Effects of Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Match on Exclusionary Discipline for Asian, Black, and Latinx Students

• In Event: Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Match, Teacher Training, and Student Academic and Disciplinary Outcomes in New York City

Abstract

Objective
Black and Latinx students are disproportionately subjected to exclusionary discipline in the form of out-of-school suspension (Carter, 2018; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010), and such suspensions have negative academic and social consequences (Author, 2018; Arcia, 2006; Hwang, 2018; Lacoe & Steinberg, 2018). Research has found that when Black students are assigned to higher proportions of Black teachers, they are less likely to receive exclusionary discipline (Lindsay & Hart, 2017); little prior research, however, has investigated whether these effects generalize to large, diverse urban school districts, or whether there are similar positive effects of student-teacher ethnoracial match for Asian or Latinx students. This study uses ten years of data on students and teachers in grades 4-8 in public schools in New York City to fill these gaps in our understanding, focusing on the following research question:

Does student-teacher ethnoracial matching impact the likelihood or severity of exclusionary discipline for Asian, Black, and Latinx students in a large, diverse urban school district?

Perspective
A significant body of research has found that students of color show improved academic outcomes when they are taught by teachers of similar ethnoracial backgrounds (Author, 2019). Relatively little quantitative research, however, has examined the effects of student-teacher ethnoracial matching on disciplinary outcomes for students of color (for exceptions, see Chin et al., 2020; Dee, 2005; Lindsay & Hart, 2017). This study builds on this work, as well as on prior work exploring the ways that teachers of color support their students of color, including through maintaining high expectations for these students (Foster, 1997; Gershenzon, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2009).

Methods
Data. Data for this study span ten years (2007-08 through 2016-17), and allow the linking of students with teachers in each year. Our final analytic sample includes 3,521,170 student-year observations, with roughly 70,000 unique teachers and 350,000 unique students each year. To measure exclusionary discipline, we use an indicator for whether a student was suspended during the school year; the length (in school days) of the suspension; and an indicator for whether the student received a more severe, district-approved suspension.
Empirical Methodology. We use student fixed effects regression to measure the impacts of ethnoracially matched teachers on exclusionary student discipline. This approach leverages longitudinal data to compare the likelihood of exclusionary discipline for students in years they are assigned different proportions of teachers of the same ethnoracial background.

Results
We find that in years when they are assigned greater proportions of ethnoracially matched teachers, Black and Latinx students in grades 4-8 in New York City are significantly less likely to be suspended from school. Asian students are also less likely to be suspended as their proportion of Asian teachers increases, although these estimates generally fall short of statistical significance.

Scholarly Significance
Our results suggest that diversifying the teacher workforce could be an important means for reducing disparities in student discipline in diverse urban settings such as New York City, but also suggest that learning from diverse educators’ approaches to discipline may also be a fruitful avenue for future research.

Authors

• Matthew Shirrell, The George Washington University

• Travis J. Bristol, University of California - Berkeley

• Tolani Britton, University of California - Berkeley