Ever Since Little Rock: The History of Disproportionate Discipline in American Education

• In Event: Structural Racism and School Discipline: Replicating the Racialized Hierarchy Through Coercion and Control

Abstract

Racialized disparities in discipline, in particular disproportionality in suspension and expulsion, have been a long-standing fact in American public education. In this presentation, we trace the origins and history of that disparate representation. Although Brown v. Board of Education set the nation’s public schools on a path towards desegregation, the original Brown ruling, and its follow-up a year later, were met with massive resistance that succeeded in delaying the end of segregation by 15 years. The Supreme Court’s mandate of immediate desegregation in 1969 was met with an almost immediate surge of methods of second generation segregation, including dramatic increases in the rate of Black suspension. A robust causal relationship between desegregation and the emergence of the Black-White discipline gap has been consistently documented. These disparities continued beyond the period of initial desegregation and were intensified by the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs and the Clinton Crime Bill of 1994. Since the advent of zero tolerance discipline, and in light of consistent and ubiquitous racialized disparities in school discipline, the over-suspension of Black and Brown students might best be considered to be third generation segregation that continues to make a significant contribution to America’s racialized hierarchy.

Explicit links to the general focus of the session and 2023 theme: Current understanding of the nature of social injustice is informed by awareness of the historical roots of inequity. Although the presence of disciplinary disparities is commonly dated to the first Office for Civil Rights data collection on school suspension in 1973, there has been far less attention paid to the deep history of those disparities. Understanding the link between current practice and the racialized stereotypes and segregationist practices in which disciplinary disparities originated is key in developing effective interventions to dismantle exclusionary and disparate discipline.

Authors

• Russell J. Skiba, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Ashley L. White, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author