The Woke War Against School Suspension

In recent years, the progressive education establishment has grown increasingly agitated about school suspensions, which they view as racist, discriminatory and even part of the much-hyped “school-to-prison-pipeline” (STPP). These claims are made on vanishingly little evidence. For instance, although Professor Linda Graham and Dr Callula Killingly admit that “rigorous investigations of Australia’s ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ are rare”, they assert that, “We cannot afford more decades of research to confirm a link between the use of exclusionary school discipline and involvement in the criminal justice system.”

Apparently, what respectable Australian researchers do is assume that there is a link between suspensions and incarceration because American researchers claim to have found one.

Moreover, they recommend that we “drastically curtail” the use of suspensions, even before an Australian STPP has been proved to exist! For Professor Anna Sullivan, the anti-discipline hardliner from the University of South Australia, suspensions are odious, less for their links to future incarceration, but more because they violate the Left’s ideological fealty to what Sullivan terms “the doctrine of equity”. Sullivan’s position is highly important because she has the ear of every left-leaning media outlet from The Conversation to ABC News. In June, she was once again the go-to expert for the ABC:

“Children who are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders are more likely to be suspended, and if you have a disability, you are highly likely to be suspended,” Professor Sullivan said. “It’s highly problematic, it’s a form of discrimination and I think most schools are not aware of it.”

This is a good introduction to Sullivan’s hostile attitude towards traditional school discipline. In Sullivan’s telling, suspensions are discriminatory if they affect any identity group at a higher rate than the national average. Since every behavioural intervention ever devised by educators creates discrepant outcomes between different groups, Sullivan finds plenty of statistics to declaim against. Though the ABC focused on the suspension data for Aborigines and the disabled, Sullivan is also convinced that “males” are discriminated against:

For example, 2019 data from NSW shows that “of all short and long suspensions approximately 25% were for Aboriginal students, despite this group representing just 8% of all student enrolments” and approximately “three quarters of all short and long suspensions in 2019 were for males (75.3% and 73.9% respectively)”.

In looking at the UK data, Sullivan really hit her stride, offering a laundry list of groups who are disproportionately suspended:

Research has shown disproportionately higher rates of exclusionary practices are applied to Black Caribbean students, Gypsy/Roma and Traveller pupils, Mixed White and Black Caribbean pupils, boys, as well as those with disabilities and/or behavioural, emotional or social difficulties.

While most people would find it unsurprising that the emotionally disturbed are more likely to get into scraps, this is beside the point for Professor Sullivan. An advocate of equity ideology, she sees any group difference in suspension rates as proof of discrimination. In 2016, Sullivan explicitly argued that school disciplinary procedures should embrace “the discourse of equity”, which she explained:

This discourse positions society as responsible for addressing disparate group outcomes, which are seen as resulting from systemic, institutionalised practices rather than personal, individual failings.

There you have it, in her own words. The truth of the matter is more or less irrelevant because “this discourse” (equity discourse) believes that “disparate group outcomes” are the fault of “systemic, institutionalised practices” rather than individual choices. Put simply, Sullivan will never find anything “fair” except the statistical impossibility of perfect parity between all identity groups. Most people would want to consider the role of personal choices, but this a non-starter with equity ideologues, because woke dogma explicitly rejects classical liberal ideas of the individual and personal responsibility. I would argue that if Group X commits violent acts at double the normal rate, this could fairly result in a much higher rate of suspensions. In contrast, Sullivan would attribute discrepant outcomes to “systemic, institutionalised practices” on principle.

This is playing fast and loose with the serious matter of school discipline. Just as there are no straight lines in nature, there is never exact statistical parity between the members of different identity groups. I do not deny that incidents of discrimination occur in schools, but the proper way to locate them is not to assume that systemic bias exists every time one group is punished at a different rate. In fact, focusing on all discrepancies as proof of discrimination would point to conclusions that few progressives would support, including the notion that “boys”, and even some cohorts of white students, are systemically discriminated against. Though the ABC predictably decided not to mention male over-representation in suspension statistics, Sullivan, beholden to “the doctrine of equity”, has never shied away from it.

In a review of statistics from Victoria, Sullivan mentioned that boys were 400 per cent more likely to be suspended than girls, with only slightly more balanced outcomes in other states. But what are the “systemic, institutionalised practices” which create male over-representation in school suspensions? This is a meaty issue which Sullivan mostly skims over. Indeed, there is little she could say that wouldn’t draw the ire of radical feminists, who see “male privilege” as a truth universally acknowledged, at least by enlightened elites. To know whether boys were indeed being unfairly singled out, I would want to know what percentage of serious misconduct (violent assaults, drug offences and verbal abuse of teachers) was done by boys. But, philosophically speaking, the hands of the equity advocate are tied, because nothing is ever due to individual or personal failings.

