Approaches to school discipline that ignore race are incomplete. Schools need data and strategies to promote equity and learning for all students.

It’s well known by now that racial disparities in discipline are linked to disparities in achievement for Black students as well as decreased student engagement and more student absences (Chu & Ready, 2018; Noltemeyer, Ward, & Mcloughlin, 2015; Sorensen, Bushway, & Gifford, 2022). Nationally, Black students consistently receive discipline referrals at higher rates than their peers and receive harsher punishments for the same infractions (Barrett et al., 2021; Liu, Hayes, & Gershenson, 2022; Losen et al., 2015). In the longer term, racial disproportionality in discipline is also associated with increased exposure to and experiences with the criminal justice system and lower college attendance and completion (Bacher-Hicks, Billings, & Deming, 2019; Davison et al., 2022). Yet despite the evidence, many educators struggle to see or acknowledge racial disparities in discipline.

We engaged in a research-practice partnership (Farrell et al., 2021) during the 2017-18 school year that included observations and interviews with 26 educators from three secondary schools with different student demographics that showed evidence of racial disproportionality in their discipline practices (Siegel-Hawley et al., 2019; Tefera et al., 2022). Oak Middle School was in a low-income urban community serving a majority Black and Latina/o/x student population. Maplewood High School was a suburban high school serving a racially diverse student population. And Middletown High was an exurban/rural high school serving an almost exclusively white student population. (We use pseudonyms for all three schools.) At Maplewood and Middletown, almost all of the educators we interviewed were white, and only one at each was Black; however, at Oak half of the participating educators were white and half were Black.

In all three schools, a Black student was two to 3½ times as likely to be suspended as all other students across all three schools. In statistical terms, this is a relative risk ratio of 2.0-to-3.5 (Nishioka, Shigeoka, & Lolich, 2017). While all three schools struggled with racially disproportionate discipline, educators assessed the scope, severity, and root causes of the issue differently across the sites.

We know from the research on racial inequities in school discipline that context matters (Kramarczuk et al., 2021; Tefera et al., 2023). The racial makeup of schools and communities is related to the racial disparities in discipline. Educators tend to rely more on exclusionary discipline like out-of-school suspensions in racially segregated schools of concentrated poverty, but racial disproportionality in discipline persists across all school contexts. Broader societal narratives about race and culture influence what happens within schools, including the ways educators respond to efforts to confront discipline disproportionality. Relatedly, many widespread discipline interventions and practices introduced to address disparities do not consider race, culture, and context, issues obviously central to racial disproportionality in discipline.

Race-evasive interventions and practices

Race-evasive discipline policies and practices do not consider the role of race and racism, while race-conscious school discipline policies or practices do. Although all schools in our study adopted written policies and practices to address discipline disparities (Siegel-Hawley et al., 2019; Tefera et al., 2022), we found they were largely race-evasive and did little to disrupt racial disparities. Leaders and educators pointed to practices they believed directly addressed disparities, including interventions such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), professional development, and data collection. These practices, however, were largely symbolic and race-evasive (Bowker & Star, 1999; Tefera et al., 2022), which contributed to districts’ ongoing issues with discipline disparities.

Whether and how school leaders and educators discussed and engaged in race-conscious policies and practices differed across contexts. For example, educators and leaders at Oak Middle School, a predominantly Black and Latina/o/x school in a low-income urban community, were less likely to assume poverty explained the “bad behavior” of students. They were the most willing of the three schools to discuss the ways broader racial disparities in the community affected the resources available in schools to grapple with inequities, including in discipline. On the other hand, educators in the suburban district of Maplewood and exurban district of Middletown were less willing to discuss race and racial disparities. All three schools attempted to address disproportionate disciplinary practices to some degree, but those efforts were generally race-evasive, faced resistance, or failed to acknowledge the problem.

