Just as theologians and laymen alike have long theorized about a Godless hell, the road to the school-to-prison-pipeline is paved with “good intentions.”
While research shows that the pipeline (SPP), slowly pushes students who face more severe school punishment -- typically Black, brown, low income and students living with disabilities -- out of the community and into the carceral system, Sociologist Aaron Kupchik finds that school agents of the pipeline may be acting unconsciously.
“A big part of it is racial hostility,” the author of The Real School Safety Problem told Blavity. “I’m not accusing that of being explicitly on the mind of disciplinarians today, but it helped create decades of patterns of how schools respond. Schools that had more cases challenging desegregation, these sites of battle, have higher rates of suspension today, especially of Black students. There is something about the legacy of the resistance to desegregation that so many schools showed after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.”
Indeed, the landmark Brown V. Board of Education ruling would go on to become one of the thousands of defining moments in American society, with the 1954 decision that schools kept racially “separate but equal” were fundamentally unconstitutional. As a result, History reports, the Supreme Court ruled that Black children condemned to segregated schools were “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”
But while Black children gained the right to access the better funded schools of their white peers, the issue of how they would be treated within the variegated schoolhouse walls was left up to educators’ discretion. And the consequences continue to pelt Black communities.
Researchers at the Center for Civil Rights Remedies and the Research-to-Practice Collaborative, National Conference on Race and Gender Disparities in Discipline found that students in Florida students who were suspended in the ninth grade -- disproportionately Black, low income and disabled children -- were less likely to graduate on time and pursue higher education and more likely to drop out, deepening the academic achievement gap between white and non white students. When the reality that Black students also receive longer suspension sentences, the sociological picture grows especially bleak.
The 2019 arrest of then-six-year-old Kaia Rolle captures the stranger-than-fiction results of persisting anti Black attitudes in U.S. schools. The former first grader, a local CBS station reported, was charged with battery after reportedly kicking school staff, and taken to a Florida juvenile detention center. In line with the demographics that researchers find are funneled into the SPP, CBS reported that the student was living with disabilities -- Rolle's grandmother told officers she suffered from sleep apnea and a sleep disorder. Neither her age nor her medical history deterred school authorities from seeing that the young child be handcuffed and taken to jail for her tantrum-- where, according to CBS, her grandmother learned that the child was fingerprinted and mug shot.
Though the bizarre arrest of tiny Kaia Rolle may seem like an outlier in its severity, interdisciplinary leadership educator Marlon Cummings found similar extremes reflected in his studies of how rural schools and communities grapple with demographic shifts -- and how the failure to do so manifests in disproportionate school punishment.
“In the districts that have high populations of Black and Brown students, you obviously see the high rates of discipline, but what's interesting is even where students of color only make up 10 to 30, or an even lower percentage of the student population, they still tend to outpace other racial groups. Typically in Black boys, but in girls as well, detention, suspension, and expulsion rates are higher than the district average. In some cases, it’s so clear to see that you will have a school of 3,000 kids, of which 300 are Black, and when you look at the kids getting suspensions, 80% of them are Black kids. Like, how is that possible?”
As Cummings raises a pressing question, Kupchik answers another: just how do lower graduation and employment rates correlate with a higher likelihood of incarceration for suspended students of color?
“Several studies have found that students who get suspended are at a greater risk for all sorts of bad outcomes. That includes failure in school, which makes sense -- it also means these students are at greater risk of not graduating. Without a high school diploma, it's certainly much harder to get a job. You're kind of set up for financial instability,” the University of Delaware professor said. “You become known as a troublemaker, you're also at greater risk of committing misbehaviors down the road, so not only are people watching you more closely, you’re more likely to be committing negative behaviors. All of these together lead to greater problems down the road.”
Indeed, the evolution from childhood to incarceration often overlaps for children whom America’s educators deem less than worthy. And the transition is marked incrementally by the slew of societal consequences that follow the decision to push students of color out of the safe space that schools promise. The message sent to students, Kupchik finds, is that they do not belong in our society -- and, he says, students receive it loud and clear. He found that more than 10 years after facing severe school punishment, students are less likely to be civically engaged in their communities.
“I found that students who are suspended out of school are less likely to vote and volunteer in their community over 10 years later,” Kupchik explained. “My hypothesis is that when you get suspended out of school on a zero tolerance policy, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. These students learn that they have less of a voice in what’s going on around them, they're not being treated as partners in any educational process, they’re being treated as objects that are acted upon in a harsh way. That doesn't set people up for participating in their communities or in civic dialogue.”
