Where can I find the stats for the NON-VIOLENT MISBEHAVIORS were referred to on January 8, 2014 by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, citing California’s data?
“nearly half of the more than 700,000 suspensions statewide in the 2011-12 school year were for, quote, ‘willful defiance’”.
“Nationwide,” he noted, “as many as 95 percent of out-of-school suspensions are for nonviolent misbehavior--like being disruptive, acting disrespectfully, tardiness, profanity, and dress code violations”.
I added the URL above, which is the transcript of the speech you are referencing: Rethinking School Discipline. I was thinking the data would come from the later-mentioned Office of Civil Rights - Data Collection, which turns out to have some cool data resources for entire US (demographics, students with disabilities, etc).
But I think this 700k number comes from the CA Dept. of Education - Expulsion and Suspension site. There you'll find 3 TXT files with data from the last 3 school years. The structure of the files is explained here.
Willful defiance is defined (source)
a broad category of misbehavior that includes minor offenses such as refusing to take a hat off or ignoring teacher requests to stop texting and more severe incidents like swearing at a teacher or storming out of class.
So from the above data, you can construct "willful defiance" suspensions as the "total suspensions" minus the "violent suspensions" in a given year.
