The Sankofa of School Discipline: Looking Backwards to Move Forward

Abstract The 1975 Children’s Defense Fund report “ School suspensions: Are they helping children ” has inspired generations of scholarship, policies, and practices. Using data from the Civil Rights Data Collection and leveraging recent literature reviews, this study provides an empirical update to the landmark 1975 report and commentary on salient developments in the school discipline research and policy landscape in the past fifty years. The results underline the urgency of the state of school discipline in the U.S. The overall out of school suspension (OSS) rates has doubled since the report’s publication and similar to 1973, Black students had the highest suspension rates in 2022. As it was in 1973, Black-White disparities in OSS were the largest in 2022. In 2022, Black students were about three times more likely to receive an OSS than White students. Research since the report’s publication have confirmed the myriad ways that suspensions harm students and underscore the important role of bias and the application of discretion in the perception of and response to student misbehavior. Intentionality and evidence are two possible guiding mantras to ensure that in the next fifty years Black students are no longer excluded from classrooms and schools more than their peers. The results compel policymakers and practitioners to invest in evidence-based reforms to reduce Black-White disparities in exclusionary discipline such as the empathic mindset intervention. Three fruitful areas for future research are posited: (a) the finance of school discipline, (b) the ecology of school discipline and, (c) the well-being of school discipline.