Racial Disparities In School Discipline Research Articles

Enhancing Educational Equality: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Implementation and Impact of Restorative Justice Practices on Mitigating Racial Disparities in School Discipline Within Urban Public Schools in the United States

This research explores the implementation and impact of restorative justice practices in addressing racial disparities in school discipline within U.S. urban public schools. The study delves into the challenges, successes, and recommendations for sustainable change in policy and practice. Theoretical frameworks and case studies are employed to analyze the influence of restorative justice on school climate, student well-being, and academic outcomes. Identified challenges include resource limitations, resistance to change, inadequate training models, and time constraints. Recommendations encompass policy adjustments, professional development initiatives, continuous evaluation, community partnerships, integration with mental health support, and addressing cultural sensitivity.

Taking Note of Our Biases: How Language Patterns Reveal Bias Underlying the Use of Office Discipline Referrals in Exclusionary Discipline

The comments teachers write when sending students to the office have the potential to increase our understanding of how bias may contribute to longstanding racial disparities in school discipline. However, large-scale analysis of open text has traditionally had a prohibitive cost. Through natural language processing techniques, we examined over 3.5 million office discipline records from national samples of more than 4,000 schools for whether teachers’ linguistic patterns differed when describing incidents depending on the race/ethnicity and gender of the students. Results of such analyses consistently showed that teachers wrote longer descriptions and included more negative emotion when disciplining Black compared to White students, especially for Black girls. In conjunction with psychology of language theory, the patterns suggest that teachers may perceive and process student behavior differently depending on student identities. Implications of the findings and potential for research on naturally occurring language data in education are discussed.

Vicarious severe school discipline predicts racial disparities among non-disciplined Black and White American adolescents.

Racial disparities in school discipline may have collateral consequences on the larger non-suspended student population. The present study leveraged two longitudinal datasets with 1201 non-suspended adolescents (48% Black, 52% White; 55% females, 45% males; Mage : 12-13) enrolled in 84 classrooms in an urban mid-Atlantic city of the United States during the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 academic years. Classmates' minor infraction suspensions predicted greater next year's defiant infractions among non-suspended Black adolescents, and this longitudinal relation was worse for Black youth enrolled in predominantly Black classrooms. For White youth, classmates' minor infraction suspensions predicted greater defiant infractions specifically when they were enrolled in predominantly non-White classrooms. Racial inequities in school discipline may have repercussions that disadvantage all adolescents regardless of race.

Moving from pathology to politicized care: Examining Black school leaders' perspectives on school discipline

School discipline is a significant educational policy and equity issue in K-12 education in the United States due to well-documented racial inequality in students’ disciplinary outcomes and the deleterious effects of exclusionary discipline on academic and adult outcomes. The roles and approaches of school leaders in the production of racial inequality in exclusionary discipline warrant further inquiry. In this qualitative case study, we apply the theoretical lenses of politicized caring and internalized racism to 12 semi-structured interviews with Black principals and assistant principals in an urban emergent district in Southeastern U.S. to examine how Black school leaders make sense of and address racial disparities in school discipline. The findings illustrate that Black school leaders’ disciplinary perspectives and practices are complex with four major themes emerging: (a) deficit thinking and pathologization, (b) internalized racism, (c) politicized care as a disciplinary ideology and (d) politicized care in disciplinary practice. Uplifting the voices of Black school leaders reveals the pervasive nature of racism and the complex ways in which Black educators attempt to dismantle inequitable patterns. The findings highlight the need to create unique support for Black school leaders to enhance their disciplinary practices through mentorship, coaching and professional development.

Are We Moving the Needle on Racial Disproportionality? Measurement Challenges in Evaluating School Discipline Reform

Challenges in the measurement of racial disparities in school discipline are a significant barrier to identifying policy and programmatic reforms that are effective at closing gaps. This article reviews key measurement issues and presents a set of empirical analyses as an illustrative case study. Specifically, we reframe the interpretation of discipline data in light of initiatives designed to reduce racial discipline disparities. We also characterize common metrics and recognize several additional ones for use in discipline disproportionality outcome evaluations. Leveraging a statewide policy reform as an example, we report findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation, which demonstrated that the various metrics can point to differing conclusions. We conclude with proposed guiding principles for the selection and use of discipline disproportionality metrics in evaluations.

