New Paths to Address Disproportionate Discipline with Black Students:
New Directives, Research, Solutions, and Another Example of Racial Hate
Dear Colleagues,
Introduction
In the nine years of writing these bi-monthly Blogs, I have noticed consistent national “news cycles” in what is published or reported in education during specific times of the year.
One trend—especially prevalent right now—is the focus on school discipline data. . . right after each school year has ended.
For me, this is counter-intuitive, because—other than using summative school discipline data to prepare for the next school year (which is still a good thing), the end-of-year focus can’t impact anything that has already occurred and is now in the past.
To buck this trend, schools should be analyzing (not just reporting) their school discipline data every month—including their school safety, climate, classroom management, and student engagement data.
In this way, positive trends and outcomes, as well as setting and student “hot-spots” can be identified as they are occurring, with corresponding steps to generalize and extend the strengths, and other steps to prevent and eliminate future (e.g., next month’s) problems.
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A second particularly persistent trend—which we have addressed in numerous Blogs over the past nine years—is the ongoing documentation of disproportionate office discipline referrals and school suspensions for Black students and students with disabilities.
While school discipline problems decreased for all students for a while before the Pandemic, they have significantly increased since. But within these disciplinary ups and downs, the disproportionate gap involving the aforementioned students has not closed, and we seem no closer to any real solutions.
To this end, rather than rehash the data (and re-emphasize the solutions that we have achieved with our consultation work across the country—see this BLOG LINK from our Project ACHIEVE website), this Blog focuses on a new directive, two new research studies, and one recent tragic example of the continued presence of racial prejudice and hate in many Black students’ lives (Four Paths).
Through this discussion, we will re-visit the root causes underlying the disproportionate discipline data in our schools in new ways, and recommend a number of resulting directions to improve school climate, teacher understanding, and student-teacher interactions for Black students.
Some of the root causes we will discuss involve the impact of:
- Punitive school discipline climates—especially in schools where a majority of the students are students of color;
- Implicit or explicit bias in classroom teachers whose office discipline referrals vary across Black vs. Hispanic vs. White students—even when they demonstrate the same inappropriate classroom behaviors; and
- New or inexperienced teachers on a school’s disproportionate office discipline referrals for students of color.
Path I: A New Directive from the Biden Administration
On May 26, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice and Education released a joint Resource on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline to the education community.
Embedded in the release was a reminder that unfair or disproportionate school discipline practices could incur an investigation for possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
While not as assertive as the 2014 Guidance Letter on the same topic from the Obama Administration, the goal is the same:
To eliminate any racial disparities seen in disproportionate discipline actions for students of color and with disabilities by ensuring that districts and schools have and use fair and consistent policies and practices for all students.
The joint Press Release announcing the Resource stated:
"Th(is) Resource demonstrates the Departments' ongoing commitment to the vigorous enforcement of laws that protect students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in student discipline. The Resource provides examples of the Departments' investigations of such discrimination over the last 10 years, reflecting the long-standing approach and continuity in the Departments' enforcement practices over time and the continuing urgency of assuring nondiscrimination in student discipline in our nation's schools."
Accompanying the Resource was a link to four Fact Sheets on Strategies for Student and Teacher Support Teams, for Educators and School-Based Staff, for Schools to Enhance Relationships with Families, and for School and District Leaders.
Collectively, this First Path is a policy- and practice-driven path that (as above) encourages districts and schools to:
- Review their discipline policies and practices from cultural and equity perspectives;
- Analyze their discipline and suspension data by gender, race, socio-economic status, and other pertinent variables;
- Evaluate their multi-tiered system of social, emotional, and behavioral instruction and intervention; and
- Assess their staff professional development, coaching, supervision, and accountability activities in the areas of cultural competence, social-emotional learning, and classroom management.
If done well, districts and schools can begin (or continue) their journeys toward creating safe, protected, welcoming, nurturing, and support school and classroom climates for Black and other students of color. This is an important complement to eliminating racially-bound disproportionate discipline referrals for students of color.
