The science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline is too narrow because it lacks racial diversity. Black workers make up just 9 percent of the STEM workforce, despite making up over 13 percent of the population. Many of the largest “leaks” in the pipeline occur in middle and high school when specialization in math and science courses begin to occur. Indeed, racial inequities in math performance, advanced course-work, and extracurricular activities can cause Black students to prematurely exit the STEM pipeline, despite high levels of interest in STEM.
At the same time, the school-to-prison pipeline has been swelling because of racial disproportionality in school punishment. The criminalization and hyper-disciplining of Black students has pushed far too many students of color away from classrooms and towards prison cells.
Although each pipeline highlights racial inequities in schools that can have lifelong impacts on students of color, as well as deleterious collateral effects on our society at large, these are often thought of as separate phenomena. The mathematics experiences of disciplined students of color within racialized school contexts have been largely ignored in research and policy. Our recent research demonstrates how each pipeline is intimately related by racial disparities in both, and how the racial composition of schools magnifies the consequences of being suspended on Black students’ mathematics performances (Johnson & Jabbari, 2021).
Our previous research using the High School Longitudinal Study demonstrates that high-suspension schools, which are disproportionately Black, can have negative impacts on math performance and college enrollment (Jabbari & Johnson, 2019), but in the current study we focus on the influence of high schools’ racial demographics on the relationship between suspension and math performance.
We find that Black suspended students in schools with low White enrollment have math test scores and efficacy beliefs no different than non-suspended Black students, but experience significant declines in their math scores as the percentage of White enrollment increases. In other words, the increasing presence of White students activates the negative impact of punishment on math for Black students. The larger setback could arise from school personnel who view the misbehavior of Black students as confirming their racialized views of Black students as less promising (i.e. self-fulfilling prophesy), or from a higher rate of repeated suspensions for Black students in majority White schools that compound learning losses.
We conclude that although desegregated schools may be seen as opportunities for Black students to access advanced STEM courses, they can also be places of racialized punishment—where suspensions are most likely to push Black students away from the STEM opportunities.
Future research should continue to explore the social processes related to punishment and STEM in diverse contexts, such as racially desegregated schools. At the same time, policymakers should consider whether suspension reforms are effective in eliminating racial disparities and expanding racial justice in mathematics. Although in-school-suspension was originally conceived as an alternative to out-of-school suspension, our research demonstrates that it can also operate as a mechanism that pushes Black students towards the school-to-prison pipeline and away from the STEM pipeline—especially in majority-White contexts. So even though we should explore alternatives to ISS, such as restorative justice, these alternatives should both acknowledge and challenge implicit and explicit racial bias in schools.
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Jabbari are the authors of “Suspended While Black in Majority White Schools: Implications for Math Efficacy and Equity” in the latest edition of The Educational Forum. It is available for free during the month of March.
By Odis Johnson, Jr., and Jason Jabbari
Odis Johnson Jr., PhD, is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has faculty appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Education as Executive Director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and in the Department of Sociology at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Jason Jabbari is an Assistant Professor of research in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, where leads the education research portfolio at the Social Policy Institute. A former classroom teacher, school leader, and basketball coach, Jabbari continues to partner with a variety of community organizations and education institutions to help them understand and solve pressing social problems.
References
Jabbari, J., & Johnson Jr, O. (2019). The collateral damage of in-school suspensions: A counterfactual analysis of high-suspension schools, math achievement and college attendance. Urban Education, 0042085920902256.
Johnson Jr, O., & Jabbari, J. (2021, October). Suspended While Black in Majority White Schools: Implications for Math Efficacy and Equity. In The Educational Forum (pp. 1-24). Routledge.