Linking Teacher Quality and School Discipline Disproportionality

The racial disparities in school discipline and lack of teacher diversity represent two pressing issues facing educational equity. While traditional measures of teacher quality center on experience and credentials, little extant literature situates teacher diversity as an aspect of teacher quality. To fill this gap, we explore how both teacher experience and racial diversity are associated with school-level student discipline outcomes, and how they vary by schools’ contextual factors. We find that while teacher diversity and experience predict both reductions in disciplinary incidents and consequences, only changes in the share of Black teachers a school employs are associated with reductions in the Black–White racial school discipline gap. We position our findings in the Diversity Intelligence and People as Technology frameworks and discuss implications for policy and educational human resources practices.

Contradictions as an entry into inclusive systemic design: Addressing racial disparities in the discipline at an urban middle school

In the United States, school disciple has been racialized. Youth from racially minoritized backgrounds receive exclusionary discipline more frequently and severely for more subjective reasons such as disrespect, excessive noise, and dress code violation in U.S. schools. The study presents how an urban school community in Wisconsin engaged in inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process, Learning Lab, to collectively examine and address racial disparities in school discipline. Learning Lab members (school staff, parents, and community representatives) engaged in root cause analysis behind disproportionality in their local context and identified the manifestations of the systemic contradiction (racial disproportionality) as dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts, and double binds in everyday practices of the school community. They collectively designed a new culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support system to address the systemic contradiction. We identified 194 discursive manifestations of contradictions in the 14 meetings of the Learning Lab. These manifestations stemmed from three main contradictions as tensions between components in the school activity system related to classroom management, school-community partnership, and behavioral support tools.

Completing the Circle: Linkages Between Restorative Practices, Socio-Emotional Well-Being, and Racial Justice in Schools

Mounting evidence demonstrates that exclusionary discipline practices like suspensions and expulsions have long-term negative socio-emotional, behavioral, and academic consequences for the students who experience them, with evidence of spill-over effects for nonexcluded students. Restorative practice has emerged as a promising alternative to punitive discipline approaches, yet evidence is mixed on whether it can improve academic outcomes or curb racial disparities in school discipline. In a new conceptual model, we argue that the full potential of restorative practice can only be reached when it is (a) operationalized more directly within a socio-emotional framework; (b) responsive to more significant mental health needs; and (c) informed by a multifaceted understanding of how racism contributes to discipline disparities, both directly through interpersonal biases and indirectly through structural oppression. A revised conceptual model based on evidence from the broader literature, original data analyses, and pilot intervention results is advanced.

Policing Black femininity: the hypercriminalization of Black girls in an urban school

ABSTRACT Studies have documented the ubiquitous racial disparities in school discipline. However, knowledge of the unique and complex disciplinary experiences of Black girls, shared from their own voices, remains under-researched. To better understand the school policing and ‘pushout’ phenomenon for Black girls, this qualitative study examines data which explore the resulting consequences of a fight between 30 Black female students. Our findings suggest that the hypercriminalization and subsequent punitive measures inflicted on these Black girls hindered their academic experiences and that despite the threat of exclusionary discipline sanctions, these young girls fought – not because they were bad – but out of necessity. Concluding, we discuss restorative approaches and explain how Circles can help support emotional healing and educational reintegration after moments of conflict.

