A First-of-Its-Kind Look at Which Students Get Disciplined — and When (Stanford Business)
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A new study tracks the ebb and flow of suspensions and detentions and their disparate impact on Black middle schoolers.
By Nadra Nittle, Insights by Stanford Business, July 3, 2023
Suspension rates in U.S. schools have been dropping over the past decade. But racial disparities in the frequency and severity of school discipline persist: Black students are twice as likely to receive out-of-school suspensions as their white classmates.
Many schools have been trying to close that gap. Yet they may be missing the bigger picture of how discipline unfolds over the school year — and how administrators and teachers can step in sooner to make sure all students are treated equally.
“When you look at these huge data sets from the Department of Education collecting data on discipline, it’s all end-of-year discipline rates,” says Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a professor of psychology at Stanford University. When that data is crunched at the end of the academic year, it’s too late to make changes that could affect how students are treated in real time. “That’s what leads people to believe that discipline is pretty static and stable, and it’s not. Discipline, and the desire to discipline, can really fluctuate.”
That idea is the crux of a first-of-its-kind study that looks at not only how students are disciplined but when. To track the ebb and flow of discipline patterns, Eberhardt and her coauthors examined four years of data on nearly 47,000 students from 61 middle schools in a large, racially diverse school district. They reached three primary findings: Discipline rates rise as the school year unfolds, particularly following breaks; Black students are disproportionately punished as discipline rates increase; and racial disparities in discipline intensify in schools where significant disparities appear during the first weeks of classes.