10 years after Ferguson, black students are still more likely to be expelled from schools

Before he was suspended, Zaire Byrd was thriving. He acted at school plays, played on the football team, and worked out with other athletes. He had never been suspended before—he had never even been arrested.

But when Byrd got right into a fight after school sooner or later, none of that seemed to matter to administrators. Byrd said he was defending himself and two friends when three other students threatened to rob them. Administrators at Tri-Cities High School in Georgia called the fight a “gang fight”—an automatic 10-day suspension. After a disciplinary hearing, they sent him to an alternate school.

This experience almost ruined his education.

“The last four years have been really big for me, from online learning to being suspended,” said Byrd, who began highschool remotely through the pandemic. “I could have learned more, but between all that and changing schools, it was tough.”

In Georgia, black students like Byrd make up just over a 3rd of the population. But they make up nearly all of students who receive punishments that take them out of sophistication, including suspension, expulsion and transfer to an alternate school.

These disparities in Georgia and across the country became the goal of a newly energized reform movement a decade ago, spurred by the identical racial reckoning that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. For many advocates, students and educators, pursuing racial justice meant addressing disparate outcomes for black youth that begin within the classroom, often through harsh discipline and underinvestment in low-income schools.

There has been some progress in lowering suspension rates for black students previously decade. But stark disparities persist, according to a review of discipline data in key states by The Associated Press.

In Missouri, for instance, an AP evaluation found that black students served 46% of all suspension days within the 2013-14 school yr — the yr Michael Brown was shot and killed by police within the state days after his highschool graduation. Nine years later, that percentage dropped to 36%, according to state data obtained through a public records request. Both numbers far exceed the share of black students in the coed population, which is about 15%.

In California, the suspension rate for black students dropped from 13 percent in 2013 to 9 percent a decade later — still thrice the suspension rate for white students.

Gradual progress, but advocates say prejudice stays

The national counting on race has elevated the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” — the notion that being kicked out of faculty or dropping out increases the likelihood of being arrested and imprisoned years later. School systems have made incremental progress in reducing suspensions and expulsions, but advocates say underlying biases and structures remain in place.

Consequence: More and more black children are being expelled from schools.

“This obviously fuels the school-to-prison pipeline,” said Terry Landry Jr., Louisiana policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re not in school, what are you doing?”

Students who are suspended, expelled, or otherwise removed from class are more likely to be suspended again. They change into more distant from their classmates and are more likely to change into disengaged from school. They also lose time learning and are likely to have lower academic outcomes, including grades and graduation rates.

Still, some schools and policymakers have doubled down on exclusionary discipline because the pandemic. In Missouri, students lost nearly 780,000 days of instruction due to in- or out-of-school suspensions in 2023, the best number in a decade.

In Louisiana, black students are twice as likely to be suspended as white students and receive longer suspensions for a similar infractions, according to a 2017 study by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. But a brand new law takes effect this yr that recommends expelling any highschool or middle school student who’s suspended thrice in a single school yr.

Teachers and fogeys try to ensure children attend school

Federal guidelines for addressing racial disparities at school discipline were first issued by President Barack Obama’s administration in 2014. Federal officials urged schools not to suspend, expel or refer students to law enforcement except as a final resort, and encouraged restorative justice practices that didn’t force students out of the classroom. Those policies were rolled back by President Donald Trump’s administration, but federal and state civil rights laws still mandate the gathering of discipline data.

In Minnesota, the expulsion and suspension rate for black students dropped from 40% in 2018 to 32% 4 years later — still nearly thrice higher than the speed of black students in the general population.

The disciplinary gap within the state was so glaring that in 2017, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights ordered dozens of districts and charter schools to enter into legal settlements over disciplinary practices, particularly for Black and Native American students. In those districts, the department found, nearly 80% of disciplinary consequences issued for subjective reasons reminiscent of “disruptive behavior” were for students of color. School buildings were closed for many of the fiscal yr due to the pandemic, so it’s hard to tell whether schools have made progress since then.

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Khulia Pringle, an education advocate in St. Paul, said her daughter was repeatedly suspended. The harsh discipline led her down a improper path. At one point, Pringle said, her daughter wanted to drop out of faculty.

Pringle, then a history and social studies teacher herself, left her job to change into a baby advocate, hoping to offer one-on-one support to families experiencing harsh school discipline.

“That’s when I really started to notice that it wasn’t just me. Every black parent I worked with called me about suspensions,” she said.

Education reform quickly emerged as a goal of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, when the Vision for Black Lives platform was finalized, it included a call for an education system that recognized students’ cultural identities, supported their mental and physical health, and didn’t subject them to unreasonable searches, seizures, and arrests in schools.

“We need to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, and that starts in schools,” said Monifa Bandele, a political leader with the Movement for Black Lives. “The data shows that with every expulsion or suspension, students are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.”

As Linda Morris, an attorney on the American Civil Liberties Union, said, black students are not only punished more harshly, but in addition they receive harsher punishments than their white peers for similar and even the identical behavior.

“Students of color are often not given the same opportunities as their white peers and can even be perceived as having harmful motives,” Morris said.

Attention to these disparities has led to some changes. Many districts have adopted restorative justice practices that aim to address the basis causes of behavior and interpersonal conflicts moderately than simply suspending students. Schools have increased their investment in mental health resources.

And for a time, some districts, including Chicago and Minneapolis, had been working to remove police from schools. Those efforts gained recent momentum in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota by a white police officer.

Schools take tougher approach to discipline after pandemic

Calls for tougher discipline and more police involvement have resurfaced in recent years as schools struggled to cope with misbehavior after months of closure due to the pandemic.

Activists point to a deeper reason for the discipline efforts.

“This response is also, in some ways, a response to the progress that’s been made,” said Katherine Dunn, director of the Opportunity to Learn program on the nonprofit Advancement Project. “It’s a response to organizing. It’s a response to the power that black, brown and other young people have built in their schools.”

After his suspension, Byrd, a Georgia student, was sent to an alternate discipline program. A district spokesman said this system is designed to help students proceed their education and receive social and emotional support during discipline.

Byrd said he waited in line every day to be searched from head to toe before being allowed to enter the constructing, a process the district says is a preventive measure and is run by the corporate that runs the choice school.

“It definitely changed him,” said his mother, DeAndrea Byrd. “He wasn’t excited about school. He wanted to quit. It was incredibly difficult.”

Byrd finished his third yr at an alternate school. He transferred to one other public school for his senior yr, where he felt supported by the administration and was able to graduate. He has since found a job close to home and plans to attend an HBCU in Alabama, where he hopes to study cybersecurity.

As Byrd reflects on the fight and its aftermath, he said he wishes the varsity had treated him like a child who had never been in trouble before, as an alternative of kicking him out.

(*10*) he said. “None of us should be punished for one mistake.”