School discipline and racial disparities

The Civil Rights Data Collection, conducted every two years by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, has tracked disciplinary outcomes by race, gender, and disability since 1968. The 2017–2018 data showed Black students at 15 percent of K–12 enrollment but 38 percent of students receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions. The gap is largest at the high school level but appears as early as preschool, where Black children are 19 percent of enrollment but 47 percent of preschool suspensions. The preschool number is particularly diagnostic because preschool-aged behavior is developmentally narrow and the disparity cannot be attributed to accumulated behavioral history. The disparity is also visible in the data on referrals to law enforcement, expulsions, and disciplinary transfers to alternative schools.

A substantial share of suspensions in many districts are recorded under subjective categories: "willful defiance," "disrespect," "disruption," "disorderly conduct." These categories require a staff member to judge that the student's behavior was inappropriate in degree or kind, with no objective threshold. Anne Gregory's research has shown that the racial disparity is largest precisely in these subjective categories — for objective offenses like weapons possession or fighting, the disparity is smaller. The data point implicates the structure of teacher discretion as the proximate mechanism. Replacing "defiance" categories with more specific descriptions of behavior, training staff in classroom de-escalation, and limiting the use of subjective categories for exclusionary consequences are among the more targeted reforms available.

The 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act required states to mandate one-year expulsions for students bringing firearms to school. Within a decade, most districts had expanded the zero-tolerance framework to include other weapons (including objects that could be construed as weapons), drugs (including over-the-counter medications), threats, and a range of other categories. The expansion was not federally mandated. It was local policy choice driven by perceived legal liability and by political pressure after high-profile incidents. The result was a structural shift toward exclusionary discipline that has only partially reversed despite mounting evidence that zero-tolerance does not improve school safety and does damage to the excluded students.

Federal funding through the COPS in Schools program from 1999 onward subsidized the placement of armed police officers in public schools. The number of SROs increased sharply, particularly in high-poverty and majority-minority districts. The presence of an officer in the building converts disciplinary incidents — a fight, a verbal altercation, a refusal to follow instructions — into potential arrest events. The same behavior that would have produced a principal's office referral in 1990 produces an arrest in 2010 in the same district. Studies by Aaron Kupchik and others have shown that SROs increase arrests for minor offenses without measurably improving safety. Some districts have moved to limit SRO roles after 2020; many have not.

The clearest causal evidence on suspension's downstream effects comes from studies that exploit policy variation or use propensity-matching to compare suspended students with similar non-suspended students. Studies by Lacoe and Steinberg, by the Council of State Governments' Breaking Schools' Rules report, and by others show that even a single suspension increases the probability of subsequent juvenile court involvement, decreases the probability of high school graduation, and decreases the probability of postsecondary enrollment. The effects survive controls for prior behavior and school characteristics. Suspension is not a neutral observation of trajectory; it changes the trajectory.

Under IDEA, a student with a disability who is suspended for more than ten cumulative days must receive a manifestation determination review to decide whether the behavior was a manifestation of the disability. If it was, the school cannot continue the exclusion in the same form and must respond educationally rather than punitively. The MDR is widely circumvented — through suspensions that stay just under ten days, through informal removals not recorded as discipline, and through MDRs that are conducted in ways that consistently find the behavior was not a manifestation. Mary Wagner's longitudinal data on students with disabilities show high rates of school discipline alongside low rates of IDEA-mandated procedural protections.

Students who accumulate suspensions or who are expelled are often placed in alternative or disciplinary schools. These schools typically have lower academic standards, less qualified staff, shorter days, and weaker outcomes. The placement is described as a temporary measure but often becomes permanent. Once a student is on the alternative track, returning to the comprehensive school is procedurally difficult, and the alternative school's academic environment makes academic recovery hard. The alternative-school sector is one of the most under-studied parts of the disciplinary architecture because its students are not represented in most accountability data.

Restorative practices — circles, conferencing, peer mediation, community-building structures — have been adopted in many districts as alternatives to exclusionary discipline. The evidence is mixed but generally positive when implementation is faithful. The Oakland Unified evaluation showed reduced suspensions and improved school climate. Chicago Public Schools' implementation produced mixed results. The pattern across studies is that restorative practices work when they are implemented as a whole-school cultural change with sustained training and leadership commitment, and fail when they are layered as a discipline alternative without the underlying cultural shift. The misuse is then cited as evidence that the practice does not work.

