Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment

• NCJ Number: 190431
• Author(s): Russell J. Skiba; Robert S. Michael; Abra C. Nardo; Reece Peterson
• Date Published: June 2000
• Length: 58 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: Lilly Endowment, Inc
• Corporate Author: Indiana Education Policy Ctr
• Sale Source: Indiana Education Policy Ctr
• Publication Format: Document
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Policy Research Report #SRSI; downloaded June 12, 2001.

Annotation

Given the consistency of the findings of minority overrepresentation across a number of measures of school discipline, this study explored racial, gender, and socioeconomic disparities in school discipline practice in sufficient detail to provide data on possible sources of disproportionate representation.

Abstract

Data for the study were drawn from the 1994-95 disciplinary records of all 11,001 students in 19 middle schools in a large, urban Midwestern public school district. Students were almost evenly divided among grades six, seven, and eight. Male students accounted for 51.8 percent of the sample. The majority of students were either black (56 percent) or white (42 percent). Information on socioeconomic status was determined by qualification status for free or reduced-cost lunch. Of the entire sample, 65.3 percent of the students' families met the criteria required for free lunch status. Because gender, race, and socioeconomic status had all been demonstrated to have disproportionate representation in previous investigations of school discipline, disparities for all three factors were explored in this data set in terms of number of office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions. The study found that racial and gender discrepancies in school disciplinary outcomes were consistent regardless of methodology, but socioeconomic disparities appeared to be somewhat less robust. There was no evidence that racial disparities disappeared when controlling for poverty status; instead, disproportionality in suspension was apparently due to prior disproportionality in referrals to the office. Finally, although discriminant analysis suggested that disproportionate rates of office referral and suspension for boys were due to increased rates of misbehavior, no support was found for the hypothesis that African-American students acted out more than other students. Rather, African-American students apparently were referred to the office for less serious and more subjective reasons. Coupled with extensive and highly consistent prior data, these results indicate that the disproportionate representation of African-Americans in office referrals, suspension, and expulsion involved a pervasive and systematic bias that may well have been inherent in the use of exclusionary discipline. 6 tables and 85 references