Aaron Kupchik

On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Aaron Kupchik, a Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He discusses his new book, "Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice."

Program Transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Aaron Kupchik. He's a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. And he's here with me today because he has a new book out titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” Among his other books is “Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adults and Juvenile Courts.”

Professor Kupchik, welcome to the program.

Aaron Kupchik: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

GR: Well it's great. It's great that you made the time. We appreciate it. So let me just say, first of all, I know this is a serious book on a serious issue and we will treat it seriously. But I thought your title was very, very clever. Well done on that. I got a grin when I read that because of the different ways that that means, but for the opening question, I just want to set some basic understandings for our listeners.

Your book is based on the assertion that school suspensions are an instance of racial discrimination and racism, as I understand it. And I just want to say, you should know that in recent years there have been, similar claims and news reporting about this in the Syracuse City school system, and our listeners will probably remember some of that.

But let me ask you this, in terms of your book, on what basis do you make the claim that school suspensions are, an instance of racial discrimination?

AK: Well, if we look at almost any study, conducted over the last 20 years, when scholars have started thinking a lot more about how we punish school, punish in schools, we see that, youth of color are really much more likely to be suspended out of school than white youth, even for the same behaviors. So it's not the case.

I wouldn't argue that it's always intended poorly. You know, there I tend to trust teachers and educators generally as really well-intended people who are doing a very difficult job with insufficient support and pay, and often hostility directed at them. And so it's not the case that every use of suspension is racially motivated. Far from it. But there's a historical piece to this in a contemporary piece to this.

And the contemporary piece is imbalance or disparity. And it's clear it is exceptionally clear. There's also a historical piece to this, and that's what I'm really trying to, I guess that's what my book does, is fill in that piece right? Because nobody had looked at it in detail before. And what I found was that we only started using suspensions as a way to remove unwanted students.

And those were Black students who were admitted into formerly segregated white schools. So that's its origin story. Is in racial exclusion. And when we follow that through to today, we see that patterns are still playing out.

GR: You know, I want to get into some of that, historical part of your of your argument a little bit later. Let me just stick with some current-day things and then we'll get into that. But and you just mentioned this, but you also you note that suspensions as a disciplinary method have become more common in recent years.

So they've really ticked up just generally in addition to the imbalance that you, cite. Can you give us an idea of the magnitude of that change in recent years? And, you know, whether it's followed some sort of particular trajectory?

AK: Absolutely. What we see is that, you know, in the 90s, the two pretty the late 90s, early 2000s, the rate of suspensions just skyrocketed, more than doubling nationwide. And, you know, this follows all sorts of punishments, right? This is the same time where we saw mass incarceration take off. And when we started investing much more in policing and punishment in society.

And so in the mid to late 90s through the early 2000, we saw suspension rates really took off, particularly for Black students. So their rates of suspension really grew by quite a bit. We have seen, for the past ten or so years, suspension rates start to decline, which is notable that the rate of decline is nowhere near the rate of increase we saw a generation ago.

But we have seen some progress in terms of reducing suspension rates.

GR: And I'm going to get into now some of the things you anticipated when you were, mentioning how difficult the job the teachers have, is and, and one of the things that I have heard from teachers and administrators when this issue of suspensions has come up is that, first of all, they're just reacting to the behavior in their classrooms, so they're not reacting to race.

And you already, I think, sort of acknowledge that that that can be the case. But the way they see this is they have a duty to the students, the parents and the community to deliver education to the entire class. So they see these suspensions as unfortunate, but necessary for them to, in a sense, make the trade off between being inclusive but also delivering what they're supposed to be delivering to the to the entire school.

How what's your reaction to that? And how do you see that is sort of being sorted out?

AK: Up until the very last portion of your statement, I completely agree. So absolutely, they have, you know, again, I believe most teachers are very well-intended and, you know, and doing a hard job, and they do have an obligation to teach to the entire class. And sometimes one or maybe two students are making that difficult or even impossible. And that is an extremely difficult position for anyone to be in, particularly a teacher who's got so much other stress on them.

What I don't agree with is that that necessarily lead has to lead to suspension. There are so many other potential things we could do. It's not a suspension or nothing problem. And yet suspension or nothing is how many schools? Not most, but many schools treat it. And that's not the individual teacher's fault. Again, I want to try to remove I'm not trying to blame individual teachers here.