The limitations of PBIS at Oak

PBIS — an intervention designed to provide varying levels of support based on students’ needs — has shown promise in reducing discipline infractions in schools (Bradshaw, Mitchell, & Leaf, 2010). Although PBIS was used in all three schools, it was relied on most heavily as the primary response to discipline in Oak. However, our discussions with Oak educators illuminated shortcomings of PBIS and similar programs. One school leader felt that the program’s emphasis on rewarding students for what educators deemed good behavior was a positive shift, not only because it helped decrease referrals but also because it contributed to “changing the mindset of teachers from punitive to rewarding good behaviors.” However, this same leader said that while implementation of the program seemed straightforward, the process was fraught with inconsistencies and challenges, particularly in the failure to address the complex and multiple needs of their diverse students.

Notably, one counselor from Oak discussed how the intervention overlooked key cultural aspects influencing students’ lives. She pointed to the growing number of immigrant and migrant students who faced disciplinary issues after leaving their home countries. These students were taken away from their homelands and brought into an “incredibly difficult situation,” she said. A race-conscious or culturally responsive approach to PBIS would have included consideration of language supports, social services, or school climate (Bal & Perzigian, 2013). But Oak took a one-size-fits-all disciplinary approach to PBIS that overlooked students’ complex racial, cultural, linguistic, and immigration contexts. Despite Oak educators and leaders pointing to the limitations of PBIS, it remained their primary response to addressing discipline disparities.

Inconsistency and pushback at Maplewood

The most racially diverse school, Maplewood High School, offered professional development on social-emotional learning (SEL) — which included strategies for developing students’ skills to manage emotions, feel empathy, and work well with others — as a key response to racial disparities in discipline. A leader at Maplewood explained the value of SEL in this way:

I would make a rule that every school has some kind of social-emotional learning . . . We need, you know, the emotional IQ. How do you interact appropriately with adults? How do you, you know, if you disagree with somebody, how do you do that in a way that can help the situation instead of harming it? More and more I’m seeing kids who have emotional needs or have mental health issues, and we’re not equipped to deal with it.

Indeed, students’ holistic needs, including their social and emotional well-being, are increasingly recognized as important aspects of schooling (Ginwright, 2015; McArthur & Lane, 2019). It was clear that Maplewood believed professional development focused on SEL was an important response to racial disproportionality in discipline.

At the same time, given the school’s predominantly white teaching force, discussions regarding SEL needed to be attuned and responsive to students of color. This is important because students of color made up nearly half of the student population. Adopting practices such as SEL without considering students’ racial and cultural backgrounds can uphold white racial and cultural norms and overlook students’ cultural differences. Additional professional development at Maplewood did include discussions about how racial and cultural biases contributed to inequities in discipline. However, our interviews with Maplewood leaders revealed that many educators resisted professional development on the topic. The resistance appeared to some to fall along generational lines. One teacher shared that “there was a lot of pushback” and that much of it came from “the veteran teachers who are like in their late 50s, 60s.”

Additionally, educators often reported that professional development lacked any specific pragmatic tools for handling discipline. Many teachers felt that PBIS and other discipline models had not included “steps on how to handle” challenging behaviors. Others found interventions confusing or not clearly aligned with addressing students’ behavior, which contributed to lack of consistency. Educators were unsure of which protocols to follow, which complicated their ability to address disparities.

Data gaps at Middletown

Middletown High School, located in a predominately white middle-income exurban community, discussed the beginnings of adopting PBIS but did not rely on any specific interventions or professional development related to racial disparities in discipline. The school leadership had just begun tracking discipline data by race. One educator expressed skepticism that disproportionality exists, telling us, “I’ve never looked at numbers for it, so I could be completely wrong, but it doesn’t seem that way.” We also learned that existing discipline data were shared irregularly and often limited to the leadership team or subset of teachers focused on discipline.

The lack of data-sharing contributed to educators’ doubts about whether discipline disparities were in fact an issue. Addressing discipline disproportionality requires acknowledgement that it exists, which requires ongoing data collection. Sharing data can help elicit buy-in from educators who are integral to disrupting disparities.

