Abstract
This mixed-methods study explores the long-term consequences of school suspension on young women’s educational, socioeconomic, and personal lives during their emerging adult years. This study purposefully focused on a diverse group of young women, by race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality, who had not had significant interactions with the criminal justice system, to better understand if suspension had confining effects on young women’s lives in early adulthood. Drawing on Monique Morris’ idea of school-to-confinement pathways for women, “confinement” is conceptualized here as constraints on a young person’s choices and opportunities. Analysis and interpretation were guided by the tenets of critical race theory and life course theory.
We analyzed data from in-depth interviews with 16 participants ages 24-28 about their perceptions of whether and how their schools’ disciplinary environment and specific disciplinary experiences affected their understanding of their academic ability, personal identity, and sense of their future possibilities. The qualitative findings suggest that our participants perceived that past suspensions diminished their sense of belonging in school, thereby destabilizing their relationship with a potentially constructive foundational institution. Women who lacked a strong sense of belonging in their home lives were most likely to report acute harm in their prospects for education, employment, and stable housing.
With dependent variables selected in part to align with interview findings, the quantitative model examined the relationship between suspension and specific outcomes of educational attainment, income, unemployment, and homeownership. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the longitudinal fixed-effects analysis finds that suspensions are significantly related to young women’s chances of success on all of these measures into their early 30’s. Disaggregated by race, a complex interaction between suspension, race, and long-term outcomes, emerges, indicating a need for additional intersectional research into suspensions’ effects.