Path II: Teacher Bias DOES Explain Disproportionate Office Discipline Referrals, Especially in MORE in Punitive, High-Minority Schools
The first new research study to review was published on-line in American Sociological Review by Jayanti Owens on November 18, 2022:
“Double Jeopardy: Teacher Biases, Racialized Organizations, and the Production of Racial/Ethnic Disparities in School Discipline”
This sound, methodologically-sophisticated study looked at the differential impact of teacher bias relative to their perceptions of Black, Hispanic, and White students’ misbehavior in the context of their respective school’s approach to student discipline.
This was accomplished by factoring out what some researchers call “the differential behavior hypothesis” which suggests that Black and other students of color misbehave more often in school and, thus, receive more discipline referrals.
To set up the study, Owens surveyed classroom teachers to identify common classroom misbehaviors, and then professionally produced three different 30- to 45-second video-vignettes with professional high-school-aged actors who were Black, Hispanic, or White.
Initially, the videos depicted these racially-different male students: (a) slamming a door while entering a classroom, (b) disrupting a classroom by loudly throwing a pencil into a garbage can, and (c) receiving a text message during a test.
As the three vignettes progressed, each student then reacted defiantly when confronted by the teacher:
- In the “door slam” vignette, the student purposefully slammed the door again, staring at the teacher in defiance.
- In the “paper throw” vignette, the student crumpled up his test booklet and threw it into the garbage, again staring down the teacher.
- In the “texting” vignette, the student ignored the teacher’s warning, continued texting and, once again, stared down the teacher.
Participating initially in the study were 1,339 virtually-recruited middle and high school teachers who taught at 295 different schools across the United States. Sixty-five percent were female, they averaged 16 years of full-time teaching experience (11 years at their current schools), and their average age was 43 years-old. Twenty-nine percent taught in urban schools, 46% in suburban schools, and 25% in rural schools.
The 1,339 participants completed a 30-minute survey describing the demographics of their schools and their school’s approach to classroom discipline. A subset of these participants then randomly viewed one out of the nine possible race-specific video-vignettes (three racial/ethnic groups by the three vignettes described above). Each experimental condition had roughly 149 respondents.
After virtually viewing the vignette, each participant (a) described the behavior of the student in the video in an open-ended text box (that was later analyzed by independent raters on each teacher’s perception of the “blameworthiness” of the student in the video), and (b) they reported on whether an office referral should occur.
Statistical analyses showed that the participating teachers were representative of public school teachers across the country in teacher race/ethnicity, teacher gender, region of the country, school racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition, and school urbanicity.
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According to the article (and quoting), the results of the study revealed that:
Black boys face a “double jeopardy” that can contribute to the racial gap in disciplinary referrals, net of differences in student behavior:
(1) at the individual teacher level, Black boys are perceived as being more blameworthy and referred to the principal more readily than White boys for identical misbehavior (although directionally consistent, anti-Latinx blaming and referral biases are smaller in magnitude and non-significant), and
(2) at the organization level, blaming climates among teachers in minority schools mean each percentage-point higher Black or Latinx enrollment is significantly associated with greater perceived blameworthiness for students of all racial/ethnic backgrounds, compared to teachers viewing identical misbehavior in White schools.
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Among Black and White boys, an estimated 27 percent of the total effect of student race on referral in this sample operates through individual-level blaming bias. This 27 percent is modest compared to the estimated 73 percent that operates through “referral bias”—that is, the greater referral of Black boys for the same perceived blameworthiness.
Yet, it is of tremendous substantive importance: whereas the designs of most prior studies of discipline prevent scholars from disentangling “differential behavior perceptions” from “differential treatment,” this study reveals that between one-quarter and one-third of what has historically been understood as “differential treatment” for the same behavior may in fact be attributable to “differential behavior perceptions,” an understudied mechanism of discipline at the individual level.
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At the organization level, this study’s ability to have teachers across minority and White schools evaluate equal shares of White, Black, and Latino boys committing identical misbehavior descriptively, but powerfully, suggests the higher suspension rates of Black and Latino boys cannot be wholly accounted for by differences in behavior.
