Dr. Rachel Lissy

“Why do we suspend?” Over the past 3 years, as part of a workshop series on the historical roots of discipline policy in New York City (NYC), I have posed this question to hundreds of educators. It is seemingly not a hard question for them to answer. The responses come quickly and are remarkably consistent. We suspend as a form of discipline--to teach a lesson or set a boundary. We suspend to send a message--to other students, to parents, to teachers. We suspend to address dangerous behavior and keep kids and teachers safe. We suspend because the Chancellor’s Regulations require us to. These answers assume that there is some pedagogical rationale for suspensions, that there is some link between suspensions as a disciplinary tool and ideas and knowledge about what is best for student learning and development. The origin story of contemporary suspension policy in New York City clearly suggests otherwise. 

Prior to 1958  in New York City, there was no such thing as a formally sanctioned suspension from school in its current form. Students were pushed out, sent home early or even encouraged to be truant in all sorts of informal ways, but there was no policy allowing a principal to suspend a student's education or remove them from school temporarily.  Instead, if a principal was concerned about a student's behavior they could refer them to a hearing with an Assistant Superintendent. At the hearing, the Assistant Superintendent could decide to place the student in a special school for “maladjusted” students or refer them to the Children’s Court for placement. At no time would a student be outside of the supervision of a school or custodial institution. This system reflected the belief that schools and social welfare agencies had an in loco parentis responsibility for students and thus needed to act as surrogate parents by playing an active and intervening role in their moral development. All of this would change following a series of headline grabbing incidents beginning in September of 1957. 

On the morning of September 19, 1957, seventeen year old Maurice Kessler walked into an American History class at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn and tossed a bottle of lye. The bottle exploded, splattering the teacher and 18 pupils with corrosive liquid. The attack was apparently aimed at 16 year-old David Ozersky, who was reported to be partially blinded in the attack. Kessler was arrested and eventually found his way into the courtroom of Judge Samuel Leibowitz, a tough-on-crime judge who had long been critical of the city's handling of the "veritable procession of kids" in its criminal courts. Leibowitz, who according to the The New York Times, knew how to turn a trial into a "public spectacle,” concluded Kessler’s first hearing by calling for a grand jury investigation into crime "in and about schools." Subsequently launched in November of 1957, the grand jury investigation would provide a platform for Leibowitz to rail against the city’s "soft in the head" approach  to the problem of disorder in the city’s schools.

As the grand jury met, over the next few months a debate would play out in the press over the causes and solutions to the problem of juvenile delinquency in schools. On one side the grand jury would be joined by conservative politicians and frustrated teachers who called for punitive and coercive responses to prevent and deter unruly behavior. These groups argued that the Progressive Era’s emphasis on child psychology and mental hygiene had led to responses based in “psychiatric mumbo jumbo” that coddled delinquents and emphasized self-expression over traditional academic skills. On the other side, educators, academics and mental health professionals called for rehabilitative responses focused on treatment, guidance and the creation of nurturing relationships and child-centered environments. The solution, they asserted, was increased resources to support rehabilitative responses such as more guidance counselors, social workers and special clinical schools for the “emotionally maladjusted.”

The contours of this debate echoed longstanding tensions about school discipline policy that dated back to the founding of America’s public schools.  As I shared in my previous post, debates about school discipline are familiar and recurring in part because they function to obscure deeper tensions about the role and responsibility of schools as public institutions.  This is especially evident in the events surrounding the Kessler-Lye incident, because in 1957, in New York City, school discipline was actually not the most dominant or controversial issue facing the public schools.  Two years earlier, in the spring of 1955, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, New York City created a Commission on Integration. This Commission was initially heralded as “setting a pattern for desegregating schools that will serve as a model for the whole nation.” But when the commission released its recommendations in 1956, calling upon the Board of Education (the Board) to change zoning and teacher assignment policies, this idealistic optimism was punctured by the reality of white backlash.  

So in the fall of 1957 when Maurice Kessler, who was Black, attacked David Ozersky, who was white, the event did not happen in a vacuum. Opponents of integration seized on the Kessler-Lye incident as an opportunity to further articulate and legitimize their resistance. The grand jury, which was all white, was led by two men with vocal ties to conservative politics. In calling attention to crime and lawlessness in the city’s schools the grand jury was bolstering one of the central arguments of anti-integrationists: that schools populated by majority Black and Puerto Rican children were “Blackboard Jungles,” too dangerous to integrate. Leibowitz and the grand jury amplified these concerns by describing schools as "hotbeds of crime, violence and depravity" occupied by "wild animals," "psychopaths" and "hoodlums, rapists, thieves, extortionists, arsonists and vandals." One of the grand jury’s central recommendations was that police be stationed in schools because, they asserted, "these are not instances of childish misbehavior but acts of criminal violence in the basest degrees."

The grand jury placed responsibility squarely on the school system for its alleged inability to contain unruly youth and protect innocent students. This was in contrast to the response to previous incidents of school disorder in 1942, 1944, 1948 and 1955 in which blame had been placed on a range of factors from the influence of mass media and commercialized violence to comic books, absent social welfare services, and broken homes. Instead, in 1957 the grand jury focused all of its ire on the school district, describing school officials  as "utterly incapable," and blaming them for "this horrible, miserable mess that is now called our public school system." 

Judge Leibowitz warned the members of the Board of Education that they were "not a law unto itself," and accused them of thinking they were "so powerful with their connections and claques." The grand jury's criticism of the school system and its characterization of school officials as out of touch, inept, and untrustworthy elites echoed and affirmed similar critiques made in opposition to integration that presented it as a social engineering experiment beyond the capacity of the Board to execute. 