Male disadvantage vis-à-vis their female classmates is not the only perverse conclusion supported by the application of equity doctrine to school suspensions data. Regarding California schools, equity doctrine suggests that white students are systemically discriminated against compared to their Asian counterparts.

While this point is never focused on, it emerges in the fine print. Typical is the article, “California’s Black Students Suspended at Far Higher Rates”, from California School News. Like many contemporary education publications, this newspaper is little more than a soapbox for Critical Race Theory ideologues. In the article, a spokesperson for “Black Minds Matter Coalition” reports that the black student suspension rate is “2.6 times higher than the state-wide average and should serve as a clarion call to educators”. Yet later, we find: “Asian (1 per cent overall), Filipino (1.4 per cent overall) and white (3 per cent overall) students were suspended at the lowest rates.”

You have to love the sleight of hand here. White students are put in the lowest category with Asians, even though white students were suspended at three times the rate of Asian students. In reality, this is a bigger difference than the 2.6 times over-representation of black students compared to the state average. Yet one statistic is a “clarion call” and the other is something to be ignored. But if equity doctrine was consistently applied, “systemic practices” in California schools are systemically disadvantaging white students over Asian ones, just as Victorian schools are systemically favouring girls over boys.

In reality, the more researchers go looking for discrepancies like these, the more they will find them. For the zealous equity advocate, the fact that Filipino-American students are 40 per cent more likely to be suspended than the Asian average could be cause enough for a moral panic. Likewise, the fact that Native American boys are 214 per cent more likely to be suspended than Native American girls would be highly problematic. But while such an approach provides grist for the grievance mills of modern academia, it is an impediment to good policy. What policy could teachers possibly develop which would drop the suspension rates for Native American boys, but not girls? Therefore, once discrepant suspension rates become a political issue, education elites are tempted to plump for the only policy change which can possibly deliver an “equitable” outcome—suspension bans.

It should surprise no one that suspension bans are Sullivan’s de facto favoured position. In one of her articles from The Conversation, she says that “aggressive and disruptive behaviours … might require a brief exclusion from class … but it should be used minimally and as a last resort”. So, suspensions are sometimes okay (because Professor Sullivan says so) but only in extremis. (She doesn’t specify how many classmates a student has to thump before deserving a “brief” break from school.) Sullivan and her collaborators are determined that suspensions be banned, except in extreme cases. A look at the chequered history of suspension bans in the United States will show why they will neither satisfy equity ideologues nor shut down the STPP.

In 2021, as part of America’s “racial reckoning”, the Dallas School District vowed to “never suspend a kid again”, though exceptions have been made for sexual assaults and drug felonies. The arguments made for the ban were essentially identical to the ones being pushed in Australia—group differences in suspension rates. In Dallas, 52 per cent of suspended students were black, despite making up only 21 per cent of the population. Moreover, the STPP was continually evoked, which is the far-fetched progressive theory that murderers would be productive citizens if they hadn’t been suspended in high school.

So, how are suspension bans faring in Dallas? The first thing to report is that something needs to done with schoolyard brawlers, and in Dallas they’ve been sending them to “reset centres”, which are withdrawal rooms with a full-time staff member who “raps” with students about their behaviour and its possible consequences. Obviously, there are considerable costs associated with this approach. Dallas got three years funding for its “reset centres” by tapping $21 million of pandemic aid money, but it will soon have to pay for the centres by itself. But what goes on inside these “reset centres”? According to the Dallas Morning News, students might spend as little as thirty minutes in there or as much as a full day. Ms Brown, one of the reset workers, is quoted as telling brawling girls, “You get to fighting, you get to swinging, so what’s the outcome of that? Your face gets messed up. Jail. You don’t go to prom. You lose out on the opportunity to participate in sports.”

When I read this, I thought, hold on a minute.

The selling point of suspension bans is that they were an alternative to punitive disciplinary practices, but here the wrongdoers were being threatened with debarment from sporting competitions and dances—surely just another form of exclusion. In The Conversation, Professor Sullivan opined, “Schools need to avoid practices that mistreat, exclude and denigrate students and are based on intimidation, anxiety, threats and retribution.” From what we’ve heard of these “reset centres”, students are still excluded from lessons, albeit more briefly, and they are being threatened with exclusion from desirable activities. This is precisely the sort of “controlling and authoritarian” behaviour Sullivan laments. Clearly, you can kick “exclusion” and “punitive responses” out the front door, but they will return through the back door.

The Dallas experience also reveals that once you have banned suspensions, equity ideologues will immediately see their replacement as the next enemy of social justice. In Dallas, school discipline bean counters are already incensed that students are being sent to “reset centres” at disparate rates. As a 2022 article reveals, “Of those students sent to reset centers last semester, 45% were Black.” The writer concludes, “The proportion of Black students being disciplined is still out of line.” As long as equity is the guiding principle of suspension policy, anything that schools do will be seen as unfair. For example, there are already published academic papers about discrepant rates of ODRs (office discipline referrals) between black and white students. For these researchers, even referring disciplinary matters to a supervisor is problematic if there is not perfect racial equity among the referred students. However, as each teacher is operating in their own classroom, how is each teacher to know whether racial equity has been reached on a school-wide, let alone a district-wide, basis? Whatever teachers do or don’t do, equity advocates will never be satisfied.