They are the products of the systems in which they work. Right. And it's administrators and systems. And through a historical legacy, are the ones who are creating the options that they have. In other words, I think I can say that more clearly. Right? What I'm saying is that the system in which these teachers are, are doing their best to take care of children and to teach them the system is flawed.

And it's not those teachers fault. It's often not the principals fault. It's that over time we've created a very narrow set of options and a set of assumptions and norms that this is just what you do and this is the only option. And that's the real problem.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Aaron Kupchik. University of Delaware professor has a new book out. It's titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” So on that point, I'm wondering and I'm just and this is just in my head right now, whether maybe what's going on with some of these administrators in terms of using suspensions so readily is that it's just the easy thing to do.

You know, it's like, okay, I have a problem. Let me deal with it. Let's just take the kid out of the class. Versus thinking about this in a deeper way. They've got other things that are pressing on them that they've got to get done. I don't know if you had a sense in your research that that might have been part of the dynamic.

AK: Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt. You know, administrators are under pressure too. You know, the irony is that it is short-term, easier, long-term, more difficult, and more costly to do what we do.

GR: Hmm.

AK: So it's true removing the student who's being a problem who's causing disruption. You know is a short-term fix for the teacher, for the principal. But that student comes back and that student comes back worse off. Having, you know, having missed days of lessons, having missed the supervision, having, you know, now, maybe they're embarrassed or they're seen differently.

What we see is that suspending kids out of school tends to make those individual students behaviors worse, not better. It also has a chilling effect on other things. So research prior research has shown that when you look at when you compare high suspension schools to low suspension schools, but that are similar on other factors, you know, including, poverty levels, race ethnicity, type of location, funding levels and so on.

The high suspension schools tend to have worse average test scores among low-income among non-suspended students. So suspensions aren't helping the other kids learn. They might be a temporary reprieve for the teacher. But they're in long term, they're not helping the academic mission. They're not helping improve behaviors. So yeah short-term understandable. But we need to find better long-term solutions.

And there are long-term solutions that are that are better and that are out there. We just don't use them as much or as well.

GR: Oh, I want to find out what some of those are. It's a very interesting statistic. And also the way you describe that it's impossible not to hear the parallels with some of the criticisms of the criminal justice system and how that how that operates as well. Let me let me throw out one more thing, though, about, that that I've heard teachers say, and that is that they feel like many days they're primarily engaged in crowd control more than education.

And, and they're very frustrated in that way. And they say, well, you know, school children are just not as able to focus as they used to be when I first started teaching. They're not as well-behaved, etc. Maybe it's impossible to know that there's there any truth to that. Do you know of whether kids have just become more harder to handle?

AK: I'm sure you love this answer, but yes and no. Okay. And so. I think those are two separate things. I think attention spans are different than behaviors. So there are certainly far more children with, attention. Issues and limitations. There are many more children who are diagnosed with ADHD than there used to be. And I can tell you from teaching in college, you know, the pandemic has really hurt, you know, generationally, student engagement.

You know, so I think that there, you know, the challenge of keeping students engaged and present, you know, physically and mentally. Yeah, it has got to be more difficult. But in terms of behavior, you know, the, you know, there's a, an annual report that, the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the federal Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education publishes called Indicators of School Crime and Safety.

And they've been tracking, school crime and student misbehavior for, you know, for since the early 1990s. And one of the what I think is the best measures, in there, it looks at students age 12 to 18 across the country and their reported victimization rates, which can include having something stolen out of your locker to being assaulted.

And what we see is that victimization rates in recent years are a fraction. I mean, I'm talking about 20% what they were in the early 90s. Students today are much safer in schools, meaning that student misbehavior and crime is much less today than it was going back to early 90s. We saw an enormous decline throughout the late 90s and 2000.

GR: That's fascinating. You know, and I have to say it sort of fits my own experiences where I can remember when I was in high school, which was before the 90s, by the way. But, that fights were tolerated to some degree. And when my son went to high school, there just weren't. And so that I could I can see that difference.

You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Aaron Kupchik. He's a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, and he's the author of a new book titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” And we've been discussing his book and the issues that it raises.

You know, Aaron, one thing you mentioned right before the break was how criminal behavior had declined. And one of the things that pops up in people's heads, of course, when they hear that as well, that's maybe because we started suspending or punishing more, you know, and so is that is that the reason why that happened or something else?

AK: You know, the data show that that's not the reason why that happened. And in fact, criminal behavior and misbehavior in schools directly tracks reductions in youth behaviors and communities. Right. So crime rates of youth in communities have fallen at exactly the same rate over exactly the same periods of time. So it's it's something generational. It's something about youth today, suspending kids out of school makes their individual behaviors worse, not better.

