Race & School Suspensions Series
Written by Wendy Haight, PhD, Gamble-Skogmo Chair
Suspensions and Black Children
The goal of this blog series is to provide information and encourage discussion of solutions for racial disproportionalities in out-of-school suspensions focusing on Black children and families. Effective responses to this complex issue emerge from an understanding of the underlying problems. In this blog we will describe the perspectives of some Minnesota caregivers of Black children suspended from school.
Study Background
University of Minnesota School of Social Work Professor Priscilla Gibson became concerned about the out-of-school suspension of Black children some years ago during her conversations with grandparents who were the primary caregivers of their grandchildren. Although children’s experiences in school was not a focus of these studies, school struggles including with out-of-school suspensions routinely came up in conversations. She embarked on a multi-year study of out-of-school suspensions, which I joined in 2013.
Caregiver Perspectives
In our first study, we talked with 30 Minnesota caregivers (mostly mothers and grandmothers) of Black children who had been suspended from school. We invited them to describe their experiences of their children’s suspensions during in-depth, individual, audiotaped interviews.
Caregivers generally valued their children’s school success. They also recognized when their children had misbehaved and supported educators’ imposition of appropriate consequences. Out-of-school suspensions, however, were rarely viewed as appropriate consequences. On the contrary, caregivers produced emotionally laden moral narratives that generally characterized their children’s suspensions as unjust; harmful to children; negligent in helping children with underlying problems such as bullying; undermining parents’ racial socialization; and, in general, racially problematic. Suspensions also contributed to some families’ withdrawal from participation in their schools.
Understanding how caregivers experience children’s out-of-school suspensions provides important clues to how families and schools can work together to effectively reduce racial disparities in out-of-school suspensions.
For a full report of this research, see:
Gibson, P., & Haight, W. (2013). Caregivers’ moral narratives of their African American children’s out-of-school suspensions: Implications for effective family-school collaborations. Social Work, 58(2),1-10.
Next Blog Post
In my next blog post, I will compare the perspectives of Black caregivers, children, and educators on out-of-school suspensions, including racial issues and the criminalization of the self and social identities of Black youth.