Understanding the Discipline Gap in Schools

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Over the last few years, racial disciplinary gaps—differences in the rates of adverse disciplinary outcomes such as school suspensions and expulsions between Black/Hispanic and white students—has received significant attention as a critical educational inequality issue in the US. Yet, no studies have estimated the magnitudes of these racial disciplinary gaps or characterized the geographical variation in these disciplinary gaps across the US in a consistent manner. Additionally, there is a dearth of information regarding the factors that drive these racial disparities.

I estimate the racial/ethnic disciplinary gaps—differences in the rates of adverse disciplinary outcomes such as school suspensions and expulsions between Black (Hispanic) and white students—using multiple measures of school disciplinary outcomes in nearly all school districts in the United States. I use data from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), between 2011 and 2013, and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) to examine the correlates of these racial disciplinary gaps. I show that, just like racial achievement gaps, racial disciplinary gaps also vary substantially, ranging from negative to greater than two standard deviations, across districts. However, unlike the correlates of racial achievement gaps, the extensive set of district-level characteristics, including economic, demographic, segregation, and school characteristics available from the SEDA, explain roughly just one-fifth of the geographic variation in Black-white disciplinary gaps and one-third of the variation in Hispanic-white disciplinary gaps.

Furthermore, I use a statewide, student-level, panel dataset of all Indiana public school students attending pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, from 2008-09 through 2013-14, to further understand the racial disciplinary gaps. I demonstrate that the racial disciplinary gaps, defined in a variety of ways and robust to a series of specification tests, emerge as early as pre-kindergarten and widen with grade progression. The magnitude of these disciplinary gaps attenuates by about half when we control for a rich set of student- and school-level characteristics. Further disentangling the disciplinary gap using a decomposition technique, I provide empirical support for the hypothesis that Black students receive a higher penalty in terms of the likelihood to get suspended/expelled than their white peers. Black students also non-randomly sort into more punitive disciplinary environments.

Finally, I also find a modest, statistically significant, positive association between racial disciplinary gaps and racial achievement gaps, even after extensive covariate adjustment. The results of this analysis provide an important step forward in determining the relationship between two persistent forms of inequality that have long plagued the US education system.

Author

• Maithreyi Gopalan, Indiana University - Bloomington