Valeriia Shaliakhina reviews Aaron Kupchik’s Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice (New York University Press, 2025)
In the United States, school suspensions are more than a tool for managing behavior. Often justified in the name of order, the effect goes far beyond discipline. Far from being a neutral response, suspension produces a mechanism of exclusion. In Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice, Aaron Kupchik examines how suspensions shape a system of racial inequality, transforming schools from spaces of development into institutions of control. Through a combination of statistical analyses and in-depth case studies of New Castle, Delaware, and Boston, Massachusetts school districts, the author reveals that punitive policies disproportionately target Black students, reflecting not only implicit bias but also longstanding social and institutional patterns of racial control.
Aaron Kupchik, a leading researcher in criminal justice and sociology at the University of Delaware, has long examined the intersections between education and policing . The book’s intervention is today more timely than ever, as the United States is actively debating restrictions on access to educational materials and disciplinary measures in schools. Aaron Kupchik’s blunt claim is that racial discrimination in schools has not disappeared; it has simply taken on new forms.
The book opens with a particularly telling incident. Marcus, a Black student, was suspended after coming too close to his teacher while attempting to sharpen his pencil. The incident resulted in disciplinary action against Marcus who did not have any intent or caused physical harm towards the educator. As the example goes on, we learn that the student was punished not because of his actions, but because of his race. This episode from the story of Marcus’s mother prompts the author to explore suspension as a tool of control that is disproportionately harsh on Black students.
Right from the introduction, the author outlines the book’s key thesis: school suspensions are not a neutral tool for managing behavior, but a historically conditioned practice of discrimination against Black students. Kupchik seeks to uncover the reasons for the use of suspension in schools as a means of punishment and discipline, as well as to explain why Black students are disproportionately suspended. Kupchik situates such practices within a longer historical context. From the historical perspective, Brown vs. Board of Education Court Decision in 1954 constituted an important moment, as it made formal racial exclusion legally untenable. The decision was intended to expand opportunities for Black students, but schools began to look for alternative means of control.
In the first chapter, “They Just Want the Blacks Out of School”: Punishment after Desegregation, Kupchik shows how, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, formal segregation became legally impossible. By comparing and contrasting school discipline approaches in southern and northern US states, the author shows that racial disparities in suspensions still emerged as a common institutional consequence of desegregation. The court decision negatively influenced schools as they began to use punishment as an alternative mechanism for controlling and removing unwanted students. As Kupchik stated,
“the fact that our common response to this problematic behavior is to remove students from school, thus ensuring that they fall further behind academically, simply does not make any sense from a pedagogical or behavior-management perspective. It only makes sense if the students who are suspended are unwanted and unwelcome” (p. 25).
In the second chapter, The Legacy of Racial Injustice: Historical Resistance to Desegregation and Contemporary Suspension Rates, Kupchick and Felicia Henry, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at American University, discuss their analysis of nationally representative data. The researchers find a trend of higher suspension rates for Black students in areas where there were many civil rights lawsuits over segregation. Kupchik and Henry identify a link between historical resistance to desegregation and contemporary school punishments. Entire school systems still adopt punitive norms disproportionally affecting Black students:
“A structural race perspective reminds us that the legacy of past battles over race shape the present, that racial inequities are embedded deep within social institutions, including schools, and that they do not disappear even when society takes apparent steps toward racial equity” (p. 63).
In the following chapters, the author refers to archival data from New Castle County, Delaware, and Boston, Massachusetts. Chapter 3 discusses an interesting case: the segregated schools in New Castle County, a Mid-Atlantic state where suspension was rare until 1978. However, in Chapter 4, the author describes the negative reactions of schools and their administrations to the 1978 court decision that overturned desegregation. In practice, one of the outcomes was that teachers began to refuse en masse to teach Black students.
In Chapter 5, the author examines the northern state of Boston, where students attended different schools. Continuing his description of Boston, in Chapter 6 the author delves deeper into archival data and discussions among lawyers involved in desegregation and confirms the strong influence of racial resistance on segregation. In the concluding chapter, the author summarizes his theories and research findings, which he described in chapters one through five. Kupchik emphasizes the harm that segregation causes to every student, regardless of race.
