Unrecorded Discipline Practices Undermine San Francisco Public Schools
A report by Coleman Advocates suggests that 'silent suspensions' are depriving students of instructional time and obscuring racial disparities in the district.
San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) officials have acknowledged that informal disciplinary practices, often referred to as "silent suspensions," are illegal, yet the district remains unable to determine the frequency of these occurrences. According to reporting by The San Francisco Standard, these off-the-books removals involve sending students home early, placing them in hallways or offices, or pulling them from classrooms without official documentation.
The Impact of Unrecorded Instructional Loss
Research conducted by the nonprofit Coleman Advocates indicates that the scale of unrecorded discipline may be substantial. The organization's report highlighted a single school containing approximately 300 students that recorded 3,639 office referrals in one year, which translated to an estimated 1,800 hours of lost classroom time. While the nonprofit did not name the specific school, it stated that the goal of the study was to illustrate the cumulative effect of undocumented discipline rather than to assign blame to educators.
Brandie Bowen-Bremond, the policy director for Coleman Advocates, noted that the lack of clear data prevents the district from identifying the depth of the issue or developing effective solutions. She further argued that without tracking these removals, the district cannot determine how much instruction is being lost, how frequently these incidents occur, or what specific supports are being triggered as a result. This lack of information also hinders the ability to identify which schools require additional resources, such as behavior specialists or counselors.
The Coleman report also connected these lost instructional hours to significant achievement gaps within the district. Data from the California Department of Education for the 2024-25 school year showed that more than 80% of Black students did not meet state standards in English, and roughly 89% did not meet standards in math. While the report clarified that student removals alone do not account for these disparities, it suggested that the district cannot close achievement gaps if the students who are already struggling are the ones most frequently removed from the classroom.
Policy Implementation and Reporting Failures
The movement toward reducing exclusionary discipline began as a response to research linking suspensions to higher dropout rates, poor academic performance, and potential incarceration. In 2014, California implemented a ban on suspending students in kindergarten through third grade for willful defiance, a category that includes disrupting activities or disobeying staff. SFUSD expanded on this by enacting its Safe and Supportive Schools resolution, which prohibited such suspensions across all grade levels and mandated the use of restorative practices and public reporting of discipline data.
While SFUSD's official suspension rates have historically remained between one-third and three-fifths of the California state average, racial disparities persist. District data from the 2025-26 school year indicated that approximately 8% of Black students were suspended, compared to 2% of the total student population. However, advocates argue these figures do not reflect the full scope of discipline occurring outside of official records.
Despite district policies requiring detailed reporting—including office referrals, instructional days lost, and the use of alternatives to suspension—the district has not met these requirements for several years. Analysis shows that the SFUSD public dashboard only provides a single annual suspension rate, failing to provide the granular data required by its own policy. Malik Washington, who reported on these findings for the Davis Vanguard, suggested that the absence of this data functions as a form of censorship by preventing transparency.
In response to a public records request regarding referral, removal, and transfer data, SFUSD has provided only policy documents thus far, though the district stated it intends to release the remaining records next month. Bowen-Bremond observed that the district frequently establishes high-quality policies but fails to implement them effectively.
Systemic Resource Shortages and Early Childhood Education
The issue of informal discipline extends to the earliest stages of education. Lily Steyer, a doctoral student at Stanford and director of child policy at the Clinton Foundation, studied the Shoestrings program, which aimed to reduce racial disparities in discipline among SFUSD's youngest learners. Although official suspension numbers for these students appeared very low, interviews with 63 parents, educators, and specialists revealed that every teacher interviewed was aware of at least one informal practice used to remove children from class.
Steyer noted that while short periods in a "calm-down corner" can assist with emotional regulation, using such spaces for extended periods can effectively become a form of exclusion. She suggested that these practices are not necessarily the result of individual teacher misconduct but are instead a systemic failure. For example, she pointed to the difficulty SFUSD faces in hiring classroom aides, noting that a transitional kindergarten teacher might manage 20 or more students alone. While teachers can theoretically request a district behavior coach, Steyer stated that with only two coaches available for all 36 preschool sites, help is often unavailable.
Steyer and her coauthors, including Crystal Hawkins, the director of the Shoestrings program, recommended that schools begin tracking and reporting these informal removals to better understand the impact on students.
Source: The San Francisco Standard. Prepared with AI assistance from the linked reporting.
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