When presenting a teacher with a given behavior by a White student, the response is more punitive among teachers in minority schools than in White schools. Descriptively, the punitive response among teachers in minority schools could be related to these schools’ use of suspensions, zero-tolerance policies for a wide range of infractions, and heightened blaming among experienced (disproportionately Latinx) teachers who do not select out of minority schools.
At the population level, this finding has significant implications for Black and Latino boys, as they are systematically sorted into more punitive and social control–oriented schools where teachers, on average, exhibit greater perceptual bias toward students of all racial/ethnic backgrounds.
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A June 16, 2023 Education Week article, “How Teacher Bias and School Culture Shape School Discipline,” reviewed Owens’ research, and then discussed its implications through interviews with Owens and other educators.
Critically, Owens noted that schools with a majority of students of color are more likely to have punitive and zero tolerance policies, more security cameras and school police on campus, and discipline approaches that emphasize student control as a primary mechanism for school safety and classroom management.
She also cited research that has found that teacher training focused on building relationships with, empathy for, and understanding of students was more effective than anti-bias training.
As quoted in Education Week, Owens discussed how to get past both the personal and the institutional bias found in her study:
It’s about changing the context in which they’re operating. So that you’re able to minimize the effects of any bias that does exist through things like policies and norms, leadership styles of administrators, the ways in which you construct your discipline code in the first place, and the ways in which you operationalize that code, as well as a bunch of sort of proactive preventative strategies to prevent misbehavior from occurring in the first place.
The Education Week reinforced the importance of not blaming teachers, but helping them to reflect on their practice and interactions. It also advocated that schools change their perspective of “discipline” as a vehicle of getting students to act in specific ways to a culture of belonging and respect.
The article also quoted Jessika Bottiani, a research associate professor at the University of Virginia:
(I)f the goal is to get students to come to school engaged in what they are learning and respectful of themselves and others, that requires less a culture of control and more a culture that is focused on understanding and meeting students’ developmental and psychological needs as conditions for learning, and tapping their cultural strengths as funds of knowledge to support their engagement.
Encapsulating our Second Path, the Education Week article concluded with a plea that districts and schools take Owens’ findings and directly confront issues around racial bias.
Path III: Less Experienced Teachers Contribute to Racial Disproportionality
The second research study to review was published on-line last week (June 14, 2023) in Educational Researcher.
“Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities”
In a methodologically well-done study, this research analyzed the characteristics of “office-referring” teachers, “misbehaving” students, and discipline offenses from a large urban school district in California during the 2016-2017 through 2019-2020 school years. Using its extremely detailed student information reporting system, the District served over 79,000 unique students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 in 101 unique schools—resulting in 227,922 student-year observations.
The goal of the study was to statistically identify the characteristics of the top office discipline referrers, and determine if there were referral patterns over time. This began by analyzing the teachers responsible for the top 5% of the District’s office discipline referrals (ODRs) based on each teacher’s annual ODR count.
Demographically, about 33% of the District’s students were Asian, 30% were Hispanic students, 12% were White, 10% were either multi-racial or other races, and 7% were Black.
In total, 75,229 Office Discipline Referrals (ODRs) were issued by 2,928 unique teachers (5,855 teacher-year observations) during the four years included in the study. Only 34% of the District’s teachers ever made an office discipline referral, and 50.4% of these teachers made fewer than five referrals per year.
At the same time, the teachers referring the top 5% of the District’s office discipline referrals (1.7% of all teachers) issued over 48 ODRs per year—approximately one ODR for every 4 school days. In all, fewer than 80 teachers in the District who were identified as top 5% referrers. They accounted for 34.8% of all ODRs made during the study’s four school years.
After pooling the individually-coded ODRs into three categories, interpersonal offenses, disruption, or noncompliance comprised 57% of the ODRs, violence comprised 28% of ODRs, and drugs, class skipping, and other reasons comprised the remaining 15%.
The top discipline referrers were 49% White, 18% Asian, 16% Hispanic, 5% Black, and 5% from multiracial or other races. Critically, when compared to the other racial groups, Black and Hispanic students were over-represented among the ODRs of the top referrers.
