There is a moment that happens in schools, usually during a staff meeting, when a problem gets named and the room waits to see what happens next.
Recently, the problem was vaping and phones. The question underneath it was familiar: what are we going to do?
One suggestion that surfaced was suspending students found two-to-a-bathroom-stall, because someone heard one school was doing it. Logical on its face. Unusual bathroom occupancy is a reasonable indicator of something happening. But suspension for that? Two girls in a stall could be vaping. They could also be having a conversation that one of them is not ready to have in a hallway.
That is already a problem with the logic. And the deeper problem is the one we reach for suspension to solve in the first place.
Suspension works in a narrow band of circumstances. When a student poses an immediate safety risk to others, removal is necessary. When a situation requires a cooling period before anything productive can happen, a short absence can create that space. These are real uses. They exist for good reason.
But suspension does not teach. It relocates. The student goes home, disconnects from school for a day or two, and returns to the same peer group, the same social pressures, and the same circumstances that shaped the behaviour. Nothing in that sequence interrupted the pattern. We interrupted the student’s presence in the building, which is not the same thing.
The research on this is extensive and consistent. A decade-long study by the American Institutes for Research analyzed over 1.24 million disciplinary incidents in New York City public schools and found that more severe exclusionary discipline produced no reduction in future misbehaviour, not through behavioural change, and not through deterrence.¹ Students who were suspended were more likely to be suspended again in subsequent years, not less.² A longitudinal study published in Justice Quarterly found that suspensions increased subsequent offending, including assault, theft, and drug involvement, even after controlling for prior behaviour, and that repeated suspensions amplified this effect further.³
What suspension reliably does is give adults the feeling that something was done. The student is gone. A consequence was issued. The record reflects it. For institutions that need to demonstrate responsiveness, this is not nothing. But it should not be confused with change. Researchers at AIR noted that educators have very little information about the long-term consequences of their suspension decisions, and many genuinely believe removal makes schools safer and more conducive to learning.¹ The belief is understandable. The evidence does not support it.
The downstream data is worth sitting with. The Fabelo et al. Texas cohort study, the largest of its kind, tracked every 7th grader in Texas public schools over six years and found that 31% of suspended students repeated a grade and 10% dropped out. Among students with eleven or more suspensions, nearly half had contact with the juvenile justice system.⁴ A meta-analysis synthesizing 274 effect sizes from 40 primary studies identified exclusionary discipline as a meaningful predictor of increased delinquency, consistently, across subgroups, regardless of race or type of exclusion.⁵
There is also something worth saying plainly about the bathroom scenario specifically. The instinct to apply suspension there comes from a desire for a clear rule with a clear consequence. No ambiguity, no judgment call. But that clarity is purchased at the cost of context. Two students in a stall is not the same situation every time, and treating it as if it is will occasionally catch something it should not.
Schools that rely heavily on zero-tolerance frameworks do not actually have less ambiguity. They have moved the ambiguity upstream, into the decision about what the rule covers, and then pretended it is gone. The dramatic expansion of exclusionary discipline over recent decades was driven largely by zero-tolerance policies applied not to serious safety incidents, but to minor, nonviolent infractions: tardiness, insubordination, disrespect.⁶ The rule felt precise. The application was always a judgment call.
Students do not change because consequences are severe. They change when they have a consistent relationship with adults who notice them, when they develop some internal reason to want something different, and when their environment shifts in ways that make the old behaviour less necessary or appealing. Schools can influence all three of those things. Suspension addresses none of them. The Learning Policy Institute’s review of national discipline data puts it plainly: suspensions do not address any of the underlying reasons that may be leading to behavioural incidents, nor do they create opportunities for students to learn new approaches to communicating or resolving conflicts.⁶
This does not mean ignoring behaviour. Presence matters. Addressing things in the moment matters. The adult who walks past a bathroom entrance and keeps walking is making a choice, and that choice accumulates into a culture.
But the answer to that problem is not a harsher consequence chart. It is visibility, consistency, and the unglamorous work of being where students are.
Suspension should be a narrow instrument used when the situation genuinely requires it. It should not be the response we reach for because it feels decisive.
Feeling decisive and doing something that works are not the same thing. Schools that confuse the two spend a lot of energy demonstrating resolve and relatively little producing change.
References
American Institutes for Research. (2021). Less is more: The effects of suspension and suspension severity on behavioral and academic outcomes. AIR. https://www.air.org/project/less-more-effects-suspension-and-suspension-severity-behavioral-and-academic-outcomes
Disability Rights NC. (2025). Stop suspending students from school — it’s counterproductive. https://disabilityrightsnc.org/resources/stop-suspending-students-from-school-its-counterproductive/
Mowen, T. J., & Brent, J. J. (2019). School discipline as a turning point: The cumulative effect of suspension on arrest. Justice Quarterly, 36(6). https://phys.org/news/2019-07-school-suspensions-subsequent.html
Fabelo, T., Thompson, M. D., Plotkin, M., Carmichael, D., Marchbanks, M. P., & Booth, E. A. (2011). Breaking schools’ rules: A statewide study of how school discipline relates to students’ success and juvenile justice involvement. Council of State Governments Justice Center.
Noltemeyer, A. L., Ward, R. M., & Mcloughlin, C. (2015). Relationship between school suspension and student outcomes: A meta-analysis. School Psychology Review. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34117607/
Learning Policy Institute. (2024). Pushed out: Trends and disparities in out-of-school suspension. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/crdc-school-suspension-report