More than a decade ago, when he was a teacher and school counselor, Amir Whitaker was called into a Los Angeles classroom to support a student in a disciplinary situation. A Black girl had been humming in one of his white colleague’s classes. His fellow teacher, Whitaker said, had asked the student to stop humming to no avail.

Eventually, the student was recommended for suspension for “defiance” – a broad, subjective category that, under the California education code, meant a student “disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority” of teachers, administrators and other school officials. Whitaker later learned the girl hummed to regulate her ADHD.

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Years later, in 2021, Whitaker found himself in a similar situation. He had since become the senior policy counsel for the ACLU of Southern California, and was asked by a Black family to intervene at a different school where their young relative had been disciplined for drumming at his desk. “The [school’s] initial response was still punitive,” Whitaker said. “With some conversations, we were able to redirect.” By then, Whitaker could point to examples that showed officials didn’t need to resort to punishment when a student’s behavior appeared disruptive: several California districts, including Los Angeles Unified, had banned willful defiance suspensions. The school, he said, had a social worker who could talk to and support the student, who, in the end, avoided suspension.

At least 25 states and the District of Columbia allow schools to suspend students for “willful defiance”, according to the LawAtlas Project’s Policy Surveillance Portal. This week, California became the first state in the US to ban such suspensions for all students, expanding a pre-existing ban on the disciplinary practice for students in grades kindergarten through eighth grade. The new law, signed by the governor, Gavin Newsom, last Sunday, could represent a model for how other states approach reforming disciplinary practices, which disproportionately affect Black and Latino students, as well as those with disabilities and those from low-income backgrounds.

Black students accounted for 14% of willful defiance suspensions by the end of the 2021-22 school year, even as they made up just 5% of students across the state, according to data from the California department of education. Latino students, who account for 55% of students in California, received 57% of willful defiance suspensions. Latino boys, in particular, who make up 29% of students, accounted for 43% of defiance suspensions.

Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said California’s decision to ban defiance suspensions is an acknowledgement that the criteria for these kinds of suspensions is overly broad. The more discretion educators have, she added, the more likely implicit and explicit bias will influence how they punish students, leading to disparate treatment of Black and Latino kids.

Seen from the back, a light-skinned adult woman with her hands on her hips watches a group of high school students seated at a table beyond her, blurred in the background.
The more discretion educators have, the more likely implicit and explicit bias will influence how they punish students. Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy
Perera noted that before the pandemic, a growing movement among states was already moving away from suspensions as a disciplinary practice. Research shows that suspensions don’t improve the climate inside the classroom and instead hurt children, who lose critical instruction time. She said that suspension bans are effective toward reducing discipline disparities in schools when they are paired with support resources, such as counseling that allows for mediated conversations to get at the root causes of so-called misbehavior.

A decade before Newsom’s ban of willful defiance suspensions, Los Angeles Unified had eliminated the practice for all students. The district had also incorporated behavioral support. Researchers at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education found that six years after such suspensions ended, the racial disparities reduced. Black students were still punished at higher rates, but the gap in suspensions between white and Black students narrowed. Latino students were suspended at similar rates to white and Asian students.

The combination of reforms and alternatives to discipline has worked beyond California. In Chicago, after the district limited suspension use and invested in a restorative justice program, researchers found that schools that had alternatives to suspension showed an 18% decline in out-of-school suspensions over the course of a decade. Black boys in particular saw a rise in both school attendance and math scores.

“It’s a two-part solution,” Whitaker of the ACLU of Southern California said. “It’s taking away the ability to remove students for trivial reasons. And the second is increasing the amount of support: restorative justice, more counselors, more school psychologists and school social workers who can actually redirect the behavior and meet the needs of the student.”

It’s a two-part solution: taking away the ability to remove students for trivial reasons, and increasing support

Amir Whitaker

An entrenched ideology of zero tolerance for misbehavior still exists among teachers and administrators, even as the research suggests such logic is harmful. That makes it difficult to predict whether California’s latest ban will be an influence or an outlier for the rest of the country. In some parts of the country, such as Missouri and Mississippi, harsh disciplinary practices, including corporal punishment, persist. The Brookings Institution found that three-quarters of US schools still allow educators to punish students for “defiance”.

The pandemic has complicated the pursuit of school discipline reform. A rise in misbehavior cases as students returned to school after the quarantine period prompted at least eight states, such as Nevada, Kentucky and North Carolina, to consider harsher punishment practices. In February, a federal appeals court ruled that laws in South Carolina that allow elementary, middle and high school students to be criminally charged for cursing and other acts of disorderly conduct were “unconstitutionally vague” and gave “unbridled discretion” to enforcers. The opinion noted that between 2015 and 2020, law enforcement charged Black kids with disorderly conduct at seven times the rate of white kids.

Perera says that those beliefs – that punishment will curtail misbehavior and keep students in order – are hard to change: “That doesn’t mean we don’t try. But I think it’s going to be a longer road towards reforming school discipline in some places.”