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.

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........

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