1.         *393 Out-of-school Suspension to Get Parental Attention

Ideally, if suspensions heightened parental awareness, they would foster a more effective collaborative home/school effort to teach appropriate behavior. Disruptive behavior would decrease improving the learning environment. In reality, to the extent that a child's persistent misbehavior is a signal of weaknesses in parenting or problem in the home environment, there is little reason to believe that removing a child from school to spend more time at home will improve behavior. Certainly, less extreme approaches can get parents to pay attention.

Moreover, the Academy of American Pediatrics' Committee on School Health (2003), which studied the impact of suspensions and expulsions, pointed out the following related issues:

Children with single parents are between two and four times as likely to be suspended or expelled from school as are children with both parents at home, even when controlling for other social and demographic factors .... For students with major home-life stresses, academic suspension in turn provides yet another life stress that, when compounded with what is already occurring in their lives, may predispose them to even higher risks of behavioral problems (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2003).

In addition, poor and single parents may feel that they must leave a child home unsupervised or risk losing their employment. Thus, there seems little reason to accept the claim that exclusion is an effective way to secure the kind of productive parental support that will improve the behavior of those children most likely to be excluded from schools.