Recommendations for addressing racial discipline disparities

Across schools, our findings show that the adoption and use of interventions, professional development, and data to address racial disparities in school discipline is complex. Responses to disparities vary according to schools’ and leaders’ organizational capacities, resources, cultural norms, and values. In our study, all of these factors shaped schools’ interventions, professional development, and data use. Across all three schools, we saw some reluctance to engage in explicit discussions of the ways race and racism impact disparities in discipline, although the extent and nature of the reluctance varied. To counter these trends, we offer specific recommendations.

What district leaders can do

Because acknowledging the problem is an important first step, leaders should use student data systems that allow schools and districts to collect and analyze discipline referrals, infractions, and consequences by race/ethnicity and other student subgroups (e.g., disability and multilingual learners). Once they have this information, they can equip school administrators with the knowledge and resources to meaningfully engage with it. For example, administrators should be trained on data collection, analysis, and reporting strategies to lead their school communities in critical conversations (Bertrand & Marsh, 2021).

In addition, district leaders need to fund and support professional development about race-conscious disciplinary practices that are intended to reduce racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. These sessions should be hands-on and held consistently throughout the school year.

What school leaders can do

At the school level, leaders should regularly and widely share and analyze discipline data in partnership with educators to:

• Demonstrate disparities.
• Discuss needed race-conscious and culturally relevant interventions.
• Elicit input from educators, parents/caregivers, and students on how to address disparities.

Youth, parents/caregivers, and educators can come together to analyze the disciplinary data and develop culturally responsive and sustaining behavioral support systems to disrupt any disparities that they find.

When adopting interventions, leaders should be well-informed about the benefits and drawbacks of the discipline policies and work toward adopting race-conscious policies, providing practical and ongoing guidance regarding those policies, and ensuring that discipline practices are implemented consistently across classrooms.

What teacher preparation programs can do

To prepare future educators, schools of education can develop and teach curricula that prepare teachers and leaders for understanding and engaging with the racial, social, cultural, historical, and political contexts surrounding schools. Curricula for aspiring teachers and leaders should include race-conscious data literacy. Researchers at the university level can help by studying racial disparities in education and sharing what they’re learning with districts and schools.

What teachers can do

Teachers can gain a clearer understanding of disparities in their schools by reviewing any district-, school-, and classroom-level discipline data by race/ethnicity, language, disability, and other key identity markers, including teacher referrals by race/ethnicity. They should regularly attend discipline-oriented professional development sessions, work to interrogate their own implicit biases, and reflect on how their biases influence day-to-day interactions with students and how that might show up in the data.

As the educators who have the most consistent and ongoing contact with the students, classroom teachers should support students who raise concerns about racially inequitable discipline. They can also regularly advocate for student and family voices to be included in the review, revision, and adoption of disciplinary practices and policies.

What students can do

When they notice inequitable treatment of students in their school, they should use their voices and advocate for change. Places to start include:

• Expressing the challenges and opportunities regarding school discipline to educators and leaders regularly.
• Requesting meetings with school leadership to discuss the disparities in ways that center students’ needs.
• Engaging in ongoing meetings with educators and leaders to develop race-conscious and culturally sustaining programs and practices.

Students can have a powerful voice in creating awareness about disproportionate disparities in discipline in schools, particularly in engaging in and adopting alternative approaches that embrace culturally sustaining responses and interventions.

Challenges to solving discipline disparities

Through our study, we were able to examine not only the landscape of racial disproportionality in exclusionary school discipline in collaboration with school district leaders, but also how prominent strategies for addressing the issue worked in practice. Our results illustrate the challenge of implementing race-conscious school discipline practices that seek to target and ameliorate disparate outcomes for Black, Latina/o/x, and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities. Schools must engage thoughtfully and collaboratively with disaggregated and intersectional data and critically reflect on the explicit and implicit ways that their ostensive policies and performative practices (Lewis & Diamond, 2015) potentially perpetuate discipline disparities.

Furthermore, our results show how racial disproportionality in school discipline can occur in different school contexts. It also reveals the limitations in discipline programs like restorative practices, PBIS, and trauma-informed care if not accompanied by ongoing and context-specific professional development for faculty and staff that address the underlying causes of the issue along with strategies for addressing it through race-conscious discipline policies and practices.

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This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 7, p. 32-37.