Crazy as this approach is, some researchers into ODRs have asserted that equity efforts need to go much further. Anne Gregory and Gabrielle Roberts, for instance, want to increase “the intersectional nature of inquiry” by looking at “socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, linguistic diversity, immigrant status, and gender and sexual identity” in ODRs. I recommend that they don’t bother because we already know that non-binary immigrant students will not be referred at exactly the same rate as Latinx lesbians. If any discrepancy is proof of discrimination, then all punishments, and even referrals of behaviour, must stop immediately, because to refer behaviour would be to facilitate inequitable outcomes. This leads me to the question: What are the entirely non-punitive alternatives? Yet before we get there, I should first look at the falsifiable claim which lies behind all this literature: that suspensions are a crucial part of an STPP that channels suspended students into prisons.

The first observation to make about this claim is that it often rests on the post hoc fallacy. In other words, just because prison inmates had troubles with authorities in their school days, that doesn’t mean the school suspensions caused their incarceration. As the Centre for Education Policy has observed:

Students with more serious problems are more likely to be suspended and, because they have those problems, they also tend to have lower test scores, higher dropout rates, and subsequently greater rates of criminal activity.

But what could these “serious problems” be which underlie both school suspensions and later criminality? The likeliest answer is a higher incidence of abusive or neglectful parenting among some identity groups.

The work of the African-American scholar Reginald L. Robinson is worth looking at here, especially his thought-provoking article, “Parental Causes of the School-to-Prison Pipeline Problem”. Robinson roundly rejects the STPP as a myth, saying that the toxic-caregiver-to-prison-pipeline would be a more appropriate moniker. Robinson explains:

It is the brain structure on which these children are relying … that led them to externalizing behavior and criminal conduct, all of which flows from their earliest dysfunctional relationships with their well-meaning but antisocially conflicted caregivers. In this way, it is a caregiver-to-prison pipeline problem.

Relying on research from neurobiology, Robinson argues that much of the antisocial behaviour seen in schools is due to abuse or chronic neglect from primary caregivers.

This explains why most black students get through a supposedly systemically racist school system without any serious disciplinary problems. But because abusive and neglectful parenting is not evenly distributed between all identity groups, there are wide discrepancies between groups on suspension rates.

Robinson’s thesis flies so counter to progressive metanarratives that it is almost shocking to read. But consider a 2018 study of Pittsburgh public schools, where so-called “restorative practices” were used as a way of reducing suspensions. “Restorative practices” are the favoured alternative for many anti-suspension advocates. The website “Restorative Practices in Schools: Designing for Equity”, characterises these practices as follows:

Restorative justice utilizes talking circles and honors distributed power among students and the sharing of power between adults and young people. Students practice agency and engage in a form of self-governance as part of their shared identity in the community.

But what did Pittsburgh schools find when they went down the wacky “peace circle” and “student self-governance” route? Not only did academic outcomes not improve, they actually weakened for students from Grades 6 to 8. Even more damaging for STPP true believers, researchers found that “arrest rates among Pittsburgh schools did not decrease”. If there really were a school-to-prison-pipeline, the reduction in suspensions should have caused a drop in arrests. The results from Syracuse are even more dispiriting. A decade after the city implemented suspension bans, it is wracked by horrific rates of homicide, especially among juveniles. A 2023 report found that Syracuse’s rate for teens charged with homicide had jumped to thirteen times the national rate. As these experiments reveal, the entire “suspension bans” movement is built on sand.

Academics touting “the doctrine of equity” have convinced themselves that by banning suspensions they will improve public health, empty the prisons and much else besides. Sullivan claims to see “a clear relationship” between suspensions and everything from illegal behaviour to “detrimental health outcomes”, including teenaged drinking and smoking. It is as if suspensions were the root cause of every social ailment. But if that was the case, why has slashing suspensions not reduced arrest rates at all in Pittsburgh? Why did suspension bans in Syracuse not deconstruct the STPP but instead presage some of the worst juvenile homicide rates in the country? Furthermore, if suspensions are so toxic, why has replacing them with “restorative practices” caused test scores to worsen in many schools?

Progressive academics are once again refusing to look at inconvenient truths about why some people fail at school, and in life. Rather than look at caregiver abuses, they have unwittingly made suspensions the scapegoat for all manner of social ills, leading the public up the garden path, again.

Raymond Burns is an English teacher who has worked for fifteen years in Australian high schools. His articles on education and critical race theory have appeared in Quadrant and overseas.