The article provides an overview of the issues surrounding racial and ethnic disproportionality in school suspensions. It is useful to practitioners that seek to complicate commonly held ideas about the effectiveness of school discipline practices.
Gregory, A., Skiba, R. J., and Noguera, P. A. “The Achievement Gap and the Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Educational Researcher, 39(1), 2010: 59-68.
McIntosh, Kent, Girvan, Erik J., Horner, Robert H., Smolkowski, Keith, and Sugai, George. 2018. “A 5-Point Intervention for Enhancing Equity in School Discipline.” Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) February 2018.
Authored by the nation’s experts in PBIS, this article provides insights into cultural responsiveness as a key component in creating equitable positive behavioral supports.
McIntosh, Kent, Girvan, Erik J., Horner, Robert H., Smolkowski, Keith, and Sugai, George. 2018. “A 5-Point Intervention for Enhancing Equity in School Discipline.” Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) February 2018.
This research study shows how African American students were seven times and Native American and Latino students were two times more likely to receive exclusionary discipline in the state of Wisconsin.
Bal, Aydin, Jennifer Betters-Bubon, and Rachel E. Fish. 2019. “A Multilevel Analysis of Statewide Disproportionality in Exclusionary Discipline and the Identification of Emotional Disturbance.” Education and Urban Society 51 (2): 247–268.
What causes high rates of suspensions, especially for students of color? Growing evidence points to racial bias. For instance, laboratory experiments find that teachers are more likely to knit together a series of misbehaviors as a pattern, to view a student who misbehaves as a troublemaker, and to punish them more severely, if the student is Black as compared with White.
Okonofua, J. A., Goyer, J. P., Lindsay, C. A., Haugabrook, J., & Walton, G. M. (2022). A Scalable Empathic-Mindset Intervention Reduces Group Disparities in School Suspensions. Sciences Advances, 8 (12), 1-10.
As discipline continues to be a primary indicator of inequity in schools, NYU provides this assessment measure to help educators identify discipline outcomes in relationship to positive behavioral support systems.
NYU Steinhardt. nd. Behavioral Analysis Workbook. New York University: Metropolitan Center for Urban Education.
This report examines compliance with federal laws designed to protect students of color with disabilities from discrimination, and whether the federal government’s enforcement of these laws adequately protects these students from discriminatory disciplinary actions and policies.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 2019. Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. Washington, DC: Author.
There is increasing concern about rising discipline citations in K–12 schools and a lack of means to reduce them. A brief intervention aimed at encouraging an empathic mindset about discipline halved student suspension rates over an academic year. The authors found this intervention, an online exercise, can be delivered at near-zero marginal cost to large samples of teachers and students.
Okonofua, J. A., Panunesku, D., & Walton, G. M., (2016). Brief Intervention to Encourage Empathic Discipline Cuts Suspension Rates in Half among Adolescents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113 (19) 5221-5226.
Using California Healthy Kids Survey data the analysis found that students who had larger exposure to restorative practices saw less exposure to exclusionary practices saw less exposer to exclusionary discipline, smaller racial disparities in discipline, and improved academic achievement.
Darling-Hammond, Sean, Lauren Trout, Trevor Fronius, & Rebeca Cerna. 2021. Can restorative practices bridge racial disparities in schools? Evidence from the California Healthy Kids Survey. WestEd https://www.wested.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Restorative-Practices-Bridging-Racial-Disparity-Research-Brief-3.pdf (accessed January 30, 2023).
Addresses essential elements of becoming culturally responsive and ways in which teachers can implement strategies in their classrooms.
Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality, New York University (2008).
The author offers an overview of the impact of suspensions on students with disabilities, particulaly African American students and male students.
Williams, V. C. (2023). Department of Education Calls on Schools to Limit Suspensions of Students with Disabilities. Exceptional Parent, 53(2), 8–9.
