the devil is in the details,” said the report’s author, Sean Darling-Hammond, assistant professor of health and education at UCLA. Strong implementation means having high-quality and ongoing training for teachers and staff, getting principals on board, equipping students with conflict resolution skills and reaching out to families early, he said.

“It’s about how you create a shift in the way everybody in a school is doing things,” he said. “Every teacher has a new approach mentally and behaviorally when a student misbehaves. Every student has a tool to manage conflict when it occurs. There are new policies in place that are supportive of this shift … Parents are communicated with about this and understand the value of it.

“It’s a full immersive shift and tracking implementation is very important,” he said.

Related: Ready to drop out of school, until restorative justice offered a path back in

Such work also needs money. The Maryland law, while well-intentioned, isn’t adequately funded, said David Hornbeck, a former Maryland state school superintendent. In March, he launched Restorative Schools Maryland, a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for restorative justice policies and funding.

Rather than a few people from a district’s central office being called to put out fires, the work of restorative practices requires full-time staff in the schools, Hornbeck said.

“We face a challenge in people thinking that restorative practice is a kind of touchy, feely, namby-pamby, let-the-kids-off-the-hook thing — and that couldn’t be further from truth,” he said. Hornbeck said he also wants schools to track suspensions, teacher turnover, and student absenteeism to make sure their restorative justice practices actually work.

Despite the funding challenges, UCLA’s Darling-Hammond said it’s worth staying the course. “We don’t know the exact perfect recipe for implementation of restorative practices. But what we do know is that, generally speaking, when students experience these practices, they’re much better for it,” he said.

That’s the hope of supporters who embrace the philosophy of fostering positive relationships to improve school climate before conflict happens. In Montgomery County schools, officials say about 80 percent of the restorative justice work is preventative (holding “community circles,” promoting self-care, teaching conflict resolution strategies) and 20 percent is responsive (repair practices and restorative conferences).

Vicki Rotker, a sixth grade teacher at Kingsview Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, said she sees the value in community circles — which encourage kids to share ideas and experiences in a safe environment — at her school, especially since the pandemic. “Experiencing Covid and being isolated, I feel this year there is an extra need and longing to connect,” Rotker said.

As Rotker’s students prepared to participate in a discussion last spring, rearranging their chairs into a circle, she reminded them to set aside any distractions, including notebooks and phones.

“In school, a lot of time we are sitting and getting,” she told them. “This gives us an opportunity to speak and be heard.”

Students passed a blue-and-green squishy ball of the Earth around the circle: They could talk when holding the ball, or pass if they didn’t have anything to say. The conversation focused on motivation and homework. Afterwards, some students said they liked getting a chance to know one another.

Daphne McKay, who retired at the end of the year as a restorative justice coach at Kingsview, said the circles give students space to process experiences and create a sense of belonging.

“The more people we have in our lives supporting us, the better,” she said. “Restorative justice is all about sitting down and hearing one another’s perspectives and trying to find a way to come together and understand one another.”

Marcia Cole, a parent in nearby Rockville, said more families need to hear how restorative practices can benefit their children. The process helped her third grade son, who wasn’t getting along on the playground with a new boy at school, she said. The tension was becoming disruptive until the restorative justice specialist stepped in and invited the two to talk it out. They have since bonded over a shared love of Pokémon cards.

The restorative specialist “was able to hear both sides of the story and ask kids questions in a way they could truly process the situation,” Cole said.

As the district prepares for a new school year, it plans to continue sharing data with school leaders to help embed the approach in everyday interactions throughout the school.

“I’m really proud of where we’ve come in getting the work started for a district of this scope and size,” said Jorandby, the district restorative justice administrator. She also noted that early data shows that students who go through a restorative justice program are less likely to engage in misbehavior at school, such as fighting.

She said it’s difficult to quantify the conflicts that were avoided thanks to the 1,900 calls that restorative justice specialists have responded to in the district.

“Often, we see horrible things that are reported that have happened to our children or happened within our district — and we don’t know all of the ones that didn’t,” Jorandby said.

This story about restorative justice in the classroom was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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For decades schools have been, rightly, accused of too often letting a toxic mix of low expectations and strict discipline policies put kids, mostly Black, Hispanic and Latino young men, on the school-to-prison pipeline. Now, colleges and universities have the chance to build the inverse path — a prison-to-school pipeline — to help people who are incarcerated.

Done right, this could be a pivotal moment for higher education to also revamp the postsecondary experience for other underserved learners, including those coming from underresourced rural areas and environments that lack college preparation programming.

The potential impact of a prison-to-school pipeline is immense. The change would, of course, be biggest for the nearly 700,000 incarcerated adults who will gain access to federal funds this July through the expansion of the Second Chance Pell program, in terms of lower rates of recidivism and increased hope. This pipeline will also save taxpayers’ money and prevent crime. And these benefits are above and beyond the ways that a college degree increases every graduate’s employment and earning potential.

But first we must build it. Today’s colleges aren’t successfully serving many existing students — so how can they serve populations removed from the education system?

The answers lie in a close examination of the current paths to college and how we can change them to better support all learners.

Let’s start with the challenges people convicted of a crime face. People in prison often had negative experiences in academic environments and, because of this, lower education levels. Many left high school before graduation or have no friends or family who have ever enrolled in college-level courses. As a result, this learner population is often unfamiliar with or lacking in confidence in classroom education.

While many aspects of the incarcerated population’s academic experiences are unique, there are barriers they share with a broad segment of other college-level learners: low digital literacy, minimal or no college preparation, uncertainty about the value of a college degree and unfamiliarity with college resources and processes. These shared characteristics of so many students signal that solutions designed for students who are incarcerated can also minimize barriers for all learners.

Related: ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

One solution for helping incarcerated learners is designing support services. Strategies include supporting specialized coaching and guidance, instituting competency-based education, making investments in student belonging, hiring dedicated people to help students navigate enrollment and fostering communities of peers with similar histories and ambitions — all of which can help students navigate the next steps in their education and efforts to join the workforce.

Taking these steps has a ripple effect. When we think about the individual needs of students within this population, it becomes easier to adapt those services for students in other groups. However, thoughtful support will mean nothing if we don’t increase access to programs.

Paths to and through today’s college experience aren’t fully serving existing students — so how can they serve a population that is often even further removed from the education system?

Currently, there are few educational options for people convicted of a crime. The latest reports show that only 35 percent of state prisons provide college-level courses. These programs serve just 6 percent of incarcerated individuals nationwide, leaving out the majority of incarcerated people interested in increasing their skills and knowledge through higher education.

The gap is even greater for people in women’s prisons. In Texas, there are three times as many college programs for men as there are for women. When given the opportunity to enroll, women show greater interest than men. But the available programs often reinforce outdated stereotypes by limiting options to female-coded professions, such as cosmetology.

This limited availability is similar to the choice constraints experienced by rural students — another population less likely to attend college. Few rural students have the chance to learn where they live, which forces them to choose between commuting several hours to the nearest college or working extra hours to cover the cost of housing on top of tuition for the program of their choice.

Related: Prisons are training inmates for the next generation of in-demand jobs

Challenges to program expansion are many. Prisons often restrict incarcerated students’ access to educational materials. Prisoners also often lack access to the technology and internet connections needed to take advantage of online learning — as do the 21 million Americans outside the system who lack broadband access.

