Why School Suspensions Do More Harm Than Good

Millions of children are suspended from public schools each year. Often, overworked and under-supported teachers, frustrated by students who disturb class or disrespect them, refer them to administrators who then send them home for a few days. Certainly, teachers need to be able to do their jobs without student disruption, so it is important for schools to impose discipline that lets them do so. But as it turns out, suspending children out of school is, in most cases, a bad idea. It fails to help schools, it hurts students, and it is a practice with links to historic racial oppression. 

For one thing, suspending a child out of school only makes their behavior worse. Most students act up in class for personal reasons—perhaps they do not understand course material or perhaps they are dealing with a difficult issue at home. Therefore, it makes little sense to send them home, where they might be unsupervised and will fall further behind in their schoolwork. As a result, they tend to behave worse when they return. School suspensions also fail to help the rest of the students in the class or school, since it creates a negative dynamic between teachers and students. Students who are suspended are less likely to graduate, have worse employment potential, are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, and are even less likely to vote or volunteer in their communities in the future. 

The families of children who are suspended face burdens as well. Overall, out-of-school suspensions have great costs. And because most are in response to minor disruptions (talking back to teachers, refusing to do schoolwork, dress code violations, etc.), not actual violence, they are not necessary for school safety. What’s more, school punishment echoes—and exacerbates—historic racial injustice.

Origins of school suspensions 

So why is out-of-school suspension the default disciplinary response in many schools across the U.S.? I asked this question in my recent book, Suspended Education. To answer it, I looked back to the time when suspensions first came into favor, in the 1960s and 70s. I looked into how and why the practice began, and how it relates to today’s school punishment practices. What I found is that the common use of school suspensions followed the massive resistance to school desegregation in the years after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Out-of-school suspensions were, initially, a method to resist desegregation and maintain a racial hierarchy in access to education.

Southern states’ resistance to desegregation has been well documented. It was illustrated by incidents like George Wallace’s stand at the school house door, crowds of white protesters yelling at and spitting on the Little Rock Nine, or the Southern Manifesto, a 1956 document written by nearly the entire congressional delegation from Southern states protesting the Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Observers of desegregation in the 1970s documented how school suspensions—a practice that in prior years was rarely used, if ever, in most schools—became common after desegregation in the South, but only for Black students.

It was less obvious, but schools in the North resisted desegregation in their own ways, too. They were quicker than Southern schools to change laws that called for segregated schools, but in some ways they were slower to change actual practice. Often referred to as de facto segregation, schools in the North were typically segregated, but not by law. Instead, it was based on where people lived. Schools are neighborhood institutions, and the stark residential segregation at the time resulted in Black and white students living in different neighborhoods and attending different schools. Biased implementation of school choice laws, decisions to build new schools in segregated neighborhoods, and other school board decisions didn’t help. When Northern schools finally desegregated, sometimes as the result of court-ordered busing plans, they too responded to the influx of Black students by suspending many of them out of school for minor, subjectively-perceived, often invented misbehaviors. 

Boston, Massachusetts offers a clear illustration of how school discipline changed in response to desegregation. Massachusetts was the first state to ban school segregation by law, in 1855. Yet in the early 1970s, Boston schools were still clearly segregated. Then in 1974, Judge Arthur Garrity ruled that Boston schools must desegregate immediately. The court approved desegregation plan was fiercely resisted by the Boston School Committee and the many parents who took to the streets in, sometimes violent, protest. It required students to be bused between neighborhoods so that Black and white students attended schools together. Immediately after it went into effect, suspensions out of school changed from an uncommon practice that received very little attention to a common practice that resulted in protest and court challenges.

In the year before desegregation, Black students were suspended at a rate of 26.4 suspensions per every 100 students. Immediately after desegregation went into effect, the rate skyrocketed to 64.6 suspensions per 100 students. For an even clearer illustration, we can compare Roxbury High School to South Boston High School. Roxbury and South Boston neighbored one another, though Roxbury was a relatively low-income, nearly entirely Black community, whereas South Boston was a community of mostly white, working-class Irish Catholics. Students from Roxbury were chosen at random (based on what block they lived on) to go to South Boston High School in 1974, which allows us to compare their experiences to those of their neighbors who stayed at Roxbury High School. For Black students who stayed at Roxbury High, the suspension rate was 8 per 100, but for the Black students from the same neighborhood who were randomly chosen to go to South Boston High, the suspension rate in 1974 was a startling 215.1 suspensions per 100 students.

