Teaching empathy may help reduce school suspensions

Schools have long used suspensions to respond to infractions from their students, but these suspensions can often have a long-lasting negative impact on the students who are suspended, harming student achievement and increasing dropouts.

Researchers have also noticed a substantial racial disparity in who is suspended — with African American students often getting suspended at much higher rates than other students for the exact same behavior.

That’s a problem UC Berkeley psychology professor Jason Okonofua and a team of researchers sought to address. They designed a short online exercise — that...