While Kupchik and Cummings’ studies focus on public schools, the reality that severe school punishment disproportionately impacts Black children also draws the light towards charters -- institutions which are publicly funded, but unrestrained by the standards that govern conventional public schools, like licensed teachers, or an elected school board. What’s more, many charter school systems are built in low-income, high-minority communities -- the population most impacted by severe school punishments.
The high performing Success Academy charter school in Brooklyn, New York, made national headlines in 2015, as a rumored “Got To Go” list, in which students who were apparently unfit for the school’s time and resources, was identified. The discovery raised questions surrounding what lengths the mostly Black and brown school was willing to go to to protect its high academic standing, the New York Times reported. Nine out of 16 of the students named on the list would end up leaving the school.
Indeed, the issue of pushing children of color out of school is not bound by state lines. Parents of four of the students listed on the Brooklyn school’s “Got To Go” list cited disruptions like being asked to come pick up their students in the middle of the work day as part of their calculation to eventually withdraw their children from Success Academy -- a phenomenon Kupchik also found a thousand miles away.
“I interviewed a whole bunch of parents down in Alabama, whose children had been suspended repeatedly and some had been expelled from schools. These parents, most of whom were low income and worked low wage jobs. They don't get paid time off, and if they miss too much time, they would lose their jobs,” he said.
Kupchik explains that for many parents, a suspension is just the first domino to fall in a series of obstacles thrown up by administrators.
“Getting suspended means your parent has to first come to school to pick you up the day of suspension, then they have to supervise you, or risk that you are unsupervised at home. And then typically, repeated suspensions come with some type of hearing, or meeting with administrative staff, and then finally you have to accompany the student back to school when their suspension is over. All of these events happen -- and they are not scheduled in advance. I’ve talked to several parents who lost jobs because of having to pick kids up, and these are families who can't afford to lose jobs.”
Naturally, schools observing “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” policies stand at the center of the pipeline, as they penalize students for minor infractions, and create an atmosphere in which the student is routinely removed from the classroom.
Kupchik remembers the story of one Alabama mother faced with the impossible choice of leaving her dying father's bedside, her disabled child without care, or going to save her teenage son from juvenile detention -- the school said she only had an hour and a half to make her choice. The infraction, Kupchik says, was minor -- a dress code violation or talking back to a teacher.
But schools with the central aim of rigid discipline are not marketed for all of America’s students. The Century Foundation found that schools dolling out severe punishments often serve the low income students of color whom leadership believe need “an attitude adjustment.”
“Recently, there has been a trend toward “No-Excuses” pedagogy in an attempt to better educate low-income students,” The Century wrote. “This trend is—either consciously or implicitly—predicated on the notion that low-income students inherently need a different style of teaching to succeed.”
Regardless of racist intent -- suspensions don’t work. While Kupchik finds that schools with higher suspension rates also carry lower test scores than those with lower rates, Cummings explains that, like a mirror that never flatters nor demeans, children’s misbehavior is often a mere reflection of what’s been poured into them.
“Kids can see through bullsh**t,” Cummings said. “They know when you really care about them, it looks like: ‘I’m expecting more from you, you can do this, I believe in you.’ You can go to the most hood or rural school and tell kids that they can be anything, give them opportunities, expose them to stuff, and those kids are successful, it doesn't matter where they come from. Whether it’s charter, public, suburban, it doesn’t matter -- the pipeline is out in the culture. If the kid is getting certain messages, they are going to go out and seek approval in other ways. And sometimes those ways are not always healthy -- they can lead to drugs, alcohol, or doing things that don't align with the best version of themselves. The person who runs a criminal enterprise could be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It all depends on the direction they were given.”
The Governor's State University professor adds that suspensions only serve to further isolate children while failing to redirect them towards more positive behavior.
“Suspensions don’t do the work to repair the harm that’s done, it’s just ‘We’re going to send that kid away.’ I’ve had administrators tell me ‘I'm gone have three days of peace with that kid out.’ Instead, we should approach students from a very culturally responsive lens," Cummings told Blavity. "Understanding what's going on in their life, what may have triggered the misbehavior. And then using restorative justice is always a more positive way to go because the kid has to own up to what they did, you allow the person who is being victimized to tell their role in it, you have this opportunity to talk about what they could do differently, to learn to live in the same space together with someone who may feel wronged. When you suspend them, you’re just getting rid of them. These are kids. The roughest and toughest are still kids. When you talk to them, kids will let you know what’s going on with them. When you suspend them, you’re not solving a problem.”