Prison officials will need to ease restrictions in the pursuit of supporting effective rehabilitation. Fortunately, there are blueprints to follow as state-run and private EdTech companies find new ways to expand prison education.

To increase accessibility, colleges and universities will have to be creative. In many public education programs nationwide, scholarships, employer partnerships, transportation programs and competency-based education are now being adopted to support a diverse set of learners. The same ideas could work for prison education programs.

Building the prison-to-school pipeline is long overdue. The federal government banned the giving of Pell Grants to prisoners for over two decades, then limited access for three more years during the Second Chance Pell Experiment. We’re now starting to see progress in prison education. And it’s happening in parallel with larger efforts in higher education to advance personalized online learning, improve the quality of digital education and close digital equity gaps.

The expansion of Pell Grants represents more than a second chance for students who are incarcerated. The prison-to-school pipeline is higher education’s second chance to ensure more people can get the education they need to live the lives they want.

Jason Levin is executive director of WGU Labs, an EdTech incubation, research and design arm of Western Governors University.

This story about the prison-to-school pipeline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.

However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime. 

Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lottery.

The lucky ones, who won a seat to their first choice middle school, were less likely to be arrested or end up in prison between the ages of 16 and 22.  But the students left behind in a neighborhood school were much more likely to be arrested or imprisoned as adults. The increase in criminal activity among the 8,000 boys who hadn’t participated in the school lottery was greater than the decrease in criminal activity for the lottery winners. Public school choice ended up increasing overall arrests and days incarcerated for young men, the researchers concluded in a draft paper, “Does School Choice Increase Crime?” circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February 2023.

The reason, according to the researchers, is that the boys left behind were surrounded by a less desirable mix of peers. Families who placed a high value on education were more likely to enter a lottery for a well-regarded school, win it and leave the neighborhood school. In Charlotte, these kids were predominantly Black and had higher test scores. From sixth grade onward, these higher achieving kids were no longer interacting socially with the neighborhood kids all day long. Crime itself is a social activity, according to the researchers’ previous studies, and kids are more likely to commit crimes with other kids who live nearby and especially those who attend the same schools. With fewer positive influences at school, kids who might not otherwise have participated in crime were more likely to join in.

“There are many important studies that have documented important, positive effects of school choice,” said Stephen Ross, an economist at the University of Connecticut and one of the three authors. “But our paper says that one should be at least somewhat more careful prior to jumping on the school choice bandwagon because there are also significant costs that might offset the benefits.”

I know, I know. Many of you reading this have questions about the study design. So did I. Let me walk you through it.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much crime people would have committed in adulthood had there been no school choice.  But the researchers were able to estimate the influence of the school lottery policy by looking at three separate years of fifth graders in each neighborhood. These are tiny sub-neighborhoods, sometimes just a few blocks in area. The researchers tracked how future criminal activity fluctuated depending upon how many of their peers left for lottery schools. In years when more peers left for lottery schools, the adult crime figures for the children left behind increased. The following year, if fewer peers left for lottery schools, subsequent crime figures fell back again.

Researchers found that it was students they had categorized as “low risk” of getting arrested who were drawn into crime after peers left for lottery schools. The increase in criminal behavior was detected among white children and children with higher test scores. These boys racked up more arrests and days behind bars when more of their elementary school classmates left. Kids at “high risk” of arrest were less affected. Their criminal activity later in adulthood was more stable regardless of how many peers left for lottery schools.

Here are some examples from the study. On average, 44 boys among 1,000 who did not participate in the lottery lost a school peer in their neighborhood to a school lottery. That seemingly small exposure to lottery winners was associated with a 25 percent increase in arrests from an average of 55 arrests to 69 arrests among the boys who were less likely to get arrested. Most children were never arrested in their young adulthood, but the 14 extra arrests among this group of 500 boys are significant.  Most of the low-risk children were never incarcerated, but the total days in prison among 500 of them jumped from 600 days to 1,000 days behind bars.

The researchers only looked at how public school lotteries affected criminal activity. By the same logic, however, it’s reasonable to think that charter schools and private school vouchers could trigger worrisome crime increases if they siphon away the best students from the local, neighborhood schools. But that hasn’t been proven.

This isn’t the first study to notice unintended consequences from open enrollment policies. A 2018 report by The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School pointed out the “Paradox of Choice.” In New York, the siphoning off of students also siphoned the funds that schools receive. Less desirable local neighborhood schools were left with fewer resources and deteriorated even more. Also unexpected was how schools had become even more segregated. Sought-after schools had become extremely selective in choosing students with the highest grades and test scores. Fewer Black and Hispanic students were being admitted.

Charlotte introduced public school choice a few years after busing ended in 2001. It was a well intended effort to prevent schools from resegregating along racial lines, and to give children a better shot at a quality education. But this study shows that there are unexpected connections between schools and communities. A good solution for one problem can sometimes create a whole new one. 

This story about the effects of a school lottery was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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FULLERTON, Calif. — On an unremarkable November morning, Jimmie Conner is hunched over his laptop at a dining table in an open-concept kitchen flooded with light. The fourth-year student at California State University, Fullerton, lives in the John Irwin House, a residence for formerly incarcerated students just over four miles from the CSUF campus. The house, in a pleasant Orange County neighborhood with a park, a reservoir, and horse stables, is furnished in a modular style. Two chairs by the fireplace sit ready for one-on-one tutoring, a cluster of ottomans nearby can accommodate a study group, and spaces to hunker down with a book or notes abound: a couch by the front door layered with pillows and blankets, a desk tucked into a corner, a fire table on the patio, and a backyard. Before living here, Conner was at a halfway house, and for the 14 years before that, he was in prison, most recently at the California Men’s Colony.

The walls of the John Irwin House are more window than anything else, like another space at CSUF designed for formerly incarcerated students: the library’s “study and hangout place,” with its sparkling floor-to-ceiling panes, formally known as the Center for Hope and Redemption. Amid all this glass, Conner feels a bit like Cinderella—lucky to be getting an educational experience that’s a perfect fit for him.

Colleges and universities are expecting an influx of students like Conner soon. The vast majority of incarcerated people are currently ineligible to receive Pell Grants, federal financial aid for low-income students. But that decades-long ban will end this summer, thanks to legislation passed in 2020. Nicholas Turner, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, estimates that more than 767,000 people will be able to apply for funds to pursue a credential or a degree through an in-prison education program. At least 95 percent of the people in American prisons are eventually released, with more than 600,000 released each year. These numbers make it clear that the United States will soon have many more people reentering society prepared to attend classes on a college campus.

A significant percentage of these new students will face such substantial barriers that they won’t return for a second semester. That’s a loss for society, for formerly incarcerated individuals, and for the college communities to which they would otherwise have made valuable contributions.

It’s a loss that the John Irwin House has a track record of forestalling. Since the residence’s opening in 2018, 21 CSUF students have been given safe, secure housing with wraparound services provided by formerly incarcerated staff members who reinforce a culture of striving and mattering. Twenty of the 21 have either graduated or remain in school, and several are pursuing advanced degrees. The model has been so successful that colleges and universities around the country are exploring plans to reproduce what one staff member calls a “revolutionary” housing solution.

