As the United States embarks on its first year with an African American President, African American and Latino students in many of our major cities still have less than a sixty percent chance of graduating from high school. The “human cost” of these disparities on the nation as a whole and especially on these particular communities is immense, exacting a particular toll on the career and life prospects of those who do not graduate. Along with disproportionately high dropout rates, schools across the country discipline and exclude African American and Latino students at rates far higher than white students, even in non-urban school districts.
Hidden amongst students who drop-out and are expelled are a third often neglected category of students: those who have been illegally “pushed out” of school. These students were neither properly expelled according to laws and regulations, nor did they voluntarily choose to end their education. Rather, they are students improperly told or encouraged by administrators to leave school for illegitimate reasons, often in violation of the law. Pushouts occur when administrators tell students that they either must or “should” leave school because they are too far behind in credits to graduate, their test scores are too low, or they have missed too much school, when in fact they are legally allowed to stay in school. This “pushout syndrome” is largely driven by administrators pressured by the No Child Left Behind Act and other test-based accountability measures to raise test scores, who exclude low-scoring and “problem” students rather than addressing their educational needs.
While dropouts are themselves a staggering problem, the pushout problem may be even more complex because students are usually pushed “out the back door” and “under the radar of effective accountability.” Thus, this already invidious practice is furthered by its invisibility to the public. Though the educational advocacy group Advocates for Children of New York (AFC) has recently had some success litigating against pushouts, this practice largely goes unnoticed by the public and unchallenged in the courts. The lack of pushout litigation may result largely from difficulty in discovering the problems, and the potential obstacles to proving that students were “pushed out” rather than voluntarily dropping out. This “pushout syndrome” certainly requires policy cures to address accountability measures gone awry, provide additional educational resources for struggling students, and create “more powerful incentives for schools to ‘hold onto’ students through graduation . . . .” Regardless, litigation is needed to address the immediate effects of these devastating practices on “minority youth who are already graduating at rates that are far lower than their white counterparts,” to deter the practice in the future, and hopefully to spur reform.