Threat and Punishment: Racial Context and School Discipline Disparities

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: School Discipline Disparities: Understanding How and Where Gaps Emerge and Efforts to Reduce Gaps

Abstract

A wide range of studies find evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in every step of the school discipline pathway. These disparities remain even after accounting for factors like student behavior and demographic characteristics. Much of the literature in sociology and education focuses on individual-level explanations of these disparities. These explanations fall short by overlooking heterogeneity across race/ethnic groups and the system of social processes that produce disparities. This study addresses these gaps by asking how racial context is related to disparities in discipline rates for Black and Latinx students across the nation. I specifically make use of racial threat theory to explore heterogeneity in the patterns and processes of racial disparities in school discipline. I use national data on school discipline rates by race and gender from the Civil Rights Data Collection administered by the Office of Civil Rights for the 2013-14 school year. With the use of multilevel modeling, I test the predictions of racial threat theory by exploring how symbolic, economic, and political threat relate to ethno-racial disparities in school discipline rates. I explore patterns by race/ethnicity and gender for Black and Latinx students and the two most common forms of discipline: out-of-school and in-school suspensions. Findings suggest that school and district level factors explain variation in racial and ethnic gaps in school discipline. Specifically, preliminary results point to a significant relationship between symbolic and economic threat and ethno-racial gaps in out-of-school suspensions. Findings also suggest heterogeneity in discipline disparities by both race/ethnicity and gender. Understanding this interplay between unequal school and district contexts and observed patterns of discipline disparities has both sociological and policy relevance. Sociologically, such an analysis helps us understand how social behavior is grounded in a particular time and larger patterns of relationships. In terms of education policy, contextual relationships imply distinct points of intervention than do individual-level processes. By shifting the lens to the contextual determinants of school level disparities for a range of discipline outcomes and student subgroups, this work provides a more complete picture of the variation and nature of school discipline disparities.

Author

• Victoria Elyse Sosina, Stanford University