Success in high school and college is a strong predictor of future employment, financial success, family stability, and health. It’s certainly true that a four-year liberal arts degree is not essential for this – skilled jobs in building trades and technical medical fields, for example, pay well and do not require a four-year college degree. But nearly every job offering middle-class wages requires some post-secondary education, at a community college, technical school or university.

A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA confirms what many of us have long suspected: American middle and high schools are losing a shocking number of instructional days to suspension. Using discipline data collected from almost every U.S. school district, the study found that 28 districts lost more than a year of learning to this draconian discipline practice. And what populations were most affected? You guessed it: Black students and students with disabilities were disproportionately deprived of the opportunity to learn in the name of suspension.

The pandemic numbers continue to be grim, but we must be relentless in our support of student learning. While it is true that COVID-19 is a matter of public safety, so is literacy. If we do not revert the looming dropout time bomb, the public health crisis associated with dropouts will last for generations.  

Schools are facing an avoidable crisis – students dropping out of high school because of toxic policies that lead to a cascading series of failures that will undermine any reason for them to persist in their studies. When students to fail to complete high school, they face a lifetime of unemployment, poverty, increased health care needs, and greater involvement in the criminal justice system. If these students were inside a burning building, we would not convene focus groups, hire consultants, or begin a strategic plan. We would get them out of the burning building. There are only a few weeks left in the fall of 2020 to decide how to respond to this crisis.

This is the first in a series of brief articles about digital equity. Each week, we will provide educators and leaders with an immediately applicable strategy that will help students, teachers, and leaders focus on what matters most.