Past as Prologue: A Critical Spatial Analysis of Exclusionary Discipline

Compared to white peers, Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students are more likely to experience exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspension) and its harmful effects, calling for policy and practice transformation. Informing this transformation will require the field to contend with contextually dependent spatial-historical legacies that influence contemporary discipline practices. Focused on one geographic region of California, we used a convergent mixed-methods design to examine out-of-school suspensions across race and space. In the quantitative strand, we analyzed discipline-based outcomes spatially, merging student-level suspension records from 2011/12 to 2021/22 with geospatial historical redlining data. In the qualitative strand, we analyzed historical and contemporary policy documents to identify underlying carceral logics that inform school discipline policy. Through systematic integration of qualitative and quantitative findings, we found that Black students were overrepresented in suspensions compared to white students, and that contextual factors—including historical redlining policies, school composition, school resources, and carceral policies—undergirded suspension outcomes in schools. We provide a mixed-methods joint display from our analysis to illustrate this throughline, and we conclude with recommendations for statewide and district-level policy change.