Student misbehavior and disruptive conduct have risen a great deal since 2020. “Due mainly to ‘equity’ measures,” many “students now get away with virtually anything,” reported David Huber of The College Fix. A few states are responding by allowing suspensions or expulsions for misbehavior that previously led only to lesser discipline. The College Fix reports that
A new law in Kentucky, for example, allows for students to be suspended for profanity, “willful disobedience or defiance of the authority of the teachers or administrators,” “defacing school property” and alcohol and drug use, The Sentinel Echo reports.
It also mandates a year’s expulsion for violent threats and/or bringing a weapon to school.
The law was a highly popular bipartisan effort according to the report, but some invoked common left-wing arguments against it.
One was the Louisville Metro Council’s Kumar Rashad who said “students of color are disproportionately suspended.”
[Republican State Rep. Steve] Rawlings, the Kentucky lawmaker, said a tougher approach is necessary. In Boone County, he said, many teachers reported feeling unsafe in the classroom, which hurts recruitment and retention at an already difficult time coming out of the pandemic years. He noted that some Democrats, including Gov. Andy Beshear, supported the changes.
Before, Rawlings said, “teachers felt that under Kentucky law they were constrained. They had to keep the student in the classroom. The new law allows teachers to go through a process, which involves parents and principals, and a series of steps to put that [disruptive] child in an alternative setting.”
Beshear told local reporters he signed the bill because of safety concerns “at a time when we’ve seen some really scary incidents across the country,” according to The Associated Press.
Similar arguments carried the day in West Virginia, said state Rep. Marty Gearheart, a Republican and the House majority whip.
Gearheart, a sponsor of the bill, said teachers, principals and other school officials were adamant that something had to be done to tame disruptive classroom behavior.
In 2020, the American Federation of Teachers found almost 88 percent of educators believed “poor student discipline and a lack of support for dealing with disruptive students” were a “very serious” or “fairly serious” problem. Seventy-five percent reported that teaching conditions had “deteriorated” over the last five years.
Ironically, teachers unions have supported state laws and school district policies making it harder to suspend disruptive or willfully defiant students, even though that resulted in disruptive students remaining in the classroom where they attacked teachers. The National Education Association claimed that “suspensions and expulsions are doing more harm than good,” citing the fact that “Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students” (even though those higher suspension rates reflect higher misconduct rates, not racism).
Record numbers of teachers were physically attacked in America’s schools, as policies were changed by local school boards and state governments to make it harder to suspend students who repeatedly defy their teachers.
Teachers unions depict school suspensions for misconduct as “systemic racism” and “the school to prison pipeline” because suspended students are more likely to be black, and some suspended students later go on to commit crimes that land them in prison.
But the reason why African-American students made up a disproportionate share of suspensions in general is because a disproportionate share of the students who violate school rules are African-American. A 2014 study by John Paul Wright and several other professors in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that higher rates of “prior problem behavior” among black students — not racism — explained why black students are suspended at a higher rate.
Black students are not singled out for “willful defiance” suspensions more than other suspensions. The black share of suspensions for willful defiance is lower than the black share of suspensions for misconduct in general. In California, blacks are suspended for misconduct at more than four times the white rate, and nearly 15 times the rate for Asians, who have the lowest suspension rate of all races. (See Tom Loveless, The 2017 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?, Brookings Institution, March 2017, pg. 25).
Supporters of banning suspensions for “willful defiance” cite its allegedly “highly subjective” nature. But that is not a reason to tolerate willful defiance that undermines classroom learning. A federal appeals court pointed that out in striking down as an unconstitutional racial quota a rule that forbade a “school district to refer a higher percentage of minority students than of white students for discipline unless the district purges all ‘subjective’ criteria from its disciplinary code.” As the court observed, “important disciplinary criteria (such as disrupting classes) are unavoidably judgmental and hence ‘subjective.’” (See People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 538 (7th Cir. 1997)).
But that is not a reason to get rid of such rules or thwart their enforcement. They are essential to creating an environment where learning can occur.
Also, subjectivity in discipline isn’t why blacks are suspended at a higher rate than whites. The federal appeals court in Philadelphia noted in 1996 that “statistical data” showed larger racial differences in discipline rates for serious, “very objective” offenses than for minor, “less objective” offenses. It also cited a lack of evidence for the notion that “misbehavior” occurs at the same rate among all “racial groups.” (See Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education of Delaware).
Curbing suspensions of willfully defiant students harms innocent African-Americans by reducing their ability to learn and be safe. After all, much violence is black-on-black, and when a black student constantly disrupts class, that harms black classmates’ ability to learn. After suspensions were curbed in New York City, the Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden found that “schools where more than 90% of students were minorities experienced the worst” effects on school climate and safety. Indeed, the harm from curbing suspensions had “a disparate impact by race and socioeconomic status.” Eden noted in the New York Post that another “study by a University of Georgia professor found that efforts to decrease the racial-suspension gap actually increase the racial achievement gap.” Joshua Kinsler found that “in public schools with discipline problems, it hurts those innocent African American children academically to keep disruptive students in the classroom,” and “cutting out-of-school suspensions in those schools widens the black-white academic achievement gap.”
The higher black suspension rate is not surprising to many observers, given the higher black crime rate and the fact that black kids are more likely to come from struggling single-parent households that fail to instill discipline. As even the liberal Brookings Institution has noted, “Black students are also more likely to come from family backgrounds associated with school behavior problems; for example, children ages 12–17 that come from single-parent families are at least twice as likely to be suspended as children from two-parent families.” (2017 Brown Center Report on American Education, pp. 30-31). The homicide rate is 10 times higher among black teens than white teens. And the Supreme Court rejected the “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, as being “contradicted by” reality, in its decision in U.S. v. Armstrong.
