Race, Parenting and School Punishment

• In Event: School Discipline and the Importance of Context

Abstract

In recent years, criminologists have paid increasing attention to the problem of excessive use of exclusionary school punishment, particularly its racially disproportionate use. While we now have a good understanding of the harms of exclusionary school punishment, we still know relatively little about the context in which it occurs. One possibility is that parenting influences school punishment, either at the individual or school levels. In this paper we explore whether and how parenting might mediate, and thereby help explain, the relationship between an individual student’s race/ethnicity and his/her risk of school punishment. We find that parenting matters, in that students with uninvolved parents are at greater risk of suspension, but that this fails to mediate or moderate the effect of race on likelihood of suspension. Further, certain parenting styles can put Black students – but not others - at even greater disadvantage.

Authors

• Aaron Kupchik, University of Delaware

• Thomas Mowen, University of Wyoming

• Akiva Liberman, Urban Institute