Dive Brief:

• Around the U.S., as many as 8,000 pre-school age children face punishments in school that include suspensions and expulsion, the Atlantic reports, drawing statistics from a study released in February.

• A 2005 report showed that 3- and 4-year-olds were expelled from pre-k programs "more than three times as often as students in kindergarten through high school," the Atlantic noted, and black children were suspended twice as often as white and Latino children.

• In Washington state, young black students are punished much more than their white counterparts, according to a new state report with data tracking suspension and expulsion rates, along with details including length of punishment and what it was for. In the 2014-15 school year, the Seattle Times reports, 10% of students removed from classrooms were black, though those students made up less than 5% of the total.

Dive Insight:

Though a new state law now mandates that Washington track suspensions and expulsions, the Seattle Times reports doing so has been challenging due to a lack of consistency in defining misbehavior and how to report it.

It's been shown that punishing nonviolent behavioral offenses with harsh measures like suspension feeds a phenomenon called the school-to-prison pipeline, in which minority students are disproportionately ending up in U.S. jails after receiving punitive treatments in school that cause them to disengage and drop out.

Many states, including California, Illinois, and Minnesota, have become invested in preventing such a pipeline. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law a bill "curtailing suspensions and expulsions in the state," while in Minneapolis, the Office of Black Male Student Achievement has partnered with a dozen schools to close the achievement gap between black and non-black students. That approach is based on a model that began in Oakland, CA. California has been widely touted as leading nationwide efforts at discipline reform, backed up by data from a recent survey from UCLA's Civil Rights Project that shows "academic success actually tracks with a reduction in suspensions for students."

The pervasive "discipline gap" between how minority and non-minority children are treated also applies to disabled students, who are "suspended at two to three times the rate of non-disabled students."