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| Tuesday, Jun 10 2008 7:03 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Jul 17 2008 11:35 AM
The numbers were almost too staggering to be believable. In just one year, the Bakersfield City School District had seen a near-tenfold spike in the number of student suspensions related to violence or drugs.
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The unexplained upsurge -- from fewer than 1,700 such suspensions in 2005-06 to more than 15,000 in 2006-07 -- had caused a succession of statistical dominoes to fall. The rate for countywide suspensions related to drugs and violence had more than doubled, turning Kern County into the apparent poster child for campus disobedience.
And Kern County's problem had, in turn, fueled a statewide increase that had experts across California tsk-tsking the failure of educators to lasso unruly students. How were kids supposed to learn to read when thugs were waiting to mug them for their iPods out on the playground?
The San Francisco Chronicle analyzed the issue in admirable detail in a May 19 front-page story, "Suspensions point to trouble in schools." California schools suspended students more than 332,000 times for violence or drugs that year -- an increase of almost 16,000 from 2005-06, the Chronicle story revealed.
But the story missed the "fact" that the BCSD, with its apparent single-year increase of 13,619, was almost wholly responsible for the state's lamentable escalation.
Well, surprise. The mystery of the suspension surge has been solved -- mostly, anyway. When the BCSD, the largest K-8 district in the state with more than 27,000 students, reported suspension data to the California Department of Education a year ago as required, a district numbers-cruncher somehow came up with a wildly inflated number. As a result, the true number of violence/drug suspensions -- 2,340, a 41 percent increase over the previous year, which is bad enough -- was recorded as 15,277. That would have been an increase of more than an 800 percent.
The district noticed the error and notified the state agency, but the Department of Education never made the correction to its publicly accessible database, which was the foundation for the Chronicle story. (The article inspired nearly 200 online reactions from readers extolling the virtues of private schools, immigration reform and the incarceration of parents.)
Yes, the BCSD's bad numbers threw off the premise of the entire Chronicle story.
Error or no error, California public schools hand out about 300,000 student suspensions each year for drugs or violence. (That's the number of suspensions, not the numbers of suspended students.) Kern County contributes its share -- about 12,000 suspensions per year.
As the Chronicle noted, more than a third of the schools across the state had drug/violence-suspension rates of at least 5 percent, a figure some experts consider the cutoff point between unavoidable and problematic. Anything higher than 5 percent, they say, suggests trouble.
With more than 36,000 students and 4,136 drug/violence suspensions in 2006-07, the Kern High School District had an 11 percent rate. The Panama Buena-Vista Union School District's rate was 12 percent; the BCSD's around 8.5 percent.
But it's hard to pin down just what those numbers mean. Do Kern County schools truly have bigger disciplinary problems than schools in other parts of the state? Maybe Kern just has school officials with less tolerance for dubious behavior. Or is something else at work?
Alan Paradise, the KHSD's director of pupil personnel, isn't sure what the numbers mean, either.
"You'd have a hard time drawing conclusions about security issues just looking at the number of suspensions," he said. "There's a natural ebb and flow to all of this, but we've been pretty consistent in the way we address student behavior in the district."
If we accept the idea that administrators across the state approach the drug and violence problem with approximately the same amount of attention, however, we have to ask ourselves: Are county educators doing everything they can to make schools safe? It can't hurt to ask -- and to see what districts with lower suspension rates are doing about it.