‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, school discipline and racial disparity

The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.

Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said. 

His teacher turned and asked if that was a threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension. 

What the teacher heard as a threat was, for Marquan, an instinctive reaction, and he had failed to code-switch in that groggy moment.

“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “That was the most unfair thing.” 

In Ohio, Black students like Marquan are suspended for incidents like this far more frequently than their white peers. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000 suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of those dismissals have been for Black students, even though they make up only 17% of the public school population. Black students in Ohio are, on average, kicked out of classes for these offenses at four and half times the rate of white students.

A Hechinger Report analysis across 20 states found that in many of them – including Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island – Black students are suspended more often for infractions that can include dress code violations, talking back to teachers and being too noisy in class.