In the months after desegregation, the plaintiffs in the court case that had sought desegregation in Boston, Morgan v Hennigan, came back to court. But this time it was about the use of suspensions for Black students. School discipline was neither part of the plaintiffs' concerns before desegregation nor a part of the judge’s orders in the desegregation ruling, but it was the central issue that brought them back to court. As they demonstrated, Boston schools’ response to the arrival of Black students in previously all white schools was to suspend large numbers of them. Black students who submitted affidavits to the court described being suspended for actions such as: making a phone call at the school pay phone; failing to identify oneself to a teacher who did not ask for identification; watching a friend fight back against students who used racist slurs; and being attacked themselves—without fighting back—by groups of white students.

Educators noted the problem as well. As Albert Holland, the first Black administrator to work at South Boston High told me “Those initial years at South Boston High School, I think that we were just doing wholesale suspensions, and for the most part Black students were victims.”

Ronald R. Edmonds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the Citywide Coordinating Council in Boston at that time, stated that “It is my professional opinion that the root cause of such [racial] disparities [in suspension rates] is the disbelief in, and disrespect for, the findings of Judge Garrity as to the history of racial discrimination in the Boston public schools…”              

Boston is not alone in this experience. In my research I found nearly the same phenomenon when I studied what happened in New Castle County, Delaware. There, too, resistance to a court-ordered desegregation plan resulted in immediate spikes in suspensions of Black students.

Contemporary implications

This history is hardly a matter of past injustice. Analyzing data from across the country, I found that schools in districts that showed greater resistance to desegregation between 1952 and 2002 suspend more Black students today—even after taking into account other potential causes of suspension rates, including student behaviors. Schools might have first started suspending students as a way to remove Black students who were seen as unwanted, but it became part of what schools do. Over time, it eclipsed other options, so that teachers or school administrators had few other options but to suspend students who they wanted to discipline.

The history of school suspensions teaches us that the practice began as a way to preserve educational opportunities for white students and maintain a racial hierarchy in education. Suspending students out of school makes little sense as a pedagogical or behavioral management strategy—it really only makes sense if we understand its initial goal of removing unwanted Black students from formerly all-white schools. While that may not be the goal of contemporary educators, their options and the taken-for-granted responses to student behavior that they learn were shaped by this initial goal.

Thankfully, we know of better ways to respond to disruptive students. It is important to hold students accountable for misbehavior, but in a way that teaches them and supports their growth, not that holds them back. This is what functional families do—parents hold children accountable with consequences, such as loss of privileges, but in a way that helps the child learn to do better and is rooted in care. Some schools use practices like Restorative Justice or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports in order to do this. Ironically , I found that child advocates in the 1970s who were concerned about the growing threat of school suspensions called for schools to support disruptive students in inclusive and restorative ways. In other words, strategies that are currently seen as novel and progressive are hardly new, since they were in use before being replaced by the rise of school suspensions. 

Understanding why we suspend students out of school rather than using more sensible strategies, which would help students and teachers alike, doesn’t just teach us about school punishment. It also illustrates the role of historic racial inequality in shaping present day practice. As others have shown before, we find the same overall pattern whereby historic racial oppression shapes contemporary inequality in banking, housing, employment, education and other areas of life.

Despite progress we have made toward racial equity in the past 50 years, the wealth and opportunity gaps between racial groups are a direct result of past racial oppression. Any dismissal of the past as irrelevant to the present is misguided at best. This doesn’t mean we should blame individuals who are part of the system today, such as teachers who deserve our respect and appreciation. But it is vital that we recognize how we got where we are if we want to fix today’s problems. Recognition of the historic base of current racial inequality shouldn’t make us feel bad, but it should compel us to fix practices rooted in racism.