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After extensive data analyses, the following four primary results were emphasized (quoting, with minor edits and paragraph transpositions):
1. Holding everything else equal, we find mostly statistically insignificant differences on teachers’ referring behavior by gender, but we find clear evidence that teachers of color are much less likely to be a referrer or a top referrer compared with their White colleagues.
For example, across all school levels, a Black teacher’s likelihood of being a referrer is 4.8 percentage points lower than a White teacher’s. This number is 2.2 percentage points when comparing relative likelihoods of being a top referrer.
Hispanic teachers are also significantly less likely to refer students or be a top referrer than White teachers—these coefficients are one-third to one-half of the magnitudes of the coefficients for Black teachers.
While Asian teachers have even a lower probability of referring students compared with Black and Hispanic teachers, they are equally as likely to be a top referrer as their White colleagues when they do make ODRs, suggesting varied referring behavior among Asian teachers.
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2. We find that Black and Hispanic students are overrepresented among students who were referred by top referrers compared to the other three groups.
These gaps are mainly driven by higher numbers of ODRs issued for Black and Hispanic students due to more subjective reasons like interpersonal offences and defiance. These ODRs also partially, although not entirely, convert to racial gaps in suspensions.
First, not surprisingly, there are clear disproportionalities in the racial composition of students who received ODRs from top referrers considering the overall racial composition of the district. However, top referrers also referred higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students compared to all referred students and relative to their representation among students in their schools and classrooms.
For example, Black students only accounted for 7% of all students enrolled in the district and 12% of students in top referrers’ classrooms, but they represented close to 22% of all referred students and 27% of students referred by top referrers.
This confirms our finding that top referrers widen racial gaps in ODRs.
While we find that top referrers indeed teach at schools with slightly higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students and even more so in their classrooms, the differences between the racial compositions of their classrooms, schools, and the district seem to explain only some but not all of the differences between the racial composition of the students who they referred and all referred students.
Thus, both the level and racial compositions of the school sites where top referrers serve and their personal and professional traits seem to explain some of their extensive referring behavior.
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3. Years of experience seems to be a particularly salient predictor that holds across school levels. Together, the results suggest that teachers who are White, early career, and serve middle schools are the ones who engage more in extensive referring.
As teachers accumulate more years of teaching experience, especially after 3 years when they receive tenure, their likelihood of being a referrer or a top referrer quickly drops.
Notably, at the middle school level, where top referrers are the most prevalent, extra years of experience does not reduce a teacher’s likelihood of being a referrer until they reach at least 11 years of experience.
However, any additional experience does greatly reduce the likelihood of being a top referrer. Notably, on average, only about 25% of teachers who are identified as top referrers in a given year remain in that category in the next year, and even a smaller proportion persist to the third year.
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Research and Practice Implications
This study confirmed a number of themes present across years of school disproportionality research (and also discussed in the first research study above):
- Disproportionality has both systems-level and teacher- (and administrator-) level root causes.
- The highest number of ODRs tend to be in Middle Schools.
- After demonstrating the same interpersonal, disruptive, or noncompliance “offenses,” disproportionality often occurs as teachers subjectively send students of color to the office more often than White or other racial-background students.
But this study—as its most-major contribution—also demonstrated that White, early career, middle school teachers in this District were both the highest referring teachers and those who most-widened the ODR racial gap.
Our many past Blogs have documented the significant dearth of training, coaching, and supervision in student behavior and classroom management “experienced” by most new (and non-certified) teachers in their teacher training programs.
Taking this and the two studies above, districts and schools need to particularly (a) target their new teachers (for three years or more), (b) in ways that are sensitive to their races and backgrounds, and to (c) the racial, grade, developmental, and life experience needs of their students, in the areas of:
- Gender, race, socio-economic, and related differences;
- Normal, abnormal, and ecologically-generated behavior;
- Building and sustaining positive staff-to-student and student-to-student relationships and interpersonal interactions;
- Classroom management and early intervention; and
- In-class strategies to address students’ interpersonal, disruptive, or noncompliance challenges.
This “targeting” should involve professional development that includes knowledge and information, skill and application, and confidence and competence. . . through in-services and then practice, coaching, supervision, evaluation, and accountability.
