Large-scale analysis confirms Black students disproportionately punished in schools

A new investigation published in the journal AERA Open indicates that Black students continue to face higher rates of school discipline and punishment compared to their peers across the United States. The research team analyzed the most recent federal data on discipline for millions of students in public schools. They examined many forms of punishment, compared Black students to various groups, and applied different ways of measuring overrepresentation. The study’s main conclusion is that these disparities in punishment remain widespread and long-lasting, which may affect students’ academic engagement, sense of fairness, and life outcomes.

A previous major report from the Government Accountability Office, which looked at data from the 2013-2014 school year, highlighted significant racial disparities in school discipline. However, since that report, several important changes have occurred. Schools have implemented new policies aimed at reducing racial inequalities, and researchers have developed more sophisticated ways to measure these disparities. Given these changes and the availability of newer data, researchers felt it was important to re-examine the issue. They wanted to determine if Black students continue to experience disproportionate levels of punishment and exclusion in schools, and if so, in what specific forms and situations.

“I feel we are at an unanticipated and ironic inflection point. In 2014, the federal government, a few states, and many districts invested heavily in relationship-oriented practices to reduce racial disparities in exclusion and discipline. Since, we’ve learned that while these practices are hard to implement, they are well worth the investment,” explained study author Sean Darling-Hammond, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

“In my research, I’ve seen educational leaders deftly implement these practices and create inclusive and enriching educational experiences for students of all backgrounds; but I’ve also seen evidence that other schools that tried to implement these practices stumbled, faced backlash, and ultimately abandoned them. At the same time, new scholarship has surfaced just how deeply harmful exclusionary and punitive practices are for students’ developing brains and identities, and has demonstrated that schools that rely on these practices see student behavior worsen and school climates decline.”

“So we are at a point where we are increasingly aware that exclusion and punishment not only don’t work, but are harmful; and yet we are disinvesting in efforts to avoid related racial disparities,” Darling-Hammond said. “My goal with this research was to contextualize this disinvestment and ascertain if disparities endure and, if so, determine where they are most severe. And my hope was that doing so might help us invest in policies that can help steer us back towards equity.”

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The researchers gathered and analyzed data from the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Schools submit information that includes the number of students who receive in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, corporal punishment, referrals to law enforcement, and school-related arrests. The research team focused on data from the 2017–2018 school year, but they also checked information from the 2020–2021 school year to see if pandemic-driven changes might have shifted patterns.

Their method involved calculating how often each type of punishment happened to Black students and comparing those figures to the rates for other students. They looked at multiple ways of defining overrepresentation, including differences in risk and ratios of risk, and also broke the data down by student characteristics such as gender, school level (elementary, middle, high), and school poverty level. This approach yielded over one thousand different comparisons of Black students to their peers.

The study’s findings revealed a consistent pattern: Black students are overrepresented in school discipline across nearly all measures and categories examined. Out of the 1,581 estimates generated, 99% indicated that Black students experience disproportionately high rates of punishment. The only exception was in the specific instance of corporal punishment for preschool children, where Black preschoolers experienced slightly less corporal punishment than their comparison groups. However, even for preschoolers, Black children were overrepresented in other forms of punishment like out-of-school suspensions and expulsions.

Across all types of punishment, comparison groups, and student groups, the researchers found clear evidence of Black student overrepresentation. When comparing Black students to White students specifically, the analysis showed that Black students were significantly more likely to experience each type of punishment. For example, Black students were approximately 3.6 times more likely to be suspended out of school, 2.5 times more likely to be suspended in school, and 3.4 times more likely to be expelled compared to White students. These disparities were evident even at the preschool level and continued throughout all grade levels.

“Exclusion and punishment in school is incredibly harmful, and Black students are far more likely than their peers to experience every form of exclusion and punishment,” Darling-Hammond told PsyPost. “This is true across basically every school context–even in preschools and especially in alternative schools. And it’s true for virtually every student population–for girls, for boys, for special education students, for wealthy students. No matter how you slice it, Black students are being punished and excluded more.”

Interestingly, the study found that some of the most pronounced disparities occurred in wealthier schools and in alternative schools. In wealthier schools, Black students were significantly more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, and expulsions. In alternative schools, the disparity was particularly stark for corporal punishment, with Black students being over 15 times more likely to experience physical punishment compared to White students in the same setting.

“I was quite surprised by the scope of racial disparities in expulsions in wealthier schools,” Darling-Hammond said. “The earned wisdom is Black students facing intersecting axes of poverty and racism will have the worst outcomes. However, Black students in wealthier scholastic contexts are actually more likely to face the most permanent exclusion — expulsion — which may indicate that some wealthy schools have adopted practices of pushing out Black students.

“The lifelong risks that attend an expulsion are extreme, so this suggests the need to provide guidance to wealthy schools to ensure they have policies and practices that avoid this stark outcome and, more importantly, that they have policies and practices that allow teachers to form the kinds of positive relationships with Black students that make an extreme outcome like expulsion unthinkable.”

Like all studies, this one has some limitations. The investigators relied on federal data that only track whether a student received a specific punishment at least once during the school year, rather than how many times it happened or whether students experienced multiple forms of punishment in combination.

There are also unanswered questions about individual student backgrounds and how much local policies might differ across regions. The authors recommend that future research try to unpack how and why the largest gaps appear in certain environments, like wealthy schools or alternative schools. They also suggest that additional studies could follow students across multiple school years to see whether repeated or combined punishments create even bigger challenges for Black youth.

“This research precisely documents racial disparities in exposure to exclusionary and punitive practices in a variety of contexts,” Darling-Hammond explained. “It opens up avenues to explore why such extreme disparities emerge in certain contexts (for example, in alternative schools, and in wealthier schools) and what we can do to combat the most extreme disparities. And it opens up avenues to explore what the impacts of these disparities might be over the life course.”

“Recent research has demonstrated that exposure to suspensions is related to the development of mental health issues later on. Given this, we can imagine how the mental health landscape of Black adults might shift if there had been parity in rates of exclusion and punishment. Or we can imagine how the mental health landscape of the next generation might shift if we achieve parity now. I believe these kinds of possibilistic questions can engender potent aspirations.”

The study, “No Matter How You Slice It, Black Students Are Punished More: The Persistence and Pervasiveness of Discipline Disparities,” was authored by Sean Darling-Hammond and Eric Ho.