Exclusionary Discipline In Schools

In 2010, a seven-year-old first grader named Tarik Ellington was suspended an entire school week for chewing his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. As it turns out, Tarik was only one of more than three million students were suspended from school, or double the level of suspensions in the 1970s, indicating an exponential increase in the phenomenon known as exclusionary discipline. Meanwhile, in that same 2010 year, more than a quarter-million students were referred to police officers for misdemeanor tickets, very often for minor offenses more than likely could have been dealt with internally and that may have only elicited a stern talking-to. The practice of pushing kids out of school and toward the juvenile and criminal justice systems has …show more content…
Exclusionary discipline is loosely defined as any type of school disciplinary action that removes or excludes a student from his or her usual educational setting, typically referring to suspension or expulsion (American Institutes for Research). Exclusionary discipline practices have long been embedded within the culture of public school discipline in the United States as a means to maintain safety and order in schools, and have been proven to disproportionately impact African American students. African American male students are suspended 2 to 3 times more frequently than other students. Additionally, in 2000, although African American students represented less than 17% of the student population in United States schools, they accounted for 34% of all suspensions (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Furthermore, research indicates that African American males subjected to exclusionary discipline may be more likely to associate with deviant peer groups, which may lead to an increase in criminal activity (Poulin, Dishion, & Burraston, 2001). In addition to early entry exposure to the criminal justice system, exclusionary policies may have the negative effect of normalizing the prison experience for African American males, consequently increasing future involvement in the criminal justice system (Poulin, Dishion, & Burraston, 2001). The alarming statistics of African American males subjected to exclusionary discipline make this population especially vulnerable to the consequences of exclusionary discipline (Nicholson-Crotty, Birchmeier, & Valentine,