More Education. Less Suspension. A Call to Action to Stop the Pushout Crisis in South Los Angeles

Parent-Led Human Rights Documentation That Exposed the Pushout Crisis Hidden Behind LAUSD’s Dropout Numbers

What This Report Is and Why It Matters

In June 2006, CADRE released More Education. Less Suspension. a parent-led human rights documentation report that changed the conversation about why so many South LA students were leaving school or getting suspended. While school officials and the media described the crisis as a dropout problem, CADRE parents knew something different was happening. Students were not dropping out. They were being pushed out.

Over six months in early 2006, CADRE organizers, parent leaders, and volunteers went door to door in South LA neighborhoods, specifically within LAUSD’s Local District 7, to document the suspension experiences of families firsthand. They interviewed nearly 50 parents and students whose children had been suspended, and surveyed close to 120 young adults who had left regular high school without graduating. The findings were groundbreaking.

CADRE found that suspensions were being used as the first intervention of choice, not a last resort. Students were losing critical learning time through repeated removals: from classrooms, from schools, and through involuntary opportunity transfers that circumvented due process. Parents were often not informed of these actions, let alone included in decisions about their children’s discipline. These cascading exclusions were not accidents. They were the predictable result of a system that had no proactive, child-centered discipline plan and that placed the burden of responsibility entirely on students and families.

Using an international human rights framework, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CADRE argued that what was happening in South LA schools amounted to systematic violations of children’s right to education. The data showed this crisis fell hardest on Black and Latino students, whose suspension rates far outpaced their share of LAUSD enrollment.

This report matters because it was the document that launched CADRE’s long-term campaign to reform school discipline in LAUSD. It is the foundation on which the Discipline Foundation Policy, the shadow reports, and years of advocacy were built. It remains a powerful model of how parent-led research can expose the truth that official data hides and how community documentation can drive real policy change.

Key Highlights

• Documents the suspension experiences of nearly 50 South LA families through door-to-door human rights canvassing
• Surveys approximately 120 young adults who left regular high school without a diploma, finding evidence of systematic pushout
• Exposes how suspensions, classroom removals, and involuntary opportunity transfers combined to dismantle students’ educational access
• Shows that 92% of all LAUSD suspensions in 2005-06 were of African American and Latino students
• Demonstrates that suspension rates for Black students were nearly 2.5 times greater than their enrollment share in the district
• Applies an international human rights framework to document violations of students’ right to education
• Identifies the absence of a proactive, child-centered discipline plan as the root of the pushout crisis
• Presents a Call to Action that directly led to the adoption of LAUSD’s Discipline Foundation Policy in 2007

Who This Resource Is For

• Parents and caregivers whose children have been suspended or involuntarily transferred from LAUSD schools
• South LA families seeking to understand the history of pushout and discipline reform in their schools
• Parent organizers and advocates building campaigns against punitive school discipline
• Educators and policymakers who want to understand what the community knew before official reform began
• Researchers and students studying school pushout, zero tolerance, and human rights-based approaches to education advocacy

Publication Details

Title: More Education. Less Suspension. A Call to Action to Stop the Pushout Crisis in South Los Angeles, Human Rights Documentation in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Local District 7
Author: Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE)
Year: June 2006

This report is part of CADRE’s broader work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, outlined in our Theory of Change.