Publication Date

2026

Abstract

Notwithstanding the decision in Brown v. Board of Education formally ending educational segregation and more than two decades of state reform, the legislative landscape protecting minoritized children from the structural violence of exclusionary school discipline has dramatically shifted in less than five years. From the passage of state “Teacher’s Bills of Rights” to mandatory expulsions, rescissions of prior protections, and new categories of removal, a retrenchment of anti-inclusion legislation—and its corollary, educational carcerality— has occurred. While studies of other forms of legislative retrenchment in K–12 public schools, such as anti-Critical Race Theory and Don’t Say Gay laws, literacy bans, and anti-transgender measures, have drawn sharp attention to the purpose and functionality of such laws to erase, exclude, and punish children, unaccounted for within this literature is the simultaneity of new bills that physically segregate children from their public school classrooms and communities. This Article addresses that gap and introduces the first systematic review of regressive state exclusionary school discipline bills proposed from 2020 to 2025.  Results of the study include aggregated and disaggregated analyses of fifty-six bills across twenty-four states and reveal a substantial rise in exclusionary school discipline, producing a net result of heightened risk for punishment and structural violence against children as early as age five.

Document Type

Article

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