This, in sum, is these implications provide a Third Path toward addressing disproportionate discipline in our schools today.
Another Example of How Racial Hate Affects Black Students
The last Path is the path of understanding, empathy, and action.
While we could frame it within the context of explicit or implicit bias and prejudice (depending on how you respond to this section of the Blog and the two reports below), the true message is one of understanding how it feels to go to school and experience bullying, harassment, and hate because of the color of your skin.
And whether it is framed in over 400 years of systemic racism against Blacks in this country, the more-recent Black Lives Matter movement, or “just” the experiences of a 14-year-old Black adolescent in Colorado below, we have got to recognize that there is a personal component to the disproportionate disciplinary referrals of students of color.
How else can we explain our failure to successfully address this problem—one that has been present well beyond the professional careers of most of us?
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The story here is of Jeremiah Ganzy, a 14-year-old bi-racial middle school student in the Douglas County School District, Colorado. He and his family (including two sisters, one who graduated from the District) told the School Board in late April about the racial slurs and prejudice they had experienced in within District schools. . . Jeremiah especially this year.
It should not matter that Jeremiah’s mother is White and a military wife grew up in the District. It should not matter is that Jeremiah takes advanced courses and has never been “a problem” in school.
What should matter is what has happened to a young adolescent as he tries to navigate a sometimes-challenging time in everyone’s life.
Listen below to the local news and the more-detailed Colorado Public Radio reports regarding what has occurred and its impact.
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This is shocking stuff.
But it is experienced by countless Black, bi-racial, and other students of color in our schools across the country every day.
And this is another level of disproportionality that they continually experience.
According to print version of the Colorado Public Radio report:
For Ganzy, she said she wants schools to have a victim advocate who knows about equality, diversity and race.
“And I want there to be education for this student that commits the hate speech. I want there to be a clear definition of punishment for hate crime because you're summing it up as bullying and it's illegal. This is more than bullying, it's a hate crime,” she said.
She said the school gave her three options. One was for her son to transfer to Mesa Middle School, where last fall the mother of a seventh-grader alleged that an older student randomly sent a racist message to her son at school.
The other two options were to homeschool him or to return to Castle Rock Middle School with a safety plan.
“My son could never return to that school, ever,” she said. “And my son could never go to high school. They talked about lynching him and now all of the kids know who he is. There is not enough safety that they could wrap around my kids where I would believe that he was protected and truly safe.”
Ganzy said her son is a “trainwreck.” He hasn’t been in school for a week.
“They were talking about he was the snitch, talking about lynching him,” she said. “We've just cut him off from social media completely. I feel like we're wearing a scarlet letter in Castle Rock.”
She said her son will participate in online school for the remainder of the year. Ganzy said she needs to move her family out of Castle Rock.
“He's not safe. These are kids that he rides the bus with. They live right next to us. This has forever changed my family's life,” she said.
The Ganzy family is reported to be moving out of the District. They leave a system that is broken. . . even as they try to protect Jeremiah and their other children.
Summary
This Blog re-visited a persistent problem in schools across the country: the ongoing presence of disproportionate office discipline referrals and school suspensions for students of color and with disabilities.
While school discipline problems decreased for all students for a while before the Pandemic, they have significantly increased since. But within these disciplinary ups and downs, the disproportionate gap involving the aforementioned students has not closed, and we seem no closer to any real solutions.
To this end, rather than rehash the data, this Blog focuses on a new directive, two new research studies, and one recent tragic example of the continued presence of racial prejudice and hate in many Black students’ lives. In doing this, we re-focused on the root causes underlying the disproportionate discipline data in our schools in new ways, and recommended a number of resulting directions to improve school climate, teacher understanding, and student-teacher interactions for Black students.
Some of the root causes we discussed involve the impact of:
- Punitive school discipline climates—especially in schools where a majority of the students are students of color;
- Implicit or explicit bias in classroom teachers whose office discipline referrals vary across Black vs. Hispanic vs. White students—even when they demonstrate the same inappropriate classroom behaviors; and
- New or inexperienced teachers on a school’s disproportionate office discipline referrals for