“My parents didn’t gangbang, but my brothers did,” says the 32-year-old Conner, recounting his childhood in Compton, Calif., as he sits at the sleek desk in his pristine bedroom. His brothers encouraged him to focus on school instead, he says, but “you see them with girls and cars and money and think, ‘Hey, this must be the lifestyle.’” He adds, “Differential association—I learned that in one of my criminal theory classes.” He joined their gang when he was 10, already knowing everyone’s name and how to throw up signs.

His first arrest was at age 12. A couple years later, he was present at a shooting. Under the old felony murder rule, which California reformed in 2019, Conner was charged as if he’d pulled the trigger. He didn’t want to take the plea deal, but he couldn’t say “It wasn’t me” without being labeled “a rat or whatever,” he says. Plus, the loved one who fired the shot would have faced life in prison if the case had gone to trial. So Conner took the deal and, at age 14, was sentenced to 17 years behind bars.

The majority of people sent to prison enter without a high school diploma or a GED certificate, yet almost 70 percent of those who are incarcerated hope to obtain a postsecondary credential. Ultimately, less than 4 percent of them graduate from college, compared with the nation’s overall rate of 29 percent, according to a 2018 report. Meanwhile, roughly two-thirds of well-paying jobs are projected to require a bachelor’s degree or higher by 2031, as the US labor market’s share of unskilled employment continues to decline.

Project Rebound, the California State University program that runs the John Irwin House, was established in 1967 to support formerly incarcerated students at San Francisco State University. It now spans 15 CSU campuses, where it offers academic counseling, opportunities to network, financial advice, tutoring, a community, help in accessing campus resources, financial aid, and more. At CSUF, 106 students participate, bringing the total to more than 300 since 2016. Eight of them live in the John Irwin House, named for Project Rebound’s founder.

The proponents of programs like Project Rebound often cite recidivism numbers to justify their existence, and they’re right: Higher education significantly reduces the likelihood that a person will be sent back to prison. Formerly incarcerated people who participate in postsecondary education programs are 48 percent less likely to be incarcerated again than those who do not—and with each degree they attain, the rate drops. For Project Rebound participants, the recidivism rate is less than 1 percent; for John Irwin House residents, it’s zero.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I gotta get more of these; I gotta get into college.’ I became a crackhead to education.”

Jimmie Conner, student at California State University, Fullerton, and resident at John Irwin House

But recidivism is just one measure. College degrees are also linked to higher rates of engagement in activities like voting and volunteerism. Those who hold them are less likely to live in poverty, rely on public assistance, or be in poor health, and these effects are passed down through generations. For people who have been incarcerated, college graduation translates to higher wages, more hours worked, and lower unemployment. Though a degree doesn’t erase the stigma of a criminal record, it can shift an employer’s focus from seeing the candidate as a liability to seeing them as someone with potential.

When he was incarcerated, Conner spent a lot of his time reading, but at first he had no intention of enrolling in anything. He was just chasing down a fascination he’d harbored from third grade until he was put in handcuffs in middle school: space. “Anything that involved astronomy, physics, I read it,” he says. A peer in the prison noticed his reading and signed him up for a GED class. Conner was skeptical, but once he had that certificate in hand, “I was like, ‘Yeah, I gotta get more of these. I gotta get into college.’ I became a crackhead to education.”

Related: From prison to dean’s list: How Danielle Metz got an education after incarceration

Conner made a case for transferring to the California Men’s Colony because it offered community college courses. “To us, it was like Harvard,” he says. There, his grades were good enough that he qualified for release one year early. In the months that followed, Conner lived in a halfway house, working a warehouse job and taking classes at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, with the goal of transferring to CSUF. But when he was accepted, Conner knew it would be too expensive to take an Amtrak train and a bus each day from his parole-approved housing 30 miles away. So he told Project Rebound staff, with whom he’d been in touch since writing them a letter from prison, “I’m gonna get a car. I’ll just sleep in my car.”

Housing challenges like Conner’s are hardly unusual. Study after study lists housing as a primary barrier to educational access for formerly incarcerated students. Formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10 times more likely to be homeless. They are often prohibited from living in public housing or on campus. Landlords tend to deny their applications. Some are forced to crash in costly motels or couch-surf.

While housing designed for formerly incarcerated people does exist, it often isn’t ideal for students: Transitional housing tends to be located far from campus, often in high-poverty neighborhoods, and comes with requirements that conflict with class times and make it hard to learn (such as blackout periods on electronic devices). And for those who live with family, there can be a host of pressures that make academic success difficult.

Instead of getting a car, Conner accepted an invitation to dinner at the John Irwin House, where, unbeknownst to him, he was vetted to ensure that he’d left “prison politics” behind. As a resident there, Conner would be expected to contribute a third of his take-home pay as rent each month. Two-thirds of that money would go toward the house’s upkeep, and the rest would be put in a savings account, to be returned to him when he moved out.

To help free him from a correctional mindset, Project Rebound wouldn’t test Conner for drugs or tell him when to eat meals or turn off his lights. He would have a curfew, but one that allowed him to attend evening classes and discussion groups (11 PM on weekdays). He knew he’d also have to maintain a GPA of 3.0 or higher, attend workshops, and participate in Project Rebound’s community service programs. What Conner didn’t realize he’d be signing up for was a new extended family.

Romarilyn Ralston is now the executive director of the CSUF branch of Project Rebound. But back in 2016, she was hired in part to answer the mail. Weeks into the job, Ralston announced, “We need a house,” because so many of the applicants’ letters mentioned housing insecurity. She wanted to house “people who are deserving of a quality life,” she says, but “most of all we wanted them to have a community of people who understood how things sometimes can go the wrong way…. There are 48,000 collateral consequences [of incarceration] that exist to trip you up, but all you need is one community to help pick you up.”

In 2017, Ralston had been the one to pick up James “JC” Cavitt, who came running into her office as an undergraduate on the verge of quitting his first job on campus. Cavitt had been assigned to read e-mails, make edits, and forward the revised information, but since he was straight out of prison, he says, “I didn’t know how to operate e-mail. I didn’t know what an attachment was.” Ralston gave him a crash course, and Cavitt—who has since graduated and received a master’s degree—says his life trajectory was forever changed. He now works as the program director for CSUF’s Project Rebound and is pursuing a PhD at a private university nearby.

But Cavitt wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking Ralston for help had he not known that she’d spent 23 years in prison herself—one more than he had. He says college administrators and faculty rarely understand the “trauma of incarceration [or] the unique needs of our population.”

One of those needs is a dedicated space to escape the well-documented stigma of incarceration on college campuses. This protective effect is especially important for Black men like Conner and Cavitt. Studies have noted their “double disadvantage,” and Conner has lived it: When he went jogging between classes at CSUF, people would cross the street to avoid him.

Cavitt says that he, too, has gotten looks that communicated: “What are you doing here?” It’s a question that formerly incarcerated students, who are often in the grip of impostor syndrome, tend to ask themselves. But there’s an evidence-backed antidote to that malady: a sense of belonging. Students who feel they belong tend to be more engaged; they enjoy school more, achieve at a higher level, and are less likely to leave without a degree.

