Abstract

Excerpted From: Ananda Deacon, Interrupting Classroom “Banishment”: How Re-Imagining Our Amendments Can Disrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline, 61 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 723 (Summer 2026). (Full Document)

“[T]he child receives the worst of both worlds ... he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children.”

The United States Supreme Court lamented the plight of children in its Gault decision, a seminal case that established several juvenile rights in legal proceedings, including the right to notice, the right to counsel, and the right against self-incrimination. And yet, the underlying justification for Gault--a lack of protection of youth in the legal system--remains unaddressed at its core. Black students are four times more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled by the age of nine, and queer youth of color are suspended at rates 1.5 times higher than youth who do not share those identities. In the legacy of Gault, the Supreme Court is called upon to expand constitutional protections before children are thrown into the swirling waters of the juvenile detention system.

Imagine: You are back in your fourth-grade classroom, sitting at your desk and talking to your friend. Your teacher yells for you, and only you, to leave the classroom. All eyes are trained on you. You were not given a warning to stop talking and have never been sent out of the classroom before. You try to ignore the whispers from your peers as you exit the room and begin the long walk to the principal’s office. You wipe your damp cheeks before anyone can see, refusing to be humiliated further. As you approach the principal’s office, you think to yourself, I hate it here. Many children have experienced being singled out in this way, but minoritized students who experience this initial moment of isolation are at increased risk of future informal classroom removal.

This Note explores how the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments can be reinterpreted to establish preventative measures that deter school officials from disproportionately punishing minoritized students for subjective offenses. Specifically, it focuses on minoritized youth--Black, brown, and queer youth in K-12 education. These groups are among the identity groups that are at the greatest risk of falling victim to the insatiable maw of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Part I examines the current landscape of external and internal factors that illustrate how the effects of exclusionary discipline are felt more acutely by minoritized children. Part II uses case studies to evaluate the limited Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment legal remedies available to minoritized children. Part III presents the case to reimagine the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments with the greatest potential to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline by slowing the rate of exclusionary discipline. First, a student being sent out of the classroom should qualify as a seizure subjected to a reasonableness standard under the Fourth Amendment. By adopting a behavioral realist approach--one that anticipates implicit bias in school decision-making--the Supreme Court can create a higher reasonableness standard that teachers must satisfy before banishing a child from the classroom. Second, proving a claim under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause should not require a showing of “intentionality,” as it creates a high bar for student plaintiffs and allows for the unintentional harms of implicit bias to remain unchecked. Alternatively, if intentionality must remain to prevent flooding the legal system, the definition of intent should be revised to reflect modern conceptions. Finally, by drawing on the reasoning behind Goss v. Lopez, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause can encompass any form of exclusionary discipline, even temporary instances, as a deprivation of liberty that grants a student additional and standardized procedural steps.

This Note also examines the barriers to implementing these desired changes, such as precedent that delineates the circumstances under which judicial interference in schools occurs and the judiciary’s lack of incentive to enact these changes. Despite implementation challenges, these considerations remain valuable as a bandage solution to the problem of school-related punishment experienced by minoritized youth every day.

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“The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools,” yet students do not enjoy the full benefits of constitutional protections. Although precedent establishes that students do not “shed their constitutional rights ... at the schoolhouse gate,” they shed enough of those rights to leave them with limited recourse to remedy injustice. Cases such as Gault have granted children protections in the juvenile legal system, while cases such as Goss and T.L.O have provided necessary protections within schools. However, the harms that sparked these cases remain largely unaddressed, requiring reinterpretations of constitutional rights to provide preventative measures and student-plaintiff-friendly standards. Relying solely on the interpretations of the Founders--who believed that children were subservient to them, that women’s rights should be limited, and that Black people were not citizens-- has stifled our progress as a society. The interests of large swaths of people living in this country were not considered during the country’s creation, and it is in our collective best interest to use the founding documents as tools that incorporate the realities of our current multicultural landscape.

Now is the time to explore a new frontier of youth justice that focuses on our most vulnerable youth and interrupts the cycle before the child is placed on the precipice of the pipeline. These reinterpretations can open the door to a future where the founding documents of this country work for all its citizens, if only we are brave enough to turn the handle.