By combining empirical data with a rich quality of narratives, Kupchik illuminates their enduring legacy of racialized discipline. To build his claim, the author draws on a wide range of sources. Kupchik uses archival records from schools in New Castle and Boston, which contain information about suspended students and the reasons for their punishment. He also uses court documents related to civil rights violations that violated desegregation, as well as interviews with lawyers and educators involved in these processes. The combination of different sources allowed Kupchik to link large-scale desegregation trends with local practices of excluding Black students, demonstrating how systemic inequality flows into everyday school life.
Nowadays, the book is particularly relevant for discussion of political economy and inequalities, as it links historical patterns of resistance to desegregation with contemporary inequities in education, offering a rigorous and morally urgent account of why school discipline cannot be understood outside the framework of structural racism. Through historical analysis and a combination of empirical data, Kupchik convincingly demonstrates that suspension from school is disproportionately more severe for Black students. Suspension is part of a broader institutional mechanism for maintaining social hierarchy. By analyzing national data sets on suspensions alongside archival records from Delaware and Massachusetts, the author shows that disciplinary decisions reflect both the legacy of desegregation and local responses to civil rights litigation, rather than simply the behavior of individual schools and their staff.
A particularly important observation by the author is the argument that mass suspension makes no rational sense in terms of educational outcomes. As Kupchik points out, such practices are harmful not only to Black students, but also, according to statistics, to other students. Methodologically, the book is strong precisely because it combines large-scale quantitative analysis with local case studies. National data reveal the systematic nature of racial discrimination through suspension, while studies in Massachusetts and Delaware show how such disciplinary practices occur at the level of daily practices, interpretations, and decisions.
However, the main gap in the book is the lack of explanation as to why teachers’ subjective reactions, such as fear, feelings of threat, and loss of control, arise specifically with Black students. Kupchik argues that teachers fears are not an individual anomaly, but a product of an institutional environment shaped by a history of segregation and a growing practice of punishment in the education system.
At the same time, Kupchik does not make this connection a central theoretical argument, leaving fear as a background explanation for disciplinary decisions rather than a core analytic focus. Moreover, exclusion from education may be caused not only by systemic institutional dynamics, but also by psychological mechanisms operating at the individual level. Teachers’ perceptions of threat, implicit racial biases, and stereotypes can shape their interpretation of student behavior and their disciplinary responses. Although Kupchik acknowledges the institutional origins of fear, he does not sufficiently engage with psychological theories of bias, threat perception, or social cognition that could provide a more complete explanation of how structural inequality is reflected in everyday disciplinary decisions.
This theoretical gap also limits the book’s policy implications. Although Kupchik convincingly demonstrates that disengagement from learning is structurally embedded, the lack of a deeper exploration of psychological mechanisms makes it difficult to assess how disciplinary reform can take into account both institutional norms and everyday decision-making in classrooms. Stronger integration of micro-level processes could have enhanced the book’s relevance to discussions of alternative disciplinary models.
Nevertheless, Suspended Education is an important contribution to understanding how institutions reproduce racial inequality in less visible forms. Aaron Kupchik shows that school suspensions function not as an exceptional disciplinary measure, but as a structural mechanism for managing undesirable students in a post-desegregation context. Suspensions become a way to maintain control without questioning the very logic of the school system. It is a straightforward claim: the problem of inequality does not lie in the bad behavior of individual students. Instead, it is embedded in disciplinary practices that appear neutral but in fact systematically exclude specific students from school life and later, democratic engagement. In this regard, Kupchik’s book does not offer comfort, but clarity. Suspended Education should be read not only as a study of the disciplinary education system, but also as an analysis of how democratic institutions are capable of reproducing inequality under the guise of order and security.
Valeriia Shaliakhina is an Assistant Editor in the Democracy and Culture Section. She is an emerging scholar in media studies, psychology and sociology, committed to understanding how communication shapes democratic culture and collective behavior. She is a senior BA student at the Dnipro University of Technology. Valeriia’s research interests focus on national identity, public discourse and the psychological mechanisms of social influence.