But belonging can be hard. Conner had trouble relating to his peers’ precollegiate experiences. Most are at least 10 years younger, so when they were watching Disney’s latest release or playing soccer at recess, he was in prison learning how to fashion a knife from a CD case. At 18, he witnessed a man being stabbed repeatedly right in front of him with an improvised plastic blade. Why? Because the man smelled like a stick of deodorant he wasn’t supposed to use.

Having lived through countless violent, unpredictable incidents like that, “I didn’t really like talking to people,” Conner says. When he first got to school, he kept to himself. At the house, he’d stay in his room. “You’re stuck in a cage all the time. You come home, and you put yourself in another cage unknowingly.”

Research shows that formerly incarcerated students can have difficulty building social connections and asking for help, because of the way incarceration erodes social trust and contributes to increased rates of PTSD. “People might think that’s a maladaptive response, but inside, that’s a survival mechanism,” says Yehudah Pryce, who lived in the John Irwin House as an undergraduate before completing a master’s degree and a doctorate in social work.

Related: Pipeline to prison: Special education too often leads to jail for thousands of American children 

Conner’s housemates understood, and they knew what to do: “They’d tell me, ‘Come out! Say hi to people!’” He did, and he learned that he could breathe around them—“like an exhale,” he says. Conner watched one of his housemates sit and study for hours at a time, “with his headphones on, typing away. That’s who we idolized; that’s who we wanted to be like.” So they mimicked him.

The men would cook for one another and, when work and school schedules allowed, watch TV or play video games. But when Cavitt visited during midterms and finals, “the house would be eerily silent,” he recalls. “They’d be like, ‘Nope, don’t bother me right now, I’m studying.’”

“The house would be eerie silent. They’d be like, ‘Nope, don’t bother me right now, I’m studying.’ ”

James “JC” Cavitt, program director for Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton

That vibe was “sort of like osmosis” to Charles Jackson, 58. After he moved last fall, Jackson says, “my grades, my studying, everything has gotten better.” This is a common experience. Cavitt says the average GPA of Project Rebound participants is significantly higher than CSUF’s as a whole, and the average GPA of house residents is higher still. Eighty-eight percent of CSUF students who weren’t scheduled to graduate returned to school last fall; 96 percent of John Irwin House residents did. Of the house residents who have graduated, five out of six went on to pursue graduate degrees, and all of them are currently employed.

But wouldn’t living in a dorm also provide this kind of academic osmosis? For many formerly incarcerated students, that isn’t an option, for various reasons. Most dorms are available only nine months a year, and living on campus is prohibitively expensive. Many formerly incarcerated students don’t have family wealth, are required to pay court-imposed restitution, or, because of their age, have less time to pay off student loans. People who look “out of place” are also more likely to have their ID checked or have campus security called on them.

Moreover, dorms aren’t conducive to the requirements of probation and parole. The day after Jackson moved into the house, he says, his parole officer knocked on the door to request a drug test “and said, ‘Here. Here’s a cup.’” If that happened at a dorm and a set of earbuds later went missing, who would people suspect? And other people’s partying poses a risk: A roommate’s pills or a whiff of marijuana in the hall can be cited as a parole violation.

None of these concerns come into play at the John Irwin House. Residents don’t feel the need to look over their shoulders, to watch out for police helicopters or naysayers. Pryce says the ability to let his guard down or to pay just $80 for rent, because that’s a third of what a dishwashing job brings in, “was just such a weight off me…knowing that I didn’t have to come up with some money scheme.” It left more focus for studying, but also, he says, “I think more highly of myself that I’m worthy to be here.” And mentoring and encouragement are available 24/7. For all these reasons, he says, “that housing component—it’s just a total game changer.”

But would it be enough for Conner? He wanted to major in business and move to Silicon Valley after graduation, but in his first semester he failed a required math course. Then he found out his mom was dying. He took the class again and did his best while managing hospice care. He failed again.

“There are 48,000 collateral consequences [of incarceration] that exist to trip you up, but all you need is one community to help pick you up.”

Romarilyn Ralston, executive director of Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton

Then his mother died, and Conner was devastated. “That was a lot of pressure,” he says. “I got my brother calling me from prison every single day, and I’m the decision-maker. I gotta help pay for the funeral.” It was all too much. Something had to go. So one day in 2020, Conner let Cavitt know that he was done with Project Rebound and would be moving out of the house.

“I saw my little brother just literally crumble,” Cavitt says. They talked about the logistics of living elsewhere, including costs like electricity, water, trash, and Wi-Fi that Conner hadn’t considered “because he’d been incarcerated pretty much all of his life.” Cavitt had lost his own mother the year before, and they talked about grief and how it can exacerbate a person’s tendency to withdraw. Cavitt remembers leveling with him: “I said, ‘Little brother, you’re doing it again…. You are pulling away instead of leaning into the community that is here to help you and support you and wrap their arms around you through this difficult time.’”

Conner was given a bitter pill, Cavitt says, but he swallowed it.

When the expansion of the Pell Grant program goes into effect next school year and more Americans leave prison ready to begin or complete bachelor’s degrees, few campuses will be ready.

The small number of colleges that run education programs in prison tend to cobble together housing for those who enroll in classes on campus after their release, often through referrals or in graduate student housing or “dry” dorms. The Prison Education Project at Washington University in St. Louis puts students in touch with sympathetic landlords who are willing to overlook their lack of a credit history through “an informal, pick-up-the-phone pipeline,” says Kevin Windhauser, the program’s director. A few other universities give them housing subsidies, which is essentially what CSUF does for female Project Rebound participants faced with housing insecurity, since they tend to be custodial parents.

But most colleges provide no housing support designed for these students. Research indicates that only around one-third of California’s colleges offer any services tailored to formerly incarcerated students, let alone housing, and that 72 percent of those are community colleges. Turner, of the Vera Institute, says the national numbers are surely much lower, since “what’s happening in California is the leading edge.”

But more Irwin-style housing is on the way. The nonprofit Thrive for Life has run a house for formerly incarcerated students in New York City since 2019, including some enrolled at New York University and Columbia, and it’s forging partnerships with additional schools, such as Marquette University, which plans to open a house in Milwaukee next fall. Project Rebound is in the process of opening new houses at Sacramento State and Fresno State, and Renford Reese, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and the founder of the Prison Education Project, has developed plans for lots he owns in Pomona. If he finds an investor, his projects will serve approximately 60 formerly incarcerated students taking classes at Cal Poly Pomona, Pitzer College, and Mt. San Antonio College.

Related: Opinion — Prison learning must be high quality and lead to a degree

Julie O’Heir, the director of the Prison Education Program at Saint Louis University, is attempting to replicate the Project Rebound model there but cites two primary impediments—finances and staffing—that boil down to a budgeting issue. At CSUF, rent from the residents covers a tiny portion of the John Irwin House’s operating expenses. Brady Heiner, an associate professor who founded the Project Rebound program at CSUF and has served as its executive director, says that to establish proof of concept, the house initially relied on philanthropic investments from several foundations.

After four years of running the John Irwin House out of a rental home, Heiner and others brought the program’s success to the attention of state legislators. In 2021, California allocated $5 million to Project Rebound. Part of CSUF’s piece of that pie—supplemented by money from the school’s capital fund, a private donation, and a matching gift—went toward buying its current home.

