Every single student deserves an equal opportunity for growth and achievement

(Commit Partnership) – In 2018, the Dallas Independent School District began charting a course toward restorative justice on all its campuses. Now, six years and several earthshaking events later, the data strongly suggest this was the right course for students.Throughout my career as an educator, administrator, school board member and now nonprofit leader, my work has been driven by data. Numbers show much more than just academic achievement; they often reveal deep disparities and shortcomings of education policies.Related Stories During the 2013-2014 school year, more than 36,500 Texas students in kindergarten through second grade received out-of-school suspensions. More than 2,500 out-of-school suspensions went to pre-K students.These practices disproportionately affected Black students. During that same school year, Black students accounted for 42% of all pre-K through fifth grade out-of-school suspensions, despite making up only 13% of the elementary school population in Texas. Loss of instructional time leads to gaps in student outcomes that only grow as patterns repeat through the years, leading to disparities in workforce success and ultimately incarceration rates.This school-to-prison pipeline is not only unjust, it is unsustainable. More than 38% of the U.S. incarcerated population is Black, a rate almost three times their share of the population, at...