The teaching workforce is roughly 80 percent white. The student population in many large urban districts is majority students of color. The demographic gap is itself a factor in disciplinary disparities; studies have shown that students of color are less likely to be suspended when they have at least one teacher of the same race. The pipeline issues — recruitment, retention, certification pathways — for teachers of color are well-documented and have moved slowly. The teacher workforce composition is one of the slower-moving variables and is unlikely to close in a meaningful timeframe without substantial structural intervention in teacher preparation.

States have several available levers: limiting the use of suspension and expulsion for specific age ranges (California's K–3 willful defiance limitation), prohibiting suspension for certain offense categories, requiring data publication, requiring evidence-based alternatives, restricting SRO roles, and tying state funding formulas to disciplinary outcomes. Most of these levers have been adopted somewhere; few states have adopted the full set. The variation between states allows for natural experiment evidence on what works. The evidence has not yet shifted policy in the laggard states, partly because the affected constituency does not have proportional political weight.

Parents whose children are suspended typically have few effective options. Appeals processes exist but are often opaque, brief, and weighted toward the school's account. Parents who challenge suspensions are often coded by schools as difficult, and that coding affects how subsequent incidents are handled. Organized parent advocacy — through community groups, legal services, and advocacy organizations — has been more effective than individual appeals, but the organizing infrastructure varies enormously by community. Parent unions in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have produced measurable policy changes; in many districts, no comparable infrastructure exists.

Federal authority over school discipline is limited. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights can investigate disparate impact under Title VI, can require data collection, and can negotiate consent decrees, but cannot directly mandate disciplinary policy. The 2014 Obama-era Dear Colleague Letter on school discipline provided guidance on disparate impact analysis; it was rescinded under the Trump administration in 2018 and partially restored under the Biden administration. The federal back-and-forth illustrates that federal action is uncertain and reversible. State and local policy is more durable. The locus of meaningful reform is the state legislature and the local school board.

A school discipline system designed from outcomes would have: data publication by race, disability, gender, and offense type; an inventory of evidence-based alternatives to suspension funded at scale; restorative practices implemented as a whole-school commitment with multi-year training budgets; SROs restricted to a narrow safety role with explicit exclusion from routine discipline; subjective categories like "defiance" removed from the suspendable list; IDEA procedural protections enforced with auditing; alternative schools held to the same accountability standards as comprehensive schools; and parent appeals processes with real procedural weight. The package is not speculative. Each element has been implemented somewhere. The collective failure is to implement them together.

1. Russell J. Skiba, Mariella I. Arredondo, and Natasha T. Williams, "More Than a Metaphor: The Contribution of Exclusionary Discipline to a School-to-Prison Pipeline," Equity and Excellence in Education 47, no. 4 (2014): 546–564. 2. Daniel J. Losen and Russell J. Skiba, Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis (Los Angeles: Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, 2010). 3. Anne Gregory, Russell J. Skiba, and Pedro A. Noguera, "The Achievement Gap and the Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the Same Coin?" Educational Researcher 39, no. 1 (2010): 59–68. 4. Tony Fabelo, Michael D. Thompson, Martha Plotkin, Dottie Carmichael, Miner P. Marchbanks III, and Eric A. Booth, Breaking Schools' Rules: A Statewide Study of How School Discipline Relates to Students' Success and Juvenile Justice Involvement (New York: Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2011). 5. Aaron Kupchik, Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear (New York: NYU Press, 2010). 6. Mary Wagner, Lynn Newman, Renée Cameto, Phyllis Levine, and Nicolle Garza, "An Overview of Findings from Wave 2 of the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2)," NCSER 2006-3004 (Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, 2006). 7. U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2017–2018 Civil Rights Data Collection: Discipline Practices in U.S. Public Schools (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2021). 8. Johanna Lacoe and Matthew P. Steinberg, "Do Suspensions Affect Student Outcomes?" Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 41, no. 1 (2019): 34–62. 9. Trevor Fronius, Sean Darling-Hammond, Hannah Persson, Sarah Guckenburg, Nancy Hurley, and Anthony Petrosino, Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools: An Updated Research Review (San Francisco: WestEd, 2019). 10. Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform (New York: NYU Press, 2010). 11. Advancement Project, Test, Punish, and Push Out: How "Zero Tolerance" and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Washington, DC: Advancement Project, 2010). 12. American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, "Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations," American Psychologist 63, no. 9 (2008): 852–862.