Before he was suspended, Zaire Byrd was thriving. He acted in school plays, played on the soccer team, and trained with other athletes. He had never been suspended before—in fact, he had never been disciplined.
But when Byrd got involved in a fight after school One day, none of that seemed to matter to administrators. Byrd said he defended himself and two friends after three other students threatened to rob them. Administrators at Tri-Cities High School in Georgia called the altercation a “gang fight” — an automatic 10-day suspension. After a disciplinary hearing, they sent him to an alternative school.
This experience nearly ruined his education.
“The last four years have been a lot for me, from online school “I could have gotten suspended,” said Byrd, who attended high school remotely during the pandemic. “I could have learned more, but between all that and changing schools, it was hard.”
In Georgia, black students like Byrd make up just over a third of the population. But they are the majority of students who receive discipline that removes them from the classroom, including suspension, expulsion and transfer to an alternative school.
These inequalities, in Georgia and across the country, became the target of a newly inflamed reform movement a decade ago, spurred on by the same racial reckoning which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movementFor many advocates, students, and educators, pursuing racial justice has meant addressing disparate outcomes for Black youth beginning in the classroom, often through strict discipline And underinvestment in low-income schools.
There has been some progress in reducing suspension rates for black students over the past decade. But vast disparities remain, according to a review of disciplinary data in major states by The Associated Press.
In Missouri, for example, an AP analysis found that black students were suspended 46% of all days in the 2013-14 school year — the year Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in the state just days after graduating from high school. Nine years later, the rate had dropped to 36%, according to state data obtained through a public records request. Both numbers far exceed the share of black students in the student body, about 15%.
And in California, the suspension rate for black students dropped from 13 percent in 2013 to 9 percent a decade later. That’s still three times higher than the suspension rate for white students.
The racial reckoning in the country elevated the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” – the idea that being expelled from school, or drop outincreases the likelihood of arrest and imprisonment years later. School systems have made gradual progress in reducing suspensions and expulsions, but advocates say underlying biases and structures remain.
The result: more black children continue to be expelled from school.
“That obviously feeds the school-to-prison pipeline,” said Terry Landry Jr., Louisiana policy director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re not in school, what are you doing?”
Students who are suspended, expelled, or otherwise kicked out of class are more likely to be suspended again. They become disconnected from their classmates and are more likely to become disconnected from schoolThey also miss out on learning time and are likely to have poorer academic results, including at work. numbers And percentages of graduation.
Still, some schools and policymakers have doubled down on exclusionary discipline since the pandemic. In Missouri, students lost nearly 780,000 days of instruction due to in-school or out-of-school suspensions in 2023, the highest number in a decade.
In Louisiana, black students are twice as likely to be suspended as white students for the same offenses, and they receive longer suspensions for the same offenses, according to a Study from 2017 of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Yet This year a new law will come into effect which recommends suspending all high school students who are suspended three times in one school year.
Federal guidelines to address racial disparities in school discipline first came from President Barack Obama’s administration in 2014. Federal officials urged schools not to suspend, expel or refer students to law enforcement unless absolutely necessary, and encouraged restorative justice practices that did not push students out of classrooms. Those rules were rolled back by President Donald Trump’s administration, but federal and state civil rights regulations still require the collection of discipline data.
In Minnesota, the share of black students expelled and suspended from school fell from 40% in 2018 to 32% four years later. That’s still nearly three times the share of black students in the general population.
The state’s disciplinary gap was so egregious that in 2017, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights ordered dozens of districts and charter schools to submit to legal settlements over their disciplinary practices, particularly for Black and Native American students. In those districts, the department found, nearly 80% of disciplinary actions for subjective reasons, such as “disruptive behavior,” went to students of color. School buildings were closed for much of the settlement period because of the pandemic, so it’s difficult to judge whether the schools have made progress since then.
Khulia Pringle, an education attorney in St. Paul, says her daughter was repeatedly suspended. The harsh discipline led her astray. For a time, Pringle says, her daughter wanted to quit school.
Pringle, then a history and social studies teacher herself, quit her job to become an advocate, hoping to provide one-on-one support to families struggling with strict school discipline.
“That’s when I really started to see that it wasn’t just me. Every black parent I worked with was calling me about suspensions,” she said.
Education reform quickly emerged as a goal for the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016, when the Vision for Black Lives platform was finalized, it included a call for an education system that cultural identitiessupported their mental and physical health and did not subject them to unjustified searches, seizures and arrests in schools.
“We need to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, and that starts in schools,” said Monifa Bandele, policy director at the Movement for Black Lives. “Data shows that with every expulsion or suspension, students are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.”
Black students are not only punished more often, they also receive harsher sentences than their white peers for similar or even the same behavior, said Linda Morris, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Students of color are often not given the same benefit of the doubt as their white peers, and are even seen as students with harmful motives,” Morris said.
Attention to these differences has led to some changes. Many districts have adopted restorative justice practices, which focus on addressing the root cause of behavior and interpersonal conflict rather than simply suspending students. Schools have invested more in mental health resources.
And for a while, some districts, including Chicago and Minneapolis, have been working on it remove police from schoolsThose efforts gained new momentum in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota by a white police officer.
In recent years there have been renewed calls for stricter discipline and greater police involvement, Schools struggled with misconduct after months of closures due to the pandemic.
Activists point to a deeper reason for the prodisciplinary approach.
“That backlash is also somewhat a reaction to the progress that’s being made,” said Katherine Dunn, director of the Opportunity to Learn program at the nonprofit Advancement Project. “It’s a reaction to organizing. It’s a reaction to the power that black, brown and other young people have built in their schools.”
After his suspension, Byrd, the Georgia student, was sent to an alternative disciplinary program. A district spokesperson said the program is designed to help students continue their education and receive social and emotional support while being disciplined.
Byrd says he stood in line every day for a head-to-toe search before he was allowed into the building. The process, the district says, ensures safety and is administered by the company that runs the alternative school.
“It definitely changed him,” said his mother, DeAndrea Byrd. “He wasn’t excited about school. He wanted to drop out. It was extremely difficult.”
Byrd finished his junior year at the alternative school. He transferred to another public school for his senior year, where he felt supported by the administration and was able to graduate. He has since found work near home and plans to attend college at an HBCU in Alabama, where he hopes to study cybersecurity.
Thinking back on the fight and its aftermath, Byrd says he wishes the school had seen him as a kid who had never gotten into trouble, instead of throwing him out.
“I wish they had never sent me away for my first offense and given me a second chance,” he said. “None of us should be punished for one mistake.”
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