Disproportionate Punishment in Schools: Racial Threat or Racial Control?

• In Event: Ecological Variation in Hate Crime Offending, Formal Responses, and Group Threat Processes

Abstract

A significant body of research has shown that racial minorities are disproportionately punished in primary and secondary schools. Most prior work has examined this relationship under the racial threat framework, finding that racial threat adequately explains part of the relationship between student race and punishment. However, prior work has not considered the race of teachers, despite its theoretical importance in racial threat. Additionally, some authors have proposed the racial control framework to better explain the association between racial composition of a school and the behavior. The present study tests the theoretical assumptions of each theory to determine which theory best explains disproportionate school punishment. Furthermore, this work examines the impact of teacher race on disproportionate punishment, both to establish novel findings as well as to assist with theory comparison. The findings suggest that, when a larger percentage of teachers in a school are non-White, disproportionate punishment of minority students is lessened. Additionally, the racial control framework provides a better (and more inherently testable) explanation of the relationship between student racial composition and disproportionate punishment. Future work should apply the racial control framework in other contexts to determine its ability to explain other relationships.

Author

• Matthew Vanden Bosch, Florida State University