Blacks students get suspended at higher rates, with long-term effects.

Black students in K-12 schools are suspended at shockingly higher rates than white students according to recent data. But what’s even more concerning, say experts, is how that affects their chance of academic and professional success in later life.

As the U.S. kicks off its school year, here’s a look at how school suspensions are correlated with lower academic performance, college acceptance rates, and general quality of life as an adult. And why Black students get the lion’s share of one of the worst school punishments possible.

Disparities in school disciplinary actions have persisted for decades, with adverse impacts on academic access, college acceptance rates, and outcomes later in life.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights data, between 1974 and 2000, the rate at which students were suspended and expelled from schools nearly doubled, increasing from 3.7 percent to 6.6 percent of students.

While the most recent data showed that suspension and expulsion rates decreased, students of color and students with disabilities are still more likely to be over-disciplined, according to a recent interview with Andrea Joseph-McCatty, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Tennessee, in The Conversation.

Black girls are suspended at a high rate

Black girls were overrepresented in suspensions. While representing 7.4 percent of enrollment, they represented 11.2 percent of in-school suspensions and 13.3 percent of out-of-school suspensions. Among girls, they were the only racial or ethnic group with this disparity. Compared to white girls, Black girls saw 4.19 times the suspension rate, according to analysis from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality’s Initiative on Gender Justice & Opportunity and the RISE Research team at New York University.

Black boys, whose share of suspensions more than tripled their share of student enrollment, saw the largest disparities across all groups, though boys identifying as multiracial, American Indian, and Alaska Native also saw disparities.

Students with disabilities, representing 13.2 percent of student enrollment, received roughly 20 percent of in-school suspensions and 25 percent of out-of-school suspensions. When broken out by race, Black students received suspensions at more than double the rate of enrollment of 2.3 percent.

It’s often about perceptions and not particularly bad behavior

While some may generally assume that students only receive school discipline for breaking school rules, social scientists have used data to show how race, gender, disability and class bias at the intersection of punitive discipline policies and systematic inequities lead to disproportional suspensions, Joseph-McCatty told The Conversation.

For instance, she said, Black girls are disciplined in school for wearing natural hair in Afros or for having braids. In other cases, Black girls are more likely to receive school discipline outcomes for subjective infractions such as tone of voice, clothing and disrespect compared to other girls, she said.

Another factor is “adultification,” or the concept coined to describe how Black girls are disproportionately perceived as less innocent, needing less nurturing, less protection, less support, knowing more about sex and adult topics, and are more adult-like than their peers, Joseph-McCatty said.

Disciplinary action’s effects on academic and professional success? Definitely not positive.

In the long term, higher school disciplinary rates are correlated with negative life outcomes, including “mental health difficulties, drug use, criminal victimization, criminal involvement, and later incarceration,” Joseph-McCatty wrote in an email to Grid.

Short term, the research shows that school suspensions for “at-risk” students “often expose them to increased conflicts outside of school, a greater likelihood for future suspensions, and a greater chance for dropout,” Joseph-McCatty wrote.

“One argument in favor of suspensions is that if a student is removed from the classroom, they’re no longer causing disruptions, and so removing disruptive students could have positive benefits on those who remain in the classroom,” Andrew Bacher-Hicks, who co-authored a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, showing the causal relationship between suspensions and negative outcomes later in life, told Harvard in a blog post.

“But we found for all students, there are large negative impacts on later-life outcomes, related to attending a school with a high suspension rate. That suggests there are not overwhelmingly positive benefits of removing disruptive peers from the classroom.”

The authors found that not only were the effects of strict school discipline most harmful for Black male students, but also that there was no positive spillover, such as higher test scores or lower risk of dropping out, for any student subgroup. In other words, there were “no positive benefits of strict school discipline that many have claimed for decades were born out in the data of this study.”

How do disciplinary records impact college admissions?

The Common App, an admissions application used by more than 1,000 colleges and universities, started including required sections on disciplinary action — for students and guidance counselors — in 2006. At the time, the Common App Board defended the section as a way to help colleges decide if a prospective student should be a part of the community they were building, according to a 2015 report.

But it removed the section in 2020, citing racial and income disparities in disciplinary records. A popular competitor, the Coalition for College admissions tool, serving more than 150 institutions, removed the question from its application in 2017.

“Our data made it clear that requiring students to disclose their school disciplinary history has a clear and profound adverse impact,” Jenny Rickard, the president and CEO of Common App, said in an interview with Forbes. “It suppresses college-going aspiration, particularly among low-income, Black, and Latinx students,” she said. “Not only that, but white students and students whose parents attended college are more likely to attend schools that prevent the disclosure of disciplinary history altogether.”

But schools that use both the Common App and the Coalition for College admissions tools can still opt to include supplemental questions on disciplinary records, and they do. Last school year, about 40 percent of the Common App’s member colleges asked about disciplinary records, the company said.

Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.