The (In)Visibility of Race in School Discipline Across Urban, Suburban, and Exurban Contexts

Background/Context: Racial disparities in school discipline represent a long-standing injustice in U.S. schools. Students of color, particularly Black students, are systematically subjected to harsher school disciplinary actions compared with their peers. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the severity of the problem and the negative consequences of harsh punishment, particularly given that students who are disciplined are more likely to be forced into the complex nexus of education and incarceration. Focus of Study: In this study, we aimed to understand how different racial contexts in urban, suburban, and exurban schools shaped responses to and understandings about racial disparities in school discipline. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that centers the visibility and invisibility of race (Artiles, 2019) throughout the disciplinary cycle, this study was guided by two research questions: (1) What are the similarities and differences in educators’ and students’ understandings of racial contexts and racial disparities in school discipline across urban, suburban, and exurban school districts? (2) How do urban, suburban, and exurban school districts’ racial contexts shape educators’ responses to racial disparities in discipline? Research Design: This research was part of a larger mixed-methods research–practice partnership that aimed to understand racial disparities in school discipline and how to address them across varying school contexts in Central Virginia. The qualitative portion of the study included individual and focus group interviews and classroom observations. The findings reported in this article focus specifically on 50 individual and focus group interviews with teachers, leaders, staff, and students. Findings: Our findings demonstrate the ways race was made visible and invisible in responses to and understandings about racial disparities in discipline. This was evident in the ways deficit perspectives were racialized and how race-evasive perspectives and ideologies dominated educators’ responses to the problem. We found these responses were mediated by the racial contexts of each school. For instance, we learned that educators at the urban middle school with a majority of Black and Latinx students were the most willing to discuss the role of race and racism in shaping racial disparities in discipline compared with educators at the suburban and exurban schools. Educators at the racially diverse suburban high school focused on socioeconomic diversity and relied on deficit cultural explanations for poverty. Contrastingly, educators at the exurban school openly discussed its racial homogeneity with its mostly White students, and their language regarding racial disparities was laced with race-evasive terms and some racist perspectives. Across suburban and exurban school contexts, many educators adopted race-evasive and deficit rationales for disproportionality in ways that failed to consider the role of the school in disciplinary outcomes. We also found that students across the three school contexts were more willing than educators to discuss the role of race and racism in explaining disparities in discipline. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this study have important implications for how schools can respond more effectively to racial disparities in discipline. First, it is important that schools create policies and practices that provide clear guidelines to promote racial equity in discipline. Data should therefore be collected, shared, discussed, analyzed, and used to inform how to improve disciplinary practices and interventions at multiple intersections (e.g., by race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability) given research that demonstrates disproportionality in discipline emerges among students of color and multiply-marginalized students. Second, schools must critically examine how their everyday beliefs about race become enacted in practice and ultimately institutionalized, thereby granting privileges to dominant groups. Third, schools can benefit from including and engaging with students as they reform disciplinary procedures to address racial disparities. Ultimately, disrupting racial inequities in discipline requires responses that include engagement with race and racism in ways that attend to both individual beliefs and school policies and practices.

Equity-focused PBIS approach reduces racial inequities in school discipline: A randomized controlled trial.

We assessed the effects of a whole-school equity intervention implemented within a school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) framework on racial inequities in school discipline in eight elementary schools with inequitable referrals for Black students. The intervention involved assessing patterns of racial disparities in school discipline decisions and providing professional development on adapting school-wide behavior systems to improve cultural responsiveness through concrete strategies targeting the patterns. After consent and matching on existing levels of racial inequities, half of the schools were randomly assigned to receive the intervention. Analyses showed that schools receiving the intervention had significant decreases in racial disparities in school discipline and rates of office discipline referrals (ODRs) for Black students, while control schools had minimal change. Results are discussed in terms of improving equity in school discipline within multitiered systems of support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Enhancing School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Tier 1 core practices to improve disciplinary equity

Addressing racial disparities in school discipline is an urgent and widespread issue facing US schools. One approach to improve racial equity in school discipline practice is to enhance the contextual fit of empirically validated schoolwide practices. Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) is a widely implemented and research-validated approach shown to improve behavioral and academic outcomes, yet evidence suggests students of color remain disproportionately disciplined in schools implementing the SWPBIS framework to fidelity. Contextual fit is a core principle of SWPBIS, but in practice, schools may lack effective strategies to enhance equity using the framework’s tier 1 core practices. This article describes promising enhancements to universal school practices aimed at reducing school discipline disparities.

