A while ago, Philadelphia Inquirer education reporter, Melanie Burney, shed light on a truth many folks are already aware of: Black and Latino students are disproportionately suspended from public schools in New Jersey. Ms. Burney cites the New Jersey Department of Education’s report on Student Safety and Discipline.
The report shows that New Jersey’s Black student suspension rate in the 2022-23 school year was 9%, whereas it was only 2.7% for white students. The Latino student suspension rate was 4.3%. In previous years dating back to 2017-2018—except the COVID year of virtual/hybrid instruction—the disparity was the same, particularly where Black students are concerned.
| Black Stu. Sus Rate | Latino Stu. Sus Rate | White St. Sus. Rate | |
| 2022-23 | 9% | 4.3% | 2.7% |
| 2021-22 (COVID) | 2.4% | 2.2% | 1.7% |
| 2020-21 | 8% | 3.7% | 2.6% |
| 2019-20 | 9.1% | 3.8% | 2.7% |
| 2018-19 | 8.9% | 4.1% | 2.7% |
| 2017-18 | 8% | 3.7% | 2.6% |
Each year, the Department of Education releases its School Performance Reports, providing statistics on student suspension rates. While discipline data in these reports are not disaggregated by race, one can ascertain the relation between race and discipline with the help of an Excel spreadsheet.
Looking at the 2022-23 school year, the higher the Black student population of a school district in seven South Jersey counties (Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem), the higher the suspension rate of that school district.
The data is clear: Black students in New Jersey, no matter the grade, are suspended at disproportionate rates. None of this is a revelation. Nationally, Black students—as young as preschool—are disproportionately suspended, referred to law enforcement, and arrested. That’s particularly true in southern red states.
Yet, while progressives lament the legacies of enslavement, the Confederacy, and Jim Crow that can be seen in public education systems throughout the South, they haven’t reckoned with similar legacies found in their blue states… because Blue Devils don’t only exist in North Carolina.
To reckon with this data is to reckon with these legacies in New Jersey.
Support for enslavement was so strong, that New Jersey was considered the slave state of the North. It was the last state to ratify the 13th amendment and rescinded ratification of the 14th amendment… re-ratifying it in 2003.
Like the Jim Crow South, New Jersey allowed for de jure segregation of its schools.
According to Marion Thompson-Wright, the superintendent of NJ state schools in 1863 sanctioned the legal segregation of schools. While integrated schools did exist in the state, “communities which had not already done so, but which were desirous of segregating colored children, were given a free hand to [do so].”
While an 1881 New Jersey law was the formal start of legal integration, the law did abolish segregated schools, according to Thompson-Wright. Segregation increased, particularly in South Jersey—the same South Jersey mentioned in the NJDOE’s report.
Today, New Jersey schools are some of the most segregated in the country. School segregation is most extreme in the entire northeast.
What do segregated schools have to do with the disproportionate discipline of Black students? According to the U.S. Dept. of Education Office of Civil Rights, students are more likely to be suspended at racially segregated, majority-nonwhite schools. School segregation, whether de jure or de facto is systemic racism and systemic racism doesn’t happen by accident.
To address disproportionate discipline in schools, stakeholders from all sectors must collectively wrestle with the truth that modern-day anti-Blackness stems from the anti-Blackness of the past. That history is at the root of the current racism Black children experience in the schools they attend. The white public often concerns itself with the horror and embarrassment of racist acts, rather than the designed oppression of systemically racist norms and policies that allow for their plausible deniability clothed in good intentions.
Schools are segregated because there’s residential segregation, resulting from government-sponsored policies; New Deal programs, and zoning ordinances that kept Black people out of places like Pennsauken and Cherry Hill
If we fail to get comfortable with the discomfort of our history, we’ll fail to chart a path forward. Black children will continue to be terrorized, the state will submit another report, and another article will be written… eliciting only more lip service.
Then again, systemic racism is intentional.
