Abstract
As a scholar who studies racial inequalities in school discipline, I have spent a lot of time exploring the causes and consequences of contemporary racial discipline disparities. Prior studies, including my own, suggest that educators’ racial biases and racialized practices perpetuate the racial discipline disparities we see today. Yet I have spent less time considering the historical foundations of racialized discipline and punishment. From countless studies, it is clear that school suspension is ineffective and harmful. For example, school suspensions harm both suspended and non-suspended students. And, of course, school suspension is a key mechanism that perpetuates Black-White inequalities in educational experiences and outcomes. So, the question then becomes, why do we continue to see the widespread use of school suspension today?
Aaron Kupchik’s Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice offers a powerful answer: you cannot make sense of suspensions unless you look back at how and why they took root. His basic argument is that school suspension did not emerge as a primary response to student behavior until Black students, as a part of school desegregation efforts, began to enroll in formerly all-White public schools. School suspensions were a legal way for formerly all-White schools to exclude Black students that were seen as problems and were “unwanted,” reproducing racial educational advantage and disadvantage. In this way, Suspended Education connects racist ideologies to racist structures, key concepts within theories of structural racism. It’s a grim but important point: school punishment, as we know it today, is not a neutral response to misbehavior but a legacy of anti-Black ideologies, structures, and racial threat.
This is an important point, as the book argues that it was not necessarily that White educators intentionally tried to oppress Black students by suspending them. Instead, the book makes a more nuanced argument. It argues that it was the convergence of various racial factors including racialized perceptions of Black students, their behaviors, and a sense of racial threat, rather than a conspiratorial plan by White educators. Colorblind ideology was also evident as White educators and local policymakers often denied the role of race in their practice. The common refrain from White educators and school boards was that suspensions had nothing to do with race—Black students, they claimed, simply misbehaved more. But Kupchik’s evidence tells a different story, one that leaves little room for such “colorblind” justifications.
That brings me to the data. The data used in Suspended Education are quite impressive and exhaustive. They combine statistics, interviews, and archival analyses, drawing up many sources such as national data, school reports, reports from child advocacy groups, student and parent voices, and news media. The triangulation of these data points makes a convincing case for the role of school desegregation in the emergence of school suspension as a central means of student discipline. Before desegregation, suspensions were rare; schools typically worked with students through dialogue, mediation, or other forms of conflict resolution. After desegregation there was a sharp spike in suspensions, especially in districts under court orders to desegregate and in schools that were previously all-White. Black students bore the brunt of these suspensions.
One of the most eye-opening statistics comes from two Boston high schools: Roxbury High, which was all-Black before desegregation, and South Boston High, which was all-White. After desegregation, Roxbury recorded 8 suspensions per 100 students. South Boston? A staggering 215 suspensions per 100 students. The contrast could not be clearer—suspension became a weapon of White resistance, wielded most aggressively in schools that had once been all-White.
Kupchik’s use of case studies is equally compelling. By comparing Delaware, a “border South” state, with Massachusetts, a northern state, he dismantles the familiar myth that racism in schooling was only a southern problem. In both New Castle, Delaware, and Boston, Massachusetts, suspensions were rare before desegregation. Afterward, both places saw dramatic increases in suspensions, fueled by White resistance and resentment. But the form of that resistance varied. In Boston, White opposition was explosive and often violent—think of the infamous “Soiling of Old Glory” photo of 1976, where a White teenager attacks a Black lawyer with the American flag. In Delaware, resistance was less explosive but no less effective at reestablishing racial boundaries inside schools. By setting these cases side by side, Kupchik shows how racism adapts to different local contexts while producing eerily similar outcomes.
The book is not perfect, of course. At times I wanted to hear more about students’ own resistance to these policies. The voices of young people, particularly Black students themselves, could have added another dimension to the story. I also found myself wondering how gender and class layered onto these racial patterns. For example, were Black boys and girls differentially targeted in newly desegregated schools? There are brief references to potential differences, but I wanted to see more. Future research could dig into these questions, examining how stereotypes of Black masculinity and Black femininity shaped students’ discipline experiences in ways that were both similar and distinct. The book addresses these limitations in the conclusion, so these are less criticisms than invitations for further research.
Perhaps most chilling is how Suspended Education connects history to the present. The book demonstrates that school districts once forced to integrate through lawsuits and federal mandates are the very ones that today suspend students at higher rates, especially Black students. Kupchik forces us to see how the struggle over desegregation did not just play out in courtrooms or on the steps of schools; it seeped into everyday disciplinary practices that continue to shape classrooms. That legacy is alive today every time a Black child is pushed out of class for a minor infraction. Over time, suspensions have become so baked into school culture that we barely notice their racialized roots. They are seen as “just how schools handle discipline,” even though the evidence of harm is overwhelming.
That is what makes this book so important. It reframes school suspension not as a technical fix for misbehavior but as part of the long arc of racial injustice. Suspended Education forces us to see how the fight over desegregation shaped the everyday practices of schooling, in ways that still haunt classrooms today. The book insists that if we want to reduce racial inequality in education, we cannot just tinker with school policy. We must commit to eradicating the ideological and structural nature of racism in society. It is a sobering story, but one we need if we are serious about dismantling racial injustice in education and beyond.