Giving Compass' Take:

• Alex Zimmerman explains how New York City's suspension centers are failing students and undermining efforts to reduce suspensions. 

• How can funders help schools better serve their students? 

• Learn how much suspensions hurt students. 

Marcus Alston thought he was fiddling with a bottle of his friend’s perfume when he unleashed pepper spray on the floor of his high school Spanish class.

It didn’t seem serious to Alston, now a junior at Manhattan’s Pace High School, and he admitted responsibility. But officials said in a letter that Alston “was in possession of a dangerous chemical,” classified as a weapon in the discipline code.

The incident last school year resulted in a month-long suspension in one of the city’s 34 suspension centers, where students are sent for suspensions longer than five days.

To Alston, it felt like jail. “Learning in that place is not a thing because of the chaos happening,” he said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has made reducing suspensions a pillar of his education agenda, and overall suspension rates have plummeted since he took office. Yet lengthier out-of-school suspensions, disproportionately issued to students of color, have fallen much less sharply.

And while advocates have called attention to lengthy punishments, what happens inside the suspension centers themselves is largely shielded from the public and faces little scrutiny. Known as “Alternate Learning Centers,” they are not included in the city’s school quality reports, meaning there is virtually no public information about their safety, attendance, or students’ performance.

According to more than a dozen interviews with students, center staff, and advocates, the suspension centers are dull at best and chaotic at worst, sometimes derailing students academically and failing to address the problems that landed them out-of-school suspensions in the first place. Academic expectations are often low; in some cases, students say they spent their days filling out worksheets that have little to do with the coursework from their original schools, watched movies, or slept. Lots of students don’t show up at all.

Read the full article about NYC’s suspension centers by Alex Zimmerman at Chalkbeat.