I designed an experiment to examine how much of these disparities in discipline may be due to differences in between-school sorting (i.e., differences in the cultures, policies, and norms of majority-Black and Latino schools relative to majority-white schools) versus teachers’ differential treatment of students from differential racial/ethnic backgrounds for the same ostensible behaviors. Using a video experiment to identify the causes of discipline disparities Second, several prior studies that support the differential treatment hypothesis rely on administrative and observational data sources-which leaves open the possibility that we are misattributing teachers’ racially/ethnically biased behavioral reports to differential treatment on the part of school administrators. First, few studies have directly tested the relative contributions of these different potential mechanisms driving racial disparities in discipline (see Owens and McLanahan (2020) for an exception). However, our understanding of the relative contributions of these factors-and their implications for policy and practice-remains incomplete. For example, in prior work, my co-author and I show that less than 10% of the Black-white suspension gap is due to racial differences in rates of behavioral problems. On the other hand, the behavior differences explanation has been extensively investigated in the literature but repeatedly found to not fully explain racial/ethnic disparities in discipline. Moreover, studies on between-school sorting show that schools with large enrollments of Black and Latinx students are more likely to use harsher discipline practices than are schools with large white student enrollments, net of average student behaviors. For example, several studies show that school administrators punish Black students more harshly than their white peers for involvement in the same multi-student incidents. ![]() Prior literature has proposed three sets of explanations for these persistent racial/ethnic disparities: (1) behavior differences, whereby Black and Latino students are worse-behaved than white students, such that they exhibit higher levels of anti-social behaviors, aggression, and delinquency (2) differential treatment, whereby Black and Latino students are punished more often and more harshly for comparable behaviors than white students and (3) between-school sorting, whereby Black and Latino students disproportionately attend majority-minority and economically disadvantaged schools, which have more punitive disciplinary environments than schools serving white students.Īmong these theories, the differential treatment and between-school sorting explanations have gained the most empirical support. Latino boys are 30% more likely to be expelled or suspended from school than are white boys, and Black boys are 300% more likely to be expelled or face suspension. Specifically, I wanted to investigate how a student’s race or ethnicity-as well as the racial/ethnic composition of their school-may affect that student’s discipline outcomes. ![]() I wanted to learn -when do teachers consider a student’s behavior a “misbehavior” and what factors influence teachers’ responses to student misbehavior? I also set out to investigate what factors shape schools’ decisions to punish students for this misbehavior. These punitive ideologies assume that the threat of punishment will stop students from misbehaving and that students who do misbehave deserve whatever punishment they get. ![]() ![]() Such policies can go so far as to require that administrators harshly punish students for various types of misbehavior. At an extreme, they treat anything that could be construed as misbehavior as such and address it in a punitive manner, including by removing the misbehaving student from the classroom learning environment or from the school altogether. Some schools take a “zero-tolerance” approach to discipline.
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