Estimating the Impact of Expulsions, Suspensions, and Arrests on Average School Proficiency Rates in Ohio Using Fixed Effects

Student removal became an increasingly utilized form of discipline since the implementation of zero-tolerance policies during the early 1990s. Evaluative studies have consistently found negative relationships between student removal and academic success. Majority of cases regarding student removal are for minor and non-violent offenses and literature in this field suggests that teachers’ biases and cultural misreadings widen racial disparities in school discipline and academic performance. Our study estimates the effects of suspensions, school-related arrests, and expulsions under zero-tolerance by exploiting within-school variation in school mean proficiency rates of Asian, Hispanic, Black, and White racial subgroups over a 3-year period. Our findings reaffirm consistent evidence that exclusionary policies have negative effects on academic outcomes. We also find evidence of differential effects by racial subgroup. The paper concludes with a discussion and policy implications.

A Matter of Measurement: How Different Ways of Measuring Racial Gaps in School Discipline Can Yield Drastically Different Conclusions About Racial Disparities in Discipline

Racial disparities in school discipline remain central to policy discussions around school discipline. Recent research points to the importance of how discipline disparities are measured for the conclusions that are drawn about the extent of the problem or whether such disparities are improving. This brief uses data from Maryland to demonstrate how the choice of metric of the Black-White discipline gap can drastically change conclusions about whether the gap is closing or widening as well as conclusions about whether particular districts or schools have high or low racial disparities in discipline. This brief shows how interpretations of the Black-White discipline gap can be drastically different when using different metrics. Implications for educational researchers and practitioners studying school discipline are given.

Minor infractions are not minor: School infractions for minor misconduct may increase adolescents' defiant behavior and contribute to racial disparities in school discipline.

Although minor misconduct is normative in adolescence, such behavior may be met with punishment in American schools. As part of a punitive disciplinary approach, teachers may give adolescents official infractions for minor misconduct-that is, a minor infraction-presumably to deter future problem behavior. This article investigates three arguments that challenge the wisdom of this assumption and considers the potentially detrimental effects of minor infractions: (a) minor infractions increase, rather than deter, adolescents' defiant behavior; (b) these effects are exacerbated among adolescents who are highly attached to school; and (c) teachers' punishment of minor misconduct may be racially biased, resulting in African American students receiving more minor infractions than White students. To test these hypotheses, 729 adolescents' school disciplinary records were analyzed over 1 academic year. Longitudinal multilevel analyses were conducted to assess (a) if receiving minor infractions predicted later increases in infractions for defiant behavior at the within-student level, (b) whether adolescents' attachment to school moderated this association, and (c) if a disparity existed between African American and White students' average level of minor infractions. Results indicated that minor infractions predicted subsequent rises in defiant behavior, and this link was exacerbated for adolescents who reported initially high levels, but not low levels, of school attachment. Furthermore, African American students received more minor infractions than White students, controlling for a host of risk factors for school misconduct. Findings are discussed in relation to American school discipline policies and African Americans' persistent overrepresentation in school discipline and the criminal justice system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Using an Embedded Mixed Methods Design to Assess and Improve Intervention Acceptability of an Equity-Focused Intervention: A Methodological Demonstration

Educators have shown reluctance to implement interventions aimed at improving racial equity in school disciplinary practice. Mixed methods were applied to assess and improve the acceptability of a new intervention designed to reduce racial disparities in school discipline. A descriptive concurrent parallel design was used to assess U.S. educators’ perceptions of the acceptability of the intervention. Quantitative findings from professional development workshops introducing the intervention to 118 educators were corroborated with qualitative findings from a separate sample of 4 teachers who implemented it in their classrooms. Quantitative findings indicated that the intervention was acceptable to a broad range of potential implementers, and qualitative findings were used to modify the intervention to further improve its utility. The strengths, limitations, and implications of embedding mixed methods approaches to assess school-based interventions are also discussed.

