What Drives Racial/Ethnic Disparities in School Discipline?

• In Event: Racialized and Gendered Constructions of Ability and Behavior

Abstract

Objectives

Of the roughly 12% (or 6 million) of K-12 students suspended in or outside of school during the 2013-14 academic year alone, Black students were 3.2 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than White students and Latinx students were 1.3 times more likely (Oakes, Wells, & Jones, 1997). Suspension or expulsion is associated with lower achievement and higher risk of school dropout, arrest, and incarceration (Fabelo et al. 2011; Mittleman 2017; Morris and Perry 2016; Wolf and Kupchik 2017).

Nevertheless, the causes of these disparities remain unclear (Gregory, Skiba and Noguera 2010; Wald and Losen 2003). To help fill this gap, this study is the first to use an innovative video experiment to test the relative contributions of the three more widely-supported mechanisms of the Black-White gap in discipline.

Theoretical Framework

Prior research has suggested four main drivers of racial/ethnic disparities in school discipline: 1) between-school sorting (i.e., non-white students disproportionately attend majority-minority and economically disadvantaged schools, which are more punitive to all students) (Kinsler 2011; Welch and Payne 2010), 2) behavior differences (i.e., non-White students are worse-behaved than White students) (Petrilli 2012), 3) differential behavior perceptions (i.e., comparable behaviors are perceived as worse with non-White vs. White students) (Gilliam et al. 2016), and; 4) differential treatment/support (i.e., non-White students are sanctioned more harshly or provided less support for comparable behaviors) (Okonofua and Eberhardt 2015; Owens and Mclanahan Forthcoming).

There is a growing consensus that student “behavior differences” explain little of the Black-White discipline gap (Bradshaw et al. 2010; Rocque 2010; Skiba et al. 2014). But, the three other mechanisms are more widely supported but have not been tested together in a single study.

Data and Methods

Teachers are randomly assigned to view and textually describe identical misbehavior filmed in real classrooms with either a Black, Latinx, or White high-school aged actor. Based on an inductively developed coding scheme, I categorized the degree of “blaming,” “neutral,” and “empathetic” language in teachers’ textual descriptions of the behavior in the video they observed. I conducted an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to disentangle the relative contributions of the three more widely-supported mechanisms of racial/ethnic discipline gaps.

Findings

I found that teachers use more “blaming” language when describing identical misbehavior by Black/Latinx as compared to White students, pointing to “differential behavior perceptions” as a key driver of racial disparities in school discipline. Moreover, this disproportionate use of blaming language with non-White students is concentrated within minority and poor schools, also pointing to the important role of “between-school sorting.”

Significance

Understanding the relative contributions of the three main drivers of racial/ethnic disparities in discipline is essential for designing policy to reduce these disparities. For example, if discipline disparities are driven by teachers that perceive Black students more negatively than White students and thus levy harsher disciplinary sanctions for the same behavioral transgressions, then policies to address or adjust for this differential perception may be effective. A misalignment between policies and the actual processes driving discipline disparities may thwart even well-intentioned policy interventions.

Author

• Jayanti Owens, Brown University