Does Out-of-School Suspension Give Students More Time to Get into Trouble?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder examines the argument that suspending students increases delinquency by giving them unsupervised time, and explains why this framing misses the point.
Key Takeaways
- The 'more time for trouble' argument is weak - Students who are suspended were already making dangerous choices; a few days at home doesn't create new criminals
- Suspension protects the school community - The primary purpose is to keep victims and other students safe from ongoing harm
- The alternative is worse - Keeping violent students in school without consequences puts everyone else at risk
Transcript
If we suspend kids from school, are we increasing the chances that they will get into trouble?
Are we increasing the amount of time they're spending outside of school and putting them on a bad path?
I think that's a lot of the basis of the school to prison pipeline argument that if we exclude students from school because of their behavior.
that's just going to give them more of an opportunity to get into trouble.
The question that comes to my mind is how much time are we really talking about and is that plausibly enough to really make a difference?
And it's totally understandable to me that we want to keep kids in school.
As educators, we want kids to be in the classroom learning and it breaks our hearts when their behavior makes that impossible, when their behavior makes it impossible for other people to learn.
And if we think about how much time kids are already spending out of school, we've got to really ask ourselves, Is suspension going to make much of a dent in that?
Students are in school about seven hours a day or about 1,260 hours a year, and there are 8,760 hours in a year total.
And if you do the math from birth to age 18, you remember kids don't go to school for their first five years.
They don't go to school in the summer.
They don't go to school on Saturdays and Sundays.
They only go to school for 17 out of 24 hours a day.
The total is about 10.4%.
Students tend to spend not the majority of their life in school.
They spend about 10.4% of their lives in school.
And a suspension, let's say a student gets suspended for three days, so 21 hours of time that otherwise they would have been in school They're going to be home.
They're going to have the opportunity to get into various types of trouble.
Is that going to make much of a difference?
Well, how many hours did they already have in a year to quote unquote get into trouble?
How many hours a year were they already out of school?
The answer is well over 7,000.
They already had over 7,000 hours a year to get into various types of trouble.
So this idea that we're going to meaningfully increase that through suspension and really ruin a kid's life, I think just doesn't hold up.
And I think there are good reasons to think about things like in-school suspension.
I certainly would rather see in-school suspension where kids can actually do their work as a first step and only do out-of-school suspension if that doesn't work out.
If they're not behaving in in-school suspension or if they don't come, then certainly out-of-school suspension needs to be an option.
But I just really question this idea that the math even makes sense that we're going to ruin kids' lives through out-of-school suspension because they're already out of school for more than 89% of their lives.
Let me know what you think.