Tail, Tusk, and Trunk: What Different Metrics Reveal About Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline

There are substantial racial disparities in school discipline but little agreement on how best to measure them. The choice of metric can influence conclusions about the magnitude of racial discipline disproportionality and intervention effectiveness. This article describes 2 common (risk ratio, risk difference) and 3 relatively novel (standardized effect size, raw differential representation, discipline rate) approaches to evaluating racial disproportionality, with illustrations of their strengths and weaknesses. Its concludes with a discussion of the metrics and a recommendation that researchers and policymakers consider the raw number of students of color differentially disciplined, as among the easiest to understand, the most stable, and capturing the widest range of information. Even so, no metric captures all relevant aspects of disproportionality. Accordingly, researchers and policymakers should be deliberate in their specific aims in measuring discipline disproportionality and select a combination of metrics that provides information most responsive to their goals.

Persistently Harsh Punishments Amid Efforts to Reform: Using Tools From Social Psychology to Counteract Racial Bias in School Disciplinary Decisions

In response to concerns about overly harsh and racially inequitable school discipline, schools have introduced disciplinary reforms. However, even in schools where these reformative programs are present, many students continue to be subject to developmentally inappropriate discipline and striking racial gaps in disciplinary outcomes persist. Teachers’ implicit racial bias likely contributes to racial disparities in school discipline. In this article, I highlight two social psychological skills—perspective-taking and individuating—that have been found to reduce the effects of implicit bias in nonschool settings. I suggest that if developed in educators, these social psychological skills could also help reduce racial disparities in school discipline. I discuss implications for future research and policy.

Culturally Responsive School Discipline: Implementing Learning Lab at a High School for Systemic Transformation

Youth from racially minoritized communities disproportionately receive exclusionary school discipline more severely and frequently. The racialization of school discipline has been linked to long-term deleterious impacts on students’ academic and life outcomes. In this article, we present a formative intervention, Learning Lab that addressed racial disparities in school discipline at a public high school. Learning Lab successfully united local stakeholders, specifically those who had been historically excluded from the school’s decision-making activities. Learning Lab members engaged in historical and empirical root cause analyses, mapped out their existing discipline system, and designed a culturally responsive schoolwide behavioral support model in response to diverse experiences, resources, practices, needs, and goals of local stakeholders. Analysis drew on the theory of expansive learning to examine how the Learning Lab process worked through expansive learning actions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Department of Education's Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law

On March 8, 2010, one year into the Obama Administration, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a passionate speech in which he asserted (correctly) that African-American students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than white students. Although he did not mention it, it is also true that white students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than Asian American students and that male students are disciplined at higher rates than female students. In response to the racial disparity he identified, Duncan promised that the Department of Education would be stepping up its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years that followed, the Department of Education made good on that promise by opening numerous investigations based on statistical disparities. On January 18, 2014, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice jointly issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on school discipline in which they asserted that the law prohibits not only actual discrimination in discipline on the basis of race, but also what they called “unjustified” disparate impact. In Part I of this article, we point out that there are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin. The Department of Education has focused only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students. By failing to consider the other side of the coin — that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms — its policy threatens to do more harm than good even for the group Secretary Duncan was trying to help. In Part II, we discuss the Department of Education’s enforcement policy toward school discipline in greater detail, its over-reliance on racial disparate impact, and how that over-reliance pushes some schools to violate Title VI’s ban on race discrimination rather than honor it. In Part III, we elaborate on why school discipline is important and present evidence that the Department of Education’s policy has contributed to the problem of disorderly classrooms, especially in schools with high minority student enrollment. In Part IV, we discuss how aggregate racial disparities in discipline do not in themselves show the discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians that some proponents of the Department of Education’s policy claim. Rather, the evidence shows that they are the result of differences in behavior. In Part V, we explain why the Department of Education’s disparate impact policy is not just wrong-headed, but also unauthorized by law.