As California public schools have overhauled their suspension policies in recent years, a new study out Monday quantifies the effects.

Statewide, there were 709,580 suspensions in the 2011-2012 academic year. Two years later that number declined nearly a third, to 503,101. Los Angeles Unified School District’s suspensions dropped by nearly two-thirds.

African-American students saw the biggest suspension drop of any ethnic or racial group. The group dropped from 33 suspensions per 100 students in the 2011-2012 academic year to 25.6 per 100 students in 2013-2014.

This is the first study to link a drop in suspensions and an uptick in performance. How is that correlation calculated?

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Guests:

Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA and author of the study, Closing the School Discipline Gap in California: Signs of Progress. He is a former elementary teacher in the East Coast

Erin Sopapunta, an 11th and 12th grade teacher at Francis Polytechnic Senior High in Sun Valley. She’s been teaching at the school since 2006