GR: Yeah. And that's that's a that's a very powerful statistic, I think. So let me ask you one specific question about, your study. And then we'll get into the history that you mentioned and also what the better alternatives would be. You take in your book two deep looks, in addition to looking at more general data, two deep looks into two school systems, one in Newcastle, Delaware, and the other one in Boston, Massachusetts.

I'm going to guess that the Delaware choice was because you were there. You could you had access, Why Boston?

AK: Well, Boston, I think works for a few reasons. You know, when this issue was first noticed, going back to the 70s, the issue of suspensions as a consequence of desegregation, and it got some attention down in the South. And a number of people back in the 70s looked at how as soon as school districts were desegregating, they started kicking kids out through out-of-school suspension, particularly Black students.

And so it was something that we knew happened initially down in the South, and I wanted to see whether it happened in other places, too. So, yes, you're right. Delaware was convenient because it was its home. But it was also an excellent case study because, I mean, the University of Delaware is right on the Mason-Dixon line.

If it were drawn straight rather than going around the state, you know, it's right in the middle of the country. It's neither North or South. And yes, I describe in the book, it's just got a fascinating, disturbing, fascinating history. Racial exclusion, you know, with some characteristics of being a northern state and some of southern, too. Boston is, you know, this northern liberal, all, you know, city with all of these, you know, academic institutions.

And so I wanted to, to look at, two other sites again, that weren't south. And I kind of crept upward, but a Mid-Atlantic and a northern side.

GR: Well, the reason why I did Boston kind of caught my eye was that it has, I think, a notorious racial history when it comes to education and, I mean, I can attest to some personal experience to the kids from Boston that I met when I went to college. And I was like, wow, that's not what I expected to hear from someone from Massachusetts.

So do you account for that, that Boston might be kind of a, you know, an extreme case? I mean, I know there's a I know there's a tradition in social science of deliberately picking things like that. But, you know, I, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds here, but just that that struck me.

AK: I don't know, the busses and extreme case, I mean, I think if you look at any city, you'll, you'll find that racism, you know, racial hostility throughout the 20th century was was everywhere. I mean, I believe that, you know, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr lived in Chicago, he described racism there. That was above and beyond what he had seen in the South.

Right. You know, and not typical in Chicago, we could look at, you know, I think almost any northern city and come away with a similar conclusion, that this is, you know, maybe think this is might be an outlier. Which means they're not outliers.

GR: One of the things I wondered, and I was curious to see if you had any, thoughts about this as is there any evidence that these suspension decisions are, formulated differently when the teachers and the administrators are not white, when they're African-American or or or brown, as opposed to if they're white?

AK: Yes. There is some research. Not a lot, but there are a number of studies that do look at punishment rates when you have teachers and it's administrators who, who are, who are Black, or African-American. And what it finds is that the punishment rates are lower than with white teachers and administrators, but they're still not equal to those that white students receive. So the problem is reduced, but not eliminated.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is University of Delaware professor Aaron Kupchik. Okay. So let's get into some of the historical aspects of your study and then what the better alternatives would be. So as we've already talked about a lot of your book concerns tracking this history of discrimination, drawing a line between, forced desegregation of school systems that were segregated and then suspensions as kind of a response to that. Just just track, track that out, track that connection out a little bit for us.

AK: Sure. What we see is that suspension or suspending children out of schools followed these mandatory desegregation. So what I found was that jurisdictions where they, were forced to be segregated. And I looked very carefully and in-depth at Newcastle County, Delaware's history and Boston's history of desegregation. Each of them had a desegregation effort that was the result of a lawsuit, and before the desegregation suspensions were very uncommon. They were used occasionally, but very uncommon in Boston, for example, a few years before, desegregation. Any suspension had to be approved by administrators at the district level according to their code of conduct. Right. So it was rare enough that that had that, you disagreed, estimate suspensions weren't, something that school districts reported in their data.

It wasn't something that the state Department of Education was reporting in either state. It just wasn't a focus. And when they did talk about student misbehavior and discipline, they didn't talk about suspension as a solution to that. Immediately after these schools desegregate ended and Black students entered formally, all-white schools suspensions became issue number one. Topic number one.

I spoke, for example, to two people were there on the ground at the time in each of these places. One of them, for example, J Street, who's, you know, still a Wilmington City Council member and here in Delaware told me that suspensions were unheard of in in schools before desegregation. But it was an issue the first day that students were literally getting off, the Black students were getting off the busses on day one of school to their formerly all-white school, and they were being suspended.

