Shining a light on education & government in TennesseeShining a light on education & government in TennesseePer-school discipline rates from Tennessee's annual file: out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, expulsions, alternative placements, and zero-tolerance commitments. Plus race and gender breakdowns to surface the gaps.
The headline is the percent of students who received any disciplinary action over the school year: in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, expulsion, transfer to an alternative school, or commitment under a zero-tolerance policy. The component chips on each card break the composite down. Race and gender breakdowns from TDOE's suppressed file fuel the equity views.
Toggle between "Highest Rate," "Largest Race Gap," and "Lowest Rate", two very different stories live in the same dataset.
Two ways to read this dashboard: the rate tells you which schools discipline the most students; the race-gap tab tells you which schools discipline students of one race significantly more than the overall school rate. Both stories matter. Both are in the data.
Tennessee schools binned by overall % of students receiving any disciplinary action.
Knox County
Knox County
Disciplined at 70.7% vs school avg 64.8%
Tipton County
Metro Nashville Public Schools
Disciplined at 58.1% vs school avg 52.7%
Memphis-Shelby County Schools
Memphis-Shelby County Schools
Memphis-Shelby County Schools
Disciplined at 51.9% vs school avg 45.4%
Memphis-Shelby County Schools
Metro Nashville Public Schools
Metro Nashville Public Schools
Metro Nashville Public Schools
Memphis-Shelby County Schools
Disciplined at 50.6% vs school avg 42.3%
Four pieces of context before drawing conclusions about any one school.
The headline number is the percent of students who received any disciplinary action, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, expulsion, alternative placement, or zero-tolerance commitment. The card stat shows the rate; the chips break it down.
TDOE reports discipline separately by race for groups large enough to avoid suppression. The "race gap" tab and card callouts surface schools where one race is disciplined at a meaningfully higher rate than the school overall.
When a race, gender, or grade subgroup has fewer than 10 students, the discipline cells are marked "Fewer than 10 Students" or "Less than 5%" rather than a numeric value. Suppressed cells render as dashes on this dashboard.
Out-of-school suspension (the SUSP chip) removes students from instruction for days at a time and is the most disruptive disciplinary action a school commonly uses. In-school suspension (ISS) keeps students on campus. Both are reported.
Because the gap between which kids get disciplined and which kids should is one of the most-studied and least-covered equity issues in American public education. The state already publishes this data per school. Putting it in a searchable, comparable format is journalism the data deserves.
For each school, we compare the discipline rate of each race subgroup against the school's overall rate. The card flags subgroups disciplined 5+ percentage points above the school average. A school can have a low overall rate and still show a meaningful gap.
Yes. Every Tennessee public school, including charters, magnets, and alternative schools, appears in the annual TDOE discipline file when their student count is large enough to clear suppression rules.
Not necessarily. A school serving a high-need population may discipline more students even with strong de-escalation practices. But sustained high rates, and especially large race gaps, consistently correlate with worse academic outcomes for the students disciplined, regardless of cause. Read the rate alongside chronic absenteeism, graduation, and grade trends before drawing a conclusion.
Discipline data comes from the Tennessee Department of Education annual school-level discipline file. Race and gender breakdowns come from the same file's race and gender sheets.
Subgroup data is suppressed when a group has fewer than 10 students. The underlying file marks suppressed cells with phrases like Fewer than 10 Students or Less than 5%; this dashboard renders those as dashes. A high overall rate does not by itself mean a school is doing something wrong, pair it with academic outcomes before drawing conclusions.
The Signal covers Tennessee schools and the policies that shape them, weekly.
Subscribe to The SignalDiscipline and chronic absenteeism move together at the school level. Read them as a pair.
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