ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the serious problems of black school dropouts and pushouts and highlights several ongoing efforts designed to abate the early departure of black students from America's public schools. The issues are the increased numbers of students who drop out, and those who are "pushed out" of school through suspensions and expulsions before they obtain a high school diploma. Incidences of suspensions cannot be separated from expulsions and dropout behavior because statistics clearly show that disciplinary problems are strongly related to a student's probability of being expelled and/or subsequent propensity to drop out. Those negative effects prompted school systems to immediately look for alternatives to out-of-school suspensions so that students would neither fall behind academically nor miss school during their suspension period.
