Black children board a school bus. LDF Photograph Collection, School Integration, 1964-1985
The Racist Origins of “Student Pushout”
In 1972, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) convened civil rights organizations from around the country to discuss a pressing issue: the sudden rise in suspensions and expulsions of Black children as schools desegregated. Prior to the 1960s, school suspension was rarely used as a tool for student discipline. But as schools began to desegregate in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the number of Black students who were suspended or expelled jumped significantly.
A report released in 1973 by the Southern Regional Council and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial organization, entitled “The Student Pushout: Victim of Continued Resistance to Desegregation,” found that in many school systems that were recently ordered to desegregate, large numbers of Black students had been pushed out of school. The report defined the problem of “student pushout” as when Black students were forced to leave school due to discriminatory treatment or “intolerable hostility.” The report argued that by suspending and expelling Black students at higher rates, school administrators were subverting court orders.
An early victim of student pushout was Minnijean Brown-Trickey. She experienced daily racial harassment as one of the Little Rock Nine—the first Black students to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. One day, she was attempting to get to her seat in the cafeteria while carrying a tray with a bowl of chili. A group of white boys who had been teasing her for days confronted her and tried to trip her. This caused her to spill her chili on one of the boys. The school administrators responded by suspending Brown-Trickey. She faced more harassment when she returned to school after the suspension, and one student hit her in the back of the head with a purse filled with combination locks. She eventually lashed out at a student who was harassing her and was expelled for the remainder of the school year. In response, white students passed notes saying, “One down, eight to go.”
It's Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in Forty-three Southern Cities Eighteen Years After Brown
A 1972 report by LDF and other civil rights organizations further explained:
“Students told our monitor that many [B]lack students drop out because of the harassment they receive from some teachers and administrators and because of the futility of trying to make up their work. ‘Drop-outs, therefore, are, in reality, push-outs,’ the monitor commented.”
Desegregation was frequently followed by a toughening of disciplinary rules in the changing school system, often at the urging of white groups that opposed integration. The new rules and school codes focused on regulating how students acted and spoke in a racially mixed environment. For example, according to a 1970 report, one principal in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, openly stated that a new dress code was necessary because the school district “had to be more conservative, especially with regard to the girls’ dress because [B]lack and white boys and girls were now attending school together.” Black students were routinely disciplined for offending the racial social hierarchy, such as for not saying “sir” or “ma’am” when speaking to white adults.
A statistical analysis showed that in the 1980-81 school year, the disproportionate suspension of Black students was particularly concentrated in five rather vague areas: disruption, disrespect, insubordination, loitering, and fighting. In contrast, the five offenses with the lowest racial disparities were clearly defined and did not require subjective judgment by school officials.
Report on the Lay Advocate Training Program in Prince George’s County, Maryland, During the 1974-75 School Year
LDF’s 1975 “Report on the Lay Advocate Training Program in Prince George’s County, Maryland, During the 1974-75 School Year” stated:
“According to data collected by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s Office for Civil Rights, during the 1972-73 school year more than one million students were suspended from school at least once. As a group, [B]lack children are suspended twice as frequently as any other group of children. Sixty-eight percent of the districts in the HEW/OCR survey reported a higher rate of [B]lack student suspensions than that of white student suspensions. Twenty-nine states suspended over 5 percent of their total [B]lack enrollment while only four states suspended 5 percent of their white students. Six states suspended 10 percent or more of their [B]lack students but none of the states suspended white students at that rate.”
In the 1975 U.S. Supreme Court case Goss v. Lopez, the NAACP submitted an amicus brief that relied on “The Student Pushout” report to show that Black students’ suspensions were racially discriminatory and a threat to civil rights. Their amicus brief stated:
“Amici believe that the duty of school officials to provide school disciplinary procedures which comply with the Fourteenth Amendment is no less important than the duty of school officials to assure meaningful desegregation, because discriminatory application of school discipline can seriously undermine the commitment to desegregation and equal educational opportunities for minority students.”
In a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court held for the first time that students had due process rights prior to exclusionary discipline. However, the Court’s decision did not address the extreme racial disparities in school discipline or the connection between these disparities and resistance to school desegregation.
Meanwhile, the advocacy of LDF, the NAACP, and others had garnered attention from Congress, which held a series of hearings on school discipline in 1974. During one hearing, U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm of New York noted that the “pushout problem” had been “going on ever since the desegregation movement has been in existence.” She asked why the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had not yet brought charges against schools that were pushing out students of color. Peter Holmes, the Director of HEW’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), committed that OCR would “pursue vigorously” the pushout problem. He directed HEW to begin conducting investigatory reviews of school districts with serious pushout problems, with attention focused on whether discipline was disparately administered against students of color.
During the 1973-74 school year, HEW (which was later replaced by the U.S. Department of Education) began collecting data on the racial impact of suspensions and expulsions as part of its annual school enrollment survey. HEW also opened investigations into districts with the worst disparities. However, there was tremendous pushback to HEW’s authority to investigate discrimination, with many school districts refusing to comply with these investigations.
Today, many school districts continue to suspend and expel Black students at exceptionally high rates, and the Department of Education’s work to protect civil rights continues to face resistance. Nationally, Black students experience exclusionary discipline at approximately twice the rate of white students. Disparities in discipline remain most pronounced when it comes to minor, often subjective offenses, such as “disrespect,” that require adults to interpret the behavior of children. Where educators can exercise discretion in determining whether or not to punish students, there is a heightened risk that racial bias will creep in.
Despite these persistent disparities, the Trump administration is attempting to defund and dismantle the Department of Education while withdrawing critical guidance on discrimination in school discipline and halting investigations of discrimination complaints. The administration has also rolled back the Department of Education’s disparate impact regulations, which protect against policies that appear to be race-neutral but have an unjustified discriminatory effect.
Research has unequivocally shown that exclusionary punishment, such as expulsions and suspensions, is not an effective deterrent for student misbehavior. There is also an extensive body of research documenting what sociologists call the “school-to-prison pipeline”: Marginalized youth receive harsher discipline and criminalized sanctions for school-based misbehavior, and as a result, they are pushed out of school and into the criminal legal system. Most researchers argue that the school-to-prison pipeline began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the rise of police in schools and the adoption of zero-tolerance laws that required criminal responses for school misbehavior. However, this overlooks how Black parents and advocates coined the term “student pushout” decades earlier and advocated for the federal government to address the troubling patterns of exclusion they observed as school desegregation began.
For more information, read the Thurgood Marshall Institute’s January 2024 report “Beyond Learning Loss: Prioritizing the Needs of Black Students as Public Education Emerges from a Pandemic.”
To understand the pernicious origins and effects of this kind of misguided school discipline, it is vital to retrace the history of the phenomenon. In a recent article published in the Boston University Law Review, I argue that the evolution of student pushout demonstrates why patterns of discrimination will not simply disappear with time. The institutional policies and racial bias that have led to race-based exclusion continue. Failure to acknowledge a broader historical context can conceal the racial meaning of practices rooted in endemic discrimination and resistance to desegregation, even if those practices may appear facially race-neutral today.
By understanding how the practice of exclusionary school discipline began, advocates and parents can more effectively combat racial disparities that persist today and recognize them as rooted in a history of white supremacy that continues to shape public education.