GR: Well, so I know that you had said earlier that when we were talking about this in the current day that, you know, teachers have a hard job. It's not like they're sitting there thinking, I'm going to suspend this Black student because they're Black. You know, it's not that. But it does sound like at the beginning there was that kind of conscious, coordinated effort.

Is that fair to say?

AK: Well, I think it's partially true, but I don't know if it's fair to say, because I wouldn't want to lump all teachers into that. There were a lot of teachers who really meant to do well, even then, back in the 70s, and they were just, you know, one, one phrase that came up from many of the people I spoke to was how unprepared the schools were.

And there was a lot going on, and there was a lot of chaos. And so certainly many teachers that were explicitly racist and did not want those Black students in their school. Others were scared. You know, which has a racial component, right? But they weren't ill-intent. Others were very well-intended. Actively wanted to do well, but just didn't have the tools or preparation.

They had pressure put on them by others. So, I wouldn't lump all teachers in on saying that. That there was intentional hostility.

GR: That's a good point. So. So let's get to the $64,000 question. Spend a lot of time on us. So. So okay. This is what we shouldn't do. What should we do? What? You know, if we want to have education happening in the classrooms, we want to be fair. We want to have the right outcomes. How should we be thinking about this differently?

AK: I think schools need to mirror functional families better. If you think about how parents good parents discipline children because that's part of parenting, they you don't kick your kid out of the family for 3 to 5 days when they do something wrong. Right. We don't suspend them out of the family. Instead, there are consequences. There's accountability. Maybe lose some privileges.

But there's there's teaching about behavior and learning, and there's acceptance that you can come back in still a full fledged family member, right? Without a label put on you that you're a troublemaker. You know, without being left behind in some way. And, and so I think we need to model that obviously schools are very different than families, and have different pressures.

And I'm not saying that every teacher needs to be the parent of each kid there. But modeling some of those efforts of how do we hold students accountable, but in ways that don't scar them, in ways that don't keep them back, right, that help them learn and move forward? You know, there are a lot of teachers out there who are amazing at doing this.

I mean, I speak to educators all the time who say they you're in they often work in areas where there are high crime rates. So we know that students are coming with with issues. Right? And they tell me, look, I build a rapport with my students and I talk to them and they trust me. And so they don't want to upset me.

And when something does come up, we talk about it and we I help them solve the problem as best I can. That's what we need to do more of now. That takes resources and time. Right. And and teachers need help doing this. It would be unfair to suggest any teacher who has a class of 40. Anytime a student is disruptive, can take ten minutes and work with that kid.

That. That's not realistic. They need help doing this. And there are programs out there. Restorative practices has grown. It is in schools. Where we try to mediate conflict. We sit down with students who do things wrong. With the people that they might have hurt or offended. They learn about why it was wrong and what they can do better.

Positive behavioral interventions and supports is another type of program that schools often do. But what I found in and across studies that I've done is that often these kinds of strategies aren't always they're not always well done. They're they're sort of add-ons, but without full investment. Right. And as long as those things exist alongside more punitive discipline, they're not going to be fully successful.

One other point I have to mention, one of the most surprising things I found in my historical research on this topic was that these strategies and these understandings, these are these are things that are typically thought of as new and progressive. They were in place before we started suspending kids. And when desegregation first happened and people noticed the rise of suspension.

This was their concern. And they said, no, you know, there are student advocates in the 70s saying, no, no, no. What we need to do is invest in schools so that they can actually mentor and counsel children. You know, we don't want to kick them out. And that will lead to these problems. So I guess what's new was old or maybe is that.

GR: Well, we've got about oh, less than a minute. And I wanted to squeeze one last question. And so I apologize. It's going to be kind of a lightning round. But you've obviously spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different people and watching things. Leave us with something that you saw that really inspired you that was positive. Give us a positive note to go out on.

AK: We have seen progress over the last ten years. More and more schools are embracing, as I said, restorative practices as positive behavioral intervention supports and other strategies. Suspension rates have gone down. I believe that, you know, most educators I speak to get it. They understand that school suspension should be a last resort. It's just how we use it and the extent to which we can build up better alternatives is the issue.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Aaron Kupchik. And again, his new book is titled “Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice.” It's a provocative and informative book on obviously a very, very difficult topic. Professor Kupchik, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it and I learned a lot.

AK: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.