Aaron Kupchick, professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, is the author of Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice (NYU Press, March 2025) addressing the question of why school punishment increases racial inequity and why school suspensions do more harm than good. The book looks at how the historic resistance to racial desegregation in schools led to the over-punishment of Black and brown students today. 

Kupchik takes readers to the root of the issue. Suspensions were not intended as a behavior management tool. Instead, they were designed to remove unwanted students from the classroom. Through statistical analysis and in-depth case studies of schools in Massachusetts and Delaware, Kupchik reveals how suspension rates skyrocketed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, serving as an unofficial means of removing Black children from newly desegregated schools. His groundbreaking research traces the legacy of these segregationist movements, demonstrating that school districts with more desegregation-related legal battles from the 1950s onward suspend more Black students today. Combining expert analysis with compelling, accessible prose, Kupchik makes a powerful case for the end of suspension and other exclusionary punishments. The result is a revelatory explanation of a pressing problem facing all children, parents and educators today.

Kupchik is the author of many books including Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear and The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment. His book Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adult and Juvenile Courts won the 2007 American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to Research in Criminology.