Suspending Education: Resistance to Desegregation and School Suspension in Delaware

• In Event: "We Are Our History”: Historicizing Current Black-White Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline

Abstract

In 1978, a federal court order compelled New Castle County, Delaware schools to desegregate. They did so by merging 11 school districts – 9 of which were comprised of nearly entirely white student bodies – into a single county-wide school district. Unlike other sites of court-ordered desegregation such as Boston, desegregation in Delaware occurred without protest or violence. Yet it had an enormous impact on school punishment. In this presentation I shed light on how desegregation was the catalyst for growth in out-of-school suspensions in New Castle County schools. I analyze archival and interview data to consider the change in approach to school discipline that occurred alongside of, and largely in response to, school desegregation. Before court-ordered desegregation, suspensions were rare and in-school suspensions did not exist; suspension was not a subject discussed in school reports, in the local news media, or by civil rights organizations advocating for better treatment of Black students in Delaware schools. But immediately after desegregation, it became a central focus of each of these parties, including civil rights organizations, local news media, and school administrators. Official records show an immediate jump in the numbers of suspensions out of school, particularly for Black students. The behaviors of Black students in desegregated schools were misrecognized as disorderly and their presence was interpreted as problematic. Black students were removed from schools because they were unwanted in these previously all-white spaces, preserving educational advantages for white students and replicating a racial hierarchy of access to opportunity despite an apparent civil rights victory. The New Castle County, Delaware case study helps us understand the historical context of exclusionary discipline and its racialized nature by demonstrating how resistance to racial desegregation of schools shaped school punishment and continues to impact schools today.

Author

• Aaron Kupchik, University of Delaware