That the grand jury had ulterior motives behind its investigation was clear to integration proponents even at the time. The NAACP released a statement arguing that “what purported to be an investigation of the schools has turned out to be an attack upon the city's entire educational system with thinly veiled overtones of racial prejudice.” Harlem’s Councilman Earl Brown argued that someone who “had lived on the moon for 10 years could tell that the 'certain people' Leibowitz's grand jury foreman talks about in his press statements are Negroes."  Integration leader Reverend Milton Galamison decried the “alarmist school crime publicity,” asserting that “there hasn’t been more violence.” Instead Galamison argued that “when violence occurs in any school attended by Negroes the tendency is to exaggerate them in the press.”  

Galamison's statement was specifically in reference to the grand jury’s singling out PS 210, a middle school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. On January 22, 1958 the grand jury issued a presentment recounting a litany of recent incidents including two that occurred at PS 210. Soon after, the grand jury subpoenaed the school’s principal, George Goldfarb, to testify on three separate occasions. During his second visit, it was rumored that members of the grand jury told Goldfarb that he might be liable for the incidents at his school and thus could be indicted for his negligence. On the morning of January 28, 1958, instead of appearing to testify for a third time, Goldfarb made his way to the roof of his six-story apartment building, and jumped to his death. Goldfarb's suicide was presented in the media as yet another casualty of school disorder. Moreover, the incident was seized upon by Southern politicians and newspapers opposed to desegregation who argued the events in New York City were evidence of New Yorkers’ hypocrisy and naiveté regarding integration. Segregationists argued that school disorder was the direct result of integration efforts and the hostilities produced by racial mixing.

In the face of growing pressure, national scrutiny and ongoing criticism Mayor Robert Wagner convened a “midnight conference” in early February 1958 with the Superintendent and Board of Education leadership.   The Mayor demanded the Board take action while also declining to provide any additional funds in the city budget.  Desperate to calm the outcry, on February 7th 1958 the Board announced a dramatic shift in policy stating that “it is the policy of the Board of Education that any pupil who shall be charged with a violation of a law involving violence or insubordination shall be forthwith suspended from regular school attendance.” In a follow up broadcast to principals, Superintendent William Jansen clarified  that principals should immediately suspend “severe troublemakers and frequent truants,” along with any students awaiting trial, on probation or previously convicted in court. In a press release, the Board explained that “in such cases under existing conditions, no instruction can be provided for such pupils.”

It is important to appreciate the stunning departure from prior practice that the Boards’s announcement marked. As noted above, previously a student could only be suspended by an Assistant Superintendent, only after a hearing had taken place, and only if an alternative placement had been secured. By contrast, the Board's new policy allowed for what the New York Times described as the "wholesale suspension of troublesome pupils from the schools without any provision for their future care." The Board openly acknowledged that the policy might result in children being sent "right out into the street." Indeed, the next day, in what the New York Times described as a “crime drive,” it was reported that at least 644 students had been suspended in a single day. By the end of the 1957-1958 school year, education officials reported more than 1300 students suspended under the new policy. With only 219 suspensions reported in the first half of the 1957-1958 school year, the new policy resulted in more than a 600% increase in student suspensions.

Initially, the policy change was almost universally condemned. Teachers’ groups described the policy as “regressive,” and a “stopgap … brought about by basic deficiencies.”  Councilmember Earl Brown described the suspension as “wanton, irresponsible” and a “political face-saving measure.” In response to this criticism the Board of Education essentially disavowed its own policy. Board officials insisted the policy was an “emergency act” intended to “dramatize” the school problem. An editorial in the New York Times suggested that the policy change was “intentionally put forth as a measure of pressure” on the state to provide more funding. Clearly, the dramatic expansion of the power to suspend, originated not from some educationally thoughtful process, but rather as an effort to allay white fears and to compel the state to cough up additional funding.  In short, the origins were political and not at all pedagogical. 

This is just the beginning of the story. If the suspension policy’s only value had been purely political and anathema to the dominant values and expertise of educators, then principals did not have to utilize it. But, in fact, educators chose to pick up the new suspension policy and run with it. For example, one week after the policy change The New York Times would interview one principal of a junior high school with 1,200 students who had immediately suspended 53 students. In the years that followed the 1958 policy change, the number of students suspended each year would grow. Indeed, between 1958 and 2008 suspensions increased uninterrupted every year from 1,550 in 1958 to more than 74,000 in 2008.  

As suspensions grew, so too did a set of ideas and beliefs about their purpose and benefits. The origins of the principal’s authority to suspend--its roots in the city's resistance to integration, its initial political purpose to "dramatize" budget shortages and its hasty and ill-conceived roll out, all would be forgotten. Instead, the legitimacy and soundness of suspending students from schools would become taken-for-granted.  

Educators are surrounded by policy tools, relics from the past, that emerged out of particular moments in time. We pick up these tools and use them, often without awareness of where they came from. As we work to transform disciplinary practices that criminalize, harm and exclude children, it's important that we confront whose tools we have been using and the context from which they emerged. Moreover, as educators engage in complex and necessary conversations about difficult disciplinary decisions, they should also keep in mind how outcry about school disorder has historically been amplified and leveraged to legitimize resistance to integration. Debates about school discipline policy are rarely just about student behavior or safety or pedagogy--they are also (and sometimes instead of) conversations about the fraught racial politics of unequal schools. 

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Rachel Lissy, Ph.D., is a historian, consultant and capacity builder who work with educators to transform discipline policy and address racial inequity. This series draws from her personal experience as well as her dissertation, "From Rehabilitation to Punishment: The Institutionalization of Suspension Policies in Post-WWII New York City Schools."