However, that onetime lump sum “is not enough to sustain us over the long term,” says Heiner, who is now the interim executive director of the overarching CSU Project Rebound Consortium. To keep the John Irwin House open, Project Rebound will have to keep fundraising.

Those who study the issue find this state of affairs frustrating. Melissa Abeyta, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a cochair of NASPA’s Formerly Incarcerated Students and System Impacted Families Knowledge Community, says: “Across the nation, we have universities with Greek houses. Why would this student population not be deserving of similar residential halls?”

The practice of affinity housing is well established, and many colleges have a program like the First-Generation Living Learning Community at the University of Texas at Austin “for first-generation college students to connect on a deeper level.” Members of sports teams often live together, and the University of California, Berkeley, offers extensive co-op housing with, for example, a building for vegetarians. In other words, colleges and universities know how to do affinity housing.

And “they have the money,” says Stanley Andrisse, an assistant professor at the Howard University College of Medicine who runs the nonprofit Prison to Professionals and its transitional house for formerly incarcerated scholars in Baltimore. “It’s about whether they have the interest or the willingness.”

Abeyta observes that, partly because they don’t understand the benefits, “some college presidents are very uncomfortable with the idea of having formerly incarcerated students on campus.” A 2022 study, citing Abeyta’s work, concluded that formerly incarcerated Latinx students possess a unique mix of knowledge and abilities drawn from their time in prison and on the streets. Abeyta has called these assets “carceral capital.”

Less than 4 percent of people released from prison ever graduate from college, compared with the nation’s overall rate of 29 percent, despite an estimated 70 percent aspiring to obtain a postsecondary credential.

Andrisse has it. Before he became a research scientist, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on three felony convictions. “I made a good amount of money selling drugs, and those same skills that got me locked up, I’m still using those skills to secure million-dollar grants,” he says. Project Rebound participants say professors rely on them to start classroom discussions and persuade younger students to attend office hours and tutoring. Formerly incarcerated students also serve as role models of what Ralston calls “grit and grind.”

“They are additive to our campus, just like our veterans,” says CSUF’s president, Framroze Virjee. Virjee supported the John Irwin House from the beginning, and the first time he visited it, he cried. “There but for the grace of God goes any one of us,” he says, describing “amazing people who got caught up in things.”

When one house resident was close to dropping out, Virjee scheduled a standing phone call with him every night at 7 o’clock for three months. “Literally one of the best days of my life,” Virjee says, was when “I got to hand him his diploma as he crossed the stage.”

After Conner left for class on that unremarkable November morning, Lance Swann drove over to the John Irwin House to share some good news. The 31-year-old junior, who teaches classes at Ironwood State Prison on the side, had moved out in August. He rented a room in a house for a few months to establish a rental history, and now he’d been offered his own lease in “a pretty nice area of Anaheim.”

Cavitt jumped to his feet, wrapping the younger man in a bear hug. The jubilation lasted for a minute or two, and then Cavitt asked to see the document. “Let’s review it,” he said. “Because landlords can sneak some stuff in there. Same thing when you go in—first thing you do is take pictures.”

When Cavitt arrived at the house a few hours earlier, Conner had been there studying. “That would have been the worst decision ever, if I’d have left Project Rebound,” Conner told me. “It would be a whole different me. Maybe I would have got in trouble again.”

Instead, Cavitt recalled, Conner “began to thrive”: He opened up and became “more vulnerable about his feelings and emotions, stuff he had repressed for years.” He also started reaching out to professors and going to office hours. “I’m advocating for myself, speaking up,” Conner confirmed.

These days, the two men talk mostly about grad school. Conner has his sights set on at least one more degree.

“I’m watching this man grow into his own, right before my eyes,” Cavitt says.

When they run into each other in early December, Conner is on his way to campus to tutor another student. “From Project Rebound?” Cavitt asks.

“Nah,” Conner responds, just a classmate who needed help.

“Wait a minute, who are you?” Cavitt teases. “When did you start doing this?”

Conner doesn’t know exactly who he’s becoming, but he does know who to thank. Being around people like Cavitt, he says, makes him think, “Damn, I can do this.” The rubber bands on his braces flash CSUF orange as he says, “It’s crazy how good my life went.”

This story about Project Rebound was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The isolation of spring 2020 sent Lindsay Richmond’s 13-year-old son AJ into severe depression.

Born with a traumatic brain injury, he’d been diagnosed in kindergarten with a serious emotional disability and severe ADHD. Stuck at home during the early months of the pandemic, his mental health declined.

That fall he was briefly admitted to a psychiatric hospital after threatening to hurt himself—just after he started seventh grade at Sobesky Academy, a public school in a suburb of Denver. While at the hospital, he got into a fight with another resident his age, and the facility pressed charges for felony assault, according to a later state investigation.

The hospital notified the school. On Sept.18, Richmond received an email from the Jefferson County School District: AJ was suspended while the district evaluated his risk of violence, a formal process known as a behavioral threat assessment. 

AJ spent the next eight months out of school with limited virtual instruction, while his mother argued with the district that his rights as a student in special education were being violated in the name of school safety.

“My son has always really liked school because he really does like that interaction with his peers and other children his age,” said Richmond. “So taking him out of that network, it really does hurt him.”

Threat assessment teams — typically teachers, mental health providers, and law enforcement officials —use specific protocols designed to pinpoint emerging or imminent threats and stop violence before it happens. When teams use these protocols correctly, proponents say, schools are safer and the school environment is more tolerant. Some research supports this view, but there’s no evidence to date that use of the protocols prevents school shootings. And advocates say the process disproportionately targets students already at risk of not succeeding in school. Students in special education, in particular, are more likely than their peers to face a threat assessment, and some have been denied protections they are owed under federal law.

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Still, policymakers increasingly see the use of threat assessment teams as a viable way to prevent mass shootings. In August, New Jersey joined 18 other states that require school districts to have such teams. Nearly every other state, including Colorado, encourages districts to adopt them. In 2018 Congress allocated federal funds to train schools on threat assessment. Twin bills introduced in Congress last year would expand that funding further by authorizing the Secret Service to set up a national program to research school violence prevention and provide training on the threat assessment process. (The Senate passed its version out of committee in September, but the House companion hasn’t moved since its introduction.)

Behavioral threat assessments have their roots in a Secret Service protocol re-configured for schools after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Since then, three main programs have emerged that follow similar approaches, said Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and principal author of the most-studied model. In addition, some states have developed their own versions.

Generally, after an incident occurs or staff receive a tip — say, a student gets into a fight or posts on social media condoning the use of violence — a team uses a structured process to gather information, interview the student and witnesses, and decide on a threat level to assign the student. Threat assessment teams are usually trained in this approach. For example, in Virginia, where the use of threat assessment protocols is mandatory, team members are required to get up to a full day of instruction.

Threat assessments of less serious incidents might result in an apology from the student or a referral for mental health services, said Travis Hamblin, director of student services for the Jordan School District in Utah. More severe offenses, as when the student brings a weapon to school, can lead to an intervention plan that might include more intensive mental health services or a referral to law enforcement, plus suspension, expulsion, or legal consequences.

