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Separate and unequal punishment in SC schools

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Separate and unequal punishment in SC schools

Sep 13, 2024 | 6:30 am ET
By Brian Rashad Fuller
Separate and unequal punishment in SC schools
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South Carolina public school bus (File/Mary Ann Chastain/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)

As an educator and product of South Carolina’s public schools, I am disheartened to know that 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling which desegregated our schools, the educational experience for many children of color remains separate and unequal.

In 1954, that inequality was enforced by Jim Crow. In 2024, one way it’s reinforced is through school discipline. 

Last month, I was not surprised to read that South Carolina ranked number one in the nation for most suspensions of preschool students in public schools. Unfortunately, it is no surprise that more than 60% of our youngest learners who received suspensions last school year were children of color and 77% were boys.

My experiences in South Carolina’s elementary schools in the 1990s mirror these statistics. 

It’s time for radical change. That’s why I wrote “Being Black in America’s Schools,” a book which exposes these disparities in part by recounting my years in Sumter, South Carolina schools, and calls us all to rethink education at the classroom and legislative levels.

I have been uniquely po­sitioned to see this trend play out in my own life.

By the age of 6, I was witnessing my father in the criminal justice system — a Black man who had also experienced harsh disciplinary practices in South Carolina schools. At the same time, I was wit­nessing my first-grade classmates suffer the brunt of similarly harsh disciplinary actions.

One of those students in par­ticular was another Black boy who was a joke­ster — a talkative, active, and playful first grader. He often frustrated our teacher and sometimes other students but, looking back, I see how his daily behavior was typical for his age and certainly not much worse than my other classmates of various racial backgrounds.

Still, I saw from even that young age how he was often separated from the classroom and received corporal punishment and was suspended from time to time until he was eventually expelled.

In my book, I write:

“I frequently wonder, what ever happened to him? How did his expulsion in first grade impact his life? Did he experience juvenile delinquency? Was he later incarcerated?

The National Education Association states, ‘A suspension can be life altering. It is the number-one predictor — more than poverty — of whether chil­dren will drop out of school and walk down a road that includes greater likelihood of unemployment, reliance on social-welfare programs, and imprisonment.’”

Over the last decade, educational experts have begun to use the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” or “school-prison nexus” to acknowledge the disproportionate rate of minority students and students with disabilities who experience harsher discipline policies in schools and later become incarcerated adults.

Specifically Black, Latino, and students with disabilities (who are more often Black and Latino) are much more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white counterparts. And in the three decades since I was in elementary school, the trend of disproportionately suspending Black students has not only continued but has grown worse.

This pattern of separate and unequal punishment does not surprise me since, as I recall, most students of color experienced it in Sumter schools, even those like myself who were considered high achieving. Some years, it was my honors teacher who singled out the four boys of color in their class, kicking us out sometimes for reasons as small as laughing while entering the classroom.

Or it was the principal who enforced dress codes for Black students but not for white students and, when I presented evidence of this unfair policy, he was inclined to harshly punish me rather than examine his own potential biases.

Unfortunately, as an educational leader who has now worked in many settings and states, I have encountered many more stories like mine.

One of the first steps, I believe, in changing a seemingly unchangeable reality is to elevate the stories of the students behind these statistics.

We must use powerful storytelling as a tool to inspire those being affected to speak up and speak out and those in power to address harmful policies and practices.

We need to demand more resources for all our overburdened educators, but especially our early childhood ones who deserve the training and resources necessary to help them nurture children rather than punish them.

Our children are depending on us to address the inequities in our education system. And as I ask in my book, “Isn’t it time to challenge the system to actually hold true to America’s promise? If not now, then when?”

Brian Rashad Fuller is the author of “Being Black in America’s Schools: A Student-Educator-Reformer’s Call for Change,” released in 2024. He will appear at Turning Page Bookshop in Goose Creek this Saturday, Sept. 14, from noon to 2 p.m.