From [HERE] Racial disciplinary disproportionalities are a stubborn feature of U.S. public school systems. Based on the 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection, Black students comprised 15% of public school enrollment but accounted for 38% of total suspensions.

These discrepancies are particularly troubling for two broad reasons. First, suspensions are associated with a host of negative impacts on academic achievement, school engagement, and even outcomes in young adulthood (e.g., exposure to the criminal justice system, SNAP receipt, and college completion). Second, such disparities might reflect systematic biases in how schools handle student discipline and not underlying racial differences in student behavior.

Closing racial gaps in suspensions and reducing the use of suspensions in general thus has been a priority in U.S. education policymaking. The good news is that there has been much progress in recent years. The out-of-school suspension rate dropped from 6.9% of students in 2010 to 3.8% in 2018. Many states and districts have gone through discipline reforms that limit the use of suspensions for minor infractions and adopt nonpunitive strategies such as restorative justice. For example, California banned suspensions and expulsions of students in grades k–3 for minor misbehaviors, and Massachusetts requires schools to first use alternative forms of discipline, such as mediation and behavioral intervention, before considering out-of-school suspension as a last resort.

Despite these positive changes, however, racial disproportionality in school discipline persists. Why is it so hard to close such gaps? What are we missing? A close look at research articles and policy debates on this topic suggests that researchers and policymakers have been almost exclusively focusing on the end result of discipline—suspensions. In contrast, little attention has been given to the referral and reporting process that precedes the decision of whether, and for how long, to suspend a student. Educators have a great deal of autonomy about whether and how to respond to undesired student behaviors. It is these “moment-by-moment” interactions that ultimately lead to the observed racial disparities in school discipline. Thus, a deeper understanding of this referral-to-suspension process is a prerequisite for the design of programs and policies to reduce disciplinary rates and disparities.

NEW RESEARCH FROM CALIFORNIA

In a trio of studies, my coauthors and I investigate how the referring process and actions of educators expand racial disparities in school discipline. To do this, we use four years of administrative data (2016-17 to 2019-20) from a large and demographically diverse urban school district in California. What’s unique about these data is that they contain detailed information on all disciplinary referrals, regardless of whether they ultimately led to a suspension, as well as the individual who made and received the referral, the reason for the referral (i.e., type of incident), and the exact time, date, and location of the incident. These rich details allow us to depict a fuller picture of how racial disparities in school discipline emerge.

Finding #1: Both racial gaps in disciplinary referrals and systematic biases in the adjudication processes contribute to racial disparities in suspensions

In the first study of this series, we find that Black students are more than twice as likely to have received at least one disciplinary referral as their white peers in the same school. Thus, part of the racial gap in suspensions is due to underlying differences in the frequency of disciplinary referrals. However, the racial gap in referral propensities is not the sole reason for the racial gap in suspensions. We also find that the conversion rate of referrals into suspensions across all types of referrals is significantly higher for Black than for white students even after controlling for a battery of student characteristics, including their demographics, neighborhood conditions, and their prior achievement and behavioral outcomes (47% higher relative to the base rate of 0.038 for white students).

“We find a clear and consistent pattern in which Black and Hispanic students are punished more severely than white students who were involved in the same incident and had the same prior disciplinary histories.”

The elevated referral-to-suspension conversion rate for Black students could be driven by differences in student behavior, educators’ biases, or both. But it is challenging to tease out the mechanism because researchers almost never observe the underlying student behavior of an infraction. To more rigorously test whether racial bias or “intentional discrimination” exists in sentencing decisions, we compare the outcomes for students of different races who were involved in the same incident. We find a clear and consistent pattern in which Black and Hispanic students are punished more severely than white students who were involved in the same incident and had the same prior disciplinary histories. Specifically, Black students were about two percentage points more likely to be suspended than white students involved in the exact same incident (nearly doubling the base rate of 2.6% for white students). Thus, intentional discrimination appears to explain a nontrivial share of racial disciplinary disparity. [MORE]