But the goal of an assessment is to figure out why a threat was made and give students what they need to get back on track, not necessarily punish them, proponents say.

In AJ’s case, Richmond said the threat assessment team met over video with her and her son for just 10 minutes to ask questions: How did he feel about coming back to school? What would he do to make sure an incident like that at the hospital didn’t happen there? How depressed was he feeling?

The district did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

A few months earlier, according to a state report provided by Richmond, AJ had once threatened to knock another student down to steal his belt; his special education team had stepped in and concluded he posed no threat of harm to himself or others. But after the episode at the hospital, the threat assessment team determined that AJ was an ongoing safety threat due to a history of “concerning behaviors,” according to the state investigation, which was prompted by a complaint Richmond filed with the Colorado Department of Education. The district decided to ban him from in-person classes.

Under federal law, a student with a disability cannot be removed from school for disciplinary reasons unless the school has proved — through a review called a manifestation determination — that the behavior that triggered the removal was not caused by the disability. But the district claimed that AJ wasn’t being removed for a disciplinary violation, so no review was required, according to the state report.

AJ’s pediatrician, psychiatrist, and guardian ad litem all asked the district to reconsider, arguing continued isolation would worsen AJ’s mental health, said Richmond. None of his behavior appears to fit on a list of predictors of violence — like talking about a school attack or trying to obtain a weapon — that appears in Colorado’s model school threat assessment policy.

From September 2020 to April 2021, AJ sat at home, getting on average less than two hours of daily live interaction with teachers. Richmond tried for months to get the district to send her the threat assessment report and finally gave up, she said.

“They kind of just treated me like I was in denial and that he was a threat and I was crazy,” said Richmond. “I felt very alone.”

It’s unclear how often school districts use threat assessments in a way that may conflict with legal protections required by federal disabilities law, in Colorado or nationally. A      review by The Hechinger Report of complaints to the Colorado Department of Education found that district threat determinations appeared to flout disability law in at least four other cases since 2015. In addition, three other parents of Colorado students with disabilities told Hechinger that the threat assessment process failed their children. One student was suspended for minor infractions after an assessment. In another case, the student’s special education team wasn’t involved in the threat assessment review. In the third case, the school didn’t provide due process during the threat assessment, the parent said. No Colorado state agency collects data on school threat assessments, nor is any such information collected nationally.

The state education department referred questions about those complaints and whether changes are needed in the state’s approach to the Colorado School Safety Resource Center. That center offers voluntary threat assessment training to schools. Center director Christine Harms said by email that she couldn’t comment on specific complaints but affirmed that the center trains schools to include special education professionals on their threat assessment teams in cases involving students with disabilities to ensure federal laws are followed.

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

Research in Virginia and Colorado by academics, including Cornell, suggests  complaints like those lodged by Colorado parents likely aren’t isolated cases. Two studies show students with disabilities are up to four times as likely to be subjected to threat assessments as others. Additional research in both states found mixed disciplinary outcomes: Two analyses found students were more likely to be suspended, and three found no significant differences.

Meanwhile the pressure schools face to prevent violence is real: In 2022 there were 285 school-shooting incidents in which a gun was brandished or fired, or a bullet hit school property, the most of any year since at least 1970, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database compiled by the Naval Postgraduate School. Schools risk lawsuits if they have even the slightest indication that a student is a safety concern and do nothing.

A few weeks after a school shooting in Maryland in March 2018, state legislators passed a law mandating threat assessment teams in schools. Megan Berger, an attorney with Disability Rights Maryland, said her organization was concerned that the policy would conflict with federal special education law.

“They kind of just treated me like I was in denial and that he was a threat and I was crazy … I felt very alone.”

Lindsay Richmond, whose disabled son was expelled after a threat assessment

Now those fears are being realized. One of her clients, an 18-year-old senior, has already been transferred from his school, apparently in violation of federal protections. He has a confirmed disability, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, which can result in ongoing irritability and anger and frequent, intense outbursts of temper.

In mid-February 2022, he was suspended for 10 days from his Maryland high school after he threatened to beat up a school employee who had ordered him out of a bathroom. (His name and that of the school are being withheld out of his mother’s concern for retaliation against his siblings.)

The school extended the suspension for an additional eight days while a team from the district  completed a threat assessment, according to a state investigation into the proceedings.

The district held the legally required manifestation determination meeting and found that the student’s outburst was indeed caused by his disability. But, according to Berger and a report of the investigation, it ignored that finding and barred the teen from returning based on the threat assessment’s conclusion that he posed a threat.

“I hope when that’s done it will be a guidepost for schools so that they don’t just call whatever they do a threat assessment,”

Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and principal author of a threat assessment model

Instead, the district transferred him to a vocational technical school, where he took vocational classes in person and his academic classes virtually for the rest of the year. His mother, Veronica, said the special education team that worked with her son wasn’t directly involved in the decision, nor did team members speak up about the process — one of the student’s special educators told Veronica she feared for her job.

Her son would never set foot in his high school again. “They took the rest of his 12th grade year from him,” said Veronica. Asked for comment, a district representative said federal privacy laws prohibited her from discussing individual students or their discipline records.

Related: Is the pandemic our chance to reimagine education for students with disabilities?

Cornell, the University of Virginia professor, said there’s a reason that students with disabilities are subject to more threat assessments: They make more threats. Some of these students need services for aggressive and impulsive behavior. It is not surprising to those who work in special education, he said, that “these students would be more likely to make threats than other students.”

Dan Stewart, a managing attorney for the National Disability Rights Network, said that type of argument overlooks the underlying reason why students with disabilities may be making threats. When students with disabilities do something aggressive or impulsive, they need help from their special education team to figure out what’s causing the behavior, not a threat assessment, he said. Federal law already has a process allowing schools, working with a student’s special education team, to temporarily remove students if they pose an immediate danger, he added.

There is evidence that at least some approaches to threat assessments may positively affect schools’ safety climate. A 2015 peer-reviewed study, for example, found that schools using Cornell’s model had lower rates of student bullying and other aggression and that teachers reported feeling safer.

Two studies show students with disabilities are up to four times more likely to be subjected to threat assessments than their peers without disabilities. Additional research on the disciplinary outcomes of assessments for these students is mixed: Two analyses found students with disabilities were more likely to be suspended, and three found no significant differences between disabled students and students without disabilities.

Hamblin, the student services director in a Utah district, said his district’s program, based on Cornell’s guidelines, emphasizes problem solving. Teams want to address the underlying issues that students might be experiencing — bullying, for example — before they escalate into violence, he said. And for staff, having a protocol takes the emotion out of deciding what to do. According to Cornell, studies show students receiving special education services have lower rates of suspension in schools with threat assessment protocols than they do in schools not using them.

Even some who see the value in threat assessments say they can be too easily misused.

Peter Mosby is principal at Rock Ridge Elementary School in a suburb of Denver. His son Chas, who is 17 and has ADHD and a serious emotional disability, was the subject of a threat assessment this fall when staff at his high school said they saw arrows in the back of Chas’ truck, said Mosby.

Staff searched the truck and found a flare gun with empty shell casings. The dean of the school, Grandview High School in Aurora, told Mosby they were considering expulsion. Chas overheard, lost his composure, and cursed at and aggressively stepped toward a school administrator, according to the school’s threat assessment report.

But Mosby said that report was inaccurate and lacked context. Chas is serious about archery, which is why there were arrow shafts in his truck. The report mentions that he had “one or two episodes” of previous violence, which Mosby disputes. And the report classifies Chas as a high-level threat, though the circumstances don’t meet the definition, Mosby said.

Related: Preschool for children with disabilities works, but federal funding for it is plummeting

Abbe Smith, spokesperson for the Cherry Creek School District, said by email that the district “very diligently” followed the threat assessment process and stands by the “determination and the facts outlined in the threat assessment report.” She said federal laws protecting student privacy prevented her from further comment.

In the end, Chas was not expelled. But Mosby said he has no way to correct claimed errors in the report, which will stay in Chas’ record.

Despite Chas’ experience, Mosby acknowledged that, as a school administrator, he finds threat assessments useful. “But like any tool, it can also be abused,” he said. “You have schools that do not want students with disabilities in their population.”

“[L]ike any tool, [threat assessment] can also be abused. You have schools that do not want students with disabilities in their population.”

Peter Mosby, elementary school principal, and parent of a student with a disability

Even as the use of threat assessment protocols has spread across the country, research on the new tool has been conducted in only a handful of places: Dallas, Memphis, four Colorado districts and statewide in Virginia.

“I’ve been calling for other states and other models to do research for years and years,” said Cornell. He’s working with others to develop standards for threat assessment programs that will include guidelines on training staff, selecting a program, and ensuring an equitable impact on students with disabilities and students of color. “I hope when that’s done it will be a guidepost for schools so that they don’t just call whatever they do a threat assessment,” he said.

Advocacy demonstrating the harm threat assessments may pose to students with disabilities could be having an effect. New Jersey’s new law requires that threat assessments of students with disabilities include their special education team to make sure legal requirements are met. And the U.S. Department of Education, in school discipline guidance issued in July, noted that schools can’t use threat assessments to circumvent the procedural safeguards of federal disability law.

Education equity advocates are demanding that the federal government do more to learn the scope of the problem. In comments submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in September 2021, a group of 50 organizations, including the National Disability Rights Network, asked that the department start collecting systematic data on the demographics of children being referred for threat assessments and then disciplined or referred to law enforcement as a result.

In the spring of 2021, after Richmond, AJ’s mom, filed her complaint with Colorado’s education department, the district allowed AJ to come back to school in person. But there were conditions: He could attend only one class and had to be accompanied everywhere on campus by a school police officer, said Richmond. She had to quit her job at a hospital to ferry AJ back and forth on the odd-hours schedule.

Richmond ultimately took AJ out of the district and moved him to the Denver public school system, where he was allowed to attend school full time. “They were like, ‘We have absolutely helped children with his needs before,’” she said. “They just welcomed him with open arms.”

This story about threat assessments was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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In the heart of Louisville, Kentucky, Rikaiya Long recently stood at the front of the courtroom, presenting oral arguments from the law brief she’d authored a week prior. Legal scholars listened intently while she defended her position in the case of strict liability.

Rikaiya is not a lawyer, though — she’s a high school student. And the legal scholars were student teachers from the University of Louisville.

This mock courtroom occupies half of Rikaiya’s classroom at Central High School. She is enrolled in the school’s law magnet program — one of its many “pathways” that combine academics with exposure to careers in specific fields. These programs provide students with opportunities to take career and technical education (CTE) courses that offer real, work-based learning experiences.

Research has shown that exposure like this makes students not only more likely to complete high school, but also more likely to enroll in college. Despite promising evidence, however, there remains little information accessible to families about the availability and quality of CTE high school programs.

High school is supposed to be a place of academic discovery that positions students for lifelong success. Without knowing the true breadth of programs at their disposal, students are not able to take advantage of valuable, pre-career learning opportunities.

Related: The high school-college hybrid that jumpstarts careers

To determine if schools provide high-quality options for students to pursue college and career, states must publish school-level data that tell us two key metrics: How many students are completing pathways programs, and how many are subsequently enrolling in college?

While vitally important, providing robust data on CTE and pathways programs alone will not ensure that they are high quality or that all students are well served; we also need to define pathway quality and promote equitable access to these programs where they exist so that all students can take advantage.

That’s why GreatSchools, a national nonprofit, recently conducted a national landscape analysis of publicly available, career-specific data to determine if we could connect parents with that data through our school profiles. (It’s part of our effort to provide families with the most complete picture of school quality possible, including sharing information on schools’ resources, practices and outcomes — and whether they are equitably distributed.)

As it turns out, only two states — Kentucky and Michigan — provide data that attempts to capture the quality of these programs, including information on student participation and outcomes for career-specific programming.

High school is supposed to be a place of academic discovery that positions students for lifelong success.

This data, combined with information on college enrollment and persistence, could help families understand how well a school is preparing students for life after high school. For some students, the plan could be college; for others, it could be high-quality technical education, the military or another skill-based vocation.

Following our analysis, we partnered with the Kentucky Board of Education to add information on career pathway offerings to our Kentucky high school profiles — connecting families across the state to this vital information. We hope it will support Kentucky families in learning about the educational opportunities available to their teenagers, while also showing other states the importance of making such data public.

Indeed, families in all 50 states and the District of Columbia should have this opportunity. The more students can learn about — and take advantage of — CTE programs at their schools, the greater the chance that they will find their right path after high school.

By participating in the law magnet program, Rikaiya discovered that she actually didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. Now, she’s set on applying her business skills to a career in public relations. So far, she’s applied to programs at three historically Black institutions: Howard University, Florida A&M University and Xavier University of Louisiana.

To fulfill the promise of high-quality career preparation programming for all students, states must prioritize greater data collection, publication and transparency. As Kentucky and Michigan demonstrate, states can develop the infrastructure necessary to collect and report this valuable information.

Students rely on data about CTE programs to make decisions about their academic and professional futures; they deserve information on all the possibilities.

Jon Deane is chief executive officer of GreatSchools.org, a national education nonprofit that supports parents through every stage of their child’s education. He brings over two decades of experience in K-12 education, previously serving as a math teacher and school administrator.

This story about career and technical education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Ruth Taddesse, now a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, celebrated the March 2021 announcement that her school district would be the first in the state to pull police from its schools.

She’d watched as school districts around the country removed officers from campuses after student-led protests for racial justice following the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

But the celebration was short-lived: Just over a year after the county’s no-police-in-schools declaration, the school district and local police department reached a new agreement that restored armed officers — now known as “community engagement officers” — to schools. While the officers wouldn’t be permanently stationed on campuses, they would have an office inside each high school and would participate in events like career days, school assemblies and study circles.

“They’re actually encouraged to engage with elementary kids,” said Taddesse, now an organizer with the student-led MoCo Against Brutality campaign. She joined the group after researching the disproportionate rates at which Black, Latino and special education students face increased discipline and referral to law enforcement when armed officers work at their schools.

“They’re not social workers,” Taddesse said of police. “They’re not restorative justice coaches. They never will be. Expecting them to help young people, that’s dangerous.”

Dozens of school districts across the country severed their relationships with local police or committed to removing armed officers from campus in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests. Youth leaders hoped to build on that momentum and get more schools and districts to follow suit, while replacing the money they spend on policing with mental health and other support services for students.

But now, some school districts have changed their minds, often in response to calls from parents to ramp up school security as student misbehavior surged last fall when kids returned to campuses. In the Montgomery County district, for example, the decision to bring back armed officers followed demands from parents for greater security after a January 2021 shooting of a student in a high school bathroom. In an email, Christopher Cram, the district’s spokesperson, said the school system put in “immense effort” to seek input from families, students and others before bringing back police, and the new agreement supports school safety while trying to ensure that Black and Hispanic students are not disproportionately targeted.

The calls for increased security intensified after the massacre in May of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Meanwhile, the bipartisan gun safety bill signed into law by President Joe Biden in the wake of the Uvalde shooting more than doubled federal funding for schools to train teachers on violence prevention, purchase security hardware and hire school resource officers, or SROs, as school police are often called. At the same time, some Republican-controlled state legislatures have introduced or advanced bills to override local school board and city council decisions and mandate armed officers in schools.

“There was obviously a big push shortly after George Floyd, and a lot of momentum around police reform generally, including on the issue of police in schools, and clearly there’s been a backsliding,” said Marc Schindler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “The unfortunate reality is that although police in schools may sound appealing, may seem an appropriate response,” he added, “we see no evidence of policing making schools safer.”  

Related: What happens once school resource officers leave schools?

Police first started patrolling American schools in the 1940s and ’50s, often as part of racist resistance to the integration of white neighborhoods and schools. But in recent decades, several high-profile school shootings fueled the expansion of federal grants to boost the ranks of police in schools: In 1975, just 1 percent of schools reported having a police officer on campus; that share rose to 58 percent by 2018, according to research from the University of Connecticut. Students in high school are more likely to see police than kids in early grades; so are those in schools with higher shares of Black and Hispanic students, the Urban Institute found.

The campaign for police-free schools, meanwhile, started over a decade ago with the formation of local groups such as the Black Organizing Project in Oakland, California, and the Urban Youth Collaborative in New York City. Those groups’ fights received national attention as civil unrest roiled the country following the 2020 police killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Student organizers joined, and often led, demonstrations to remove police from their schools. And at first, school boards seemed to listen.

“It was a really hard battle, but at the end of the day, students had their voices heard,” said Sindy Carballo, a 2020 graduate of Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia who helped campaign for the removal of police from that district.

“It’s a community-based policing approach. It is very important to know that relationship-building with parents and students and with [school] staff has to be the number one goal of a school resource officer.”

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers

The effort was successful: In May 2021, the Alexandria City Council voted to end its funding for school resource officers. But then parents overrode their children, holding protests and pleading with city council members to restore funding for campus police. Five months later, the council heeded their pleas and voted 4-3 to place SROs back in middle and high schools.

“Fast forward to when students went back to school, and suddenly there’s all this backlash from parents saying so much trauma happened during the pandemic and teachers weren’t prepared and we definitely need police in schools again,” said Carballo, now a youth organizer with the group Tenants and Workers United.

Researchers with Education Week identified at least 50 school districts that removed police from schools or cut budgets for policing programs from May 2020 through June 2022. Eight districts, including Alexandria City Public Schools, have since added police back, the news outlet found. 

An uptick in violence and misbehavior is one reason. Nationally, a full third of U.S. public schools reported an increase in physical attacks or fights between students due to Covid and its complications. More than half of schools reported a pandemic-related rise in classroom disruptions and student tardiness, and physical attacks by students against a teacher or staff member increased at 1 in 10 schools.

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

Arleen Yaz Alonso, director of youth organizing for Gente Organizada, a nonprofit in Pomona, California, said the pandemic exacerbated mental health challenges among students, which contributed to behavior problems in schools. But she said a solution would be to invest in student mental health — not police officers.

The Pomona Unified School District appeared to be embracing that idea when, in June 2021, it announced it would no longer employ SROs and would instead hire proctors trained in de-escalating conflicts. But only a few months later, the district said it was bringing back SROs, following an October shooting near Pomona High School. (The district did not respond to interview requests.)

“It is absurd and unnecessary to bring an armed officer to a campus where there are minors,” said Alonso. “Schools are a place for education and a place for students to learn about themselves, about academics, to dream big, and having an armed police officer on campus is not the route to go.”

Proponents of school resource officers say they bring stability to schools. Because they are stationed in school buildings over the long term, SROs can build relationships with students, unlike local police who might be called in to respond to an emergency. “It’s a community-based policing approach,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “It is very important to know that relationship-building with parents and students and with [school] staff has to be the number one goal of a school resource officer.”

But experts who have studied police in schools note a lack of evidence to suggest that police improve safety. A review of the research on school police released in May by the education nonprofit WestEd found no link between placing police at schools and prevention of crime. Meanwhile, the bulk of the research on the topic revealed that school-based officers actually contribute to higher rates of student discipline, without improving school safety. The WestEd review found no connection between school-based law enforcement and learning outcomes, including attendance.

“If the U.S. was spending money on a drug trial and they kept finding it wasn’t working and it wasn’t working, and actually had bad side effects, then we would have stopped funding that drug trial ages ago,” said Ben Fisher, associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the WestEd study, citing an analogy used by the sociologist Aaron Kupchik. Instead of continuing to throw money at an ineffective security strategy with unintended consequences, schools should instead be investing in proven strategies, like counseling, Fisher said.

In some cases, school districts that seek to remove police may now find they can’t do so because of state-level decisions. Kentucky earlier this year passed legislation that requires a police officer on every school campus in the state, except when schools lack the funding to hire an officer. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators introduced a bill to require school districts to appoint an SRO on every campus that meets a threshold for arrests and violent incidents.

“Fast forward to when students went back to school, and suddenly there’s all this backlash from parents saying so much trauma happened during the pandemic and teachers weren’t prepared and we definitely need police in schools again.”

Sindy Carballo, a 2020 graduate of Virginia’s Alexandria City school district, who campaigned for the removal of police from that district

Young people, meanwhile, are adjusting their strategies, too.

In Alexandria, students plan to keep asking school board members “every chance we get” about why they continue to police student behavior, said Carballo. “But we’re also asking, ‘Are you willing to implement more resources for restorative justice, for mental health?’ ”

All the board members have said yes, Carballo said, but no one has committed to a specific amount. She suggested: “How about let’s start somewhere? What about $500,000?”

In Pomona, California, Gente Organizada and the students who work alongside it are still in talks with the district, too, Alonso said. Currently, they are pushing for the creation of school-based mental health centers where students could go for support.

In Denver, where the school district canceled its contract with local police but later expanded its staff of armed security officers and gave them authority to issue tickets to students, youth organizers with the community group Movimiento Poder spent their summer drafting a plan to take their fight statewide and override district leaders.

And in Montgomery County, Ruth Taddesse and other members of MoCo Against Brutality created an online “police sighting form” that people can fill out when they see armed officers on campus. The idea, she said, is to let police know that students don’t want them there.

“They think if students start seeing cops walking around, we’ll start complaining — which is obviously what we plan on doing.”

Caroline Preston contributed reporting to this story.

This story about police in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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