Forgotten Histories: A Systematic Review of Research on Black-White Disparities in Exclusionary School Discipline

• In Event: "We Are Our History”: Historicizing Current Black-White Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline

Abstract

Despite a plethora of research on Black-white racial disparities in exclusionary school discipline, we know little about the extent to which recent research acknowledges or engages the long history of this issue. Recent literature reviews on racial disparities in exclusionary school discipline (e.g., Welsh, 2018) have not taken stock of the current state of the field’s engagement with the historical antecedents of today’s large disparities between Black and white students in school discipline, which date back to the mid 20th Century. To assess the extent to which scholars engage this history, we conducted a systematic literature review (Alexander, 2020) in which we investigated the “origin stories'' recounted about Black-white racial disparities in exclusionary school discipline in over 200 peer-reviewed research articles published between the years 2000-2022. We found that nearly 66% of articles included an explicit recognition of the historical linkages of today’s discipline disparities, Most articles, however, limited the historical timeline to the 1990s. Only 10% of articles traced this history back further to that of school desegregation or slavery, and 33% of articles included no origin story at all. Thus we estimate that the1990s origin story of “zero tolerance” has eclipsed other relevant histories, histories which have profoundly shaped racial discipline disparities today and require further exploration. Based on these findings, we encourage school discipline scholars to expand the origin story of Black-White racial disparities in exclusionary discipline to include the era of Black-White school desegregation and the legacy of slavery in framing, conceptualizing, and advancing inquiries on this issue. We include examples of the four origin stories and identify scholarly gaps and implications for future research.

Authors

• Kathryn E. Wiley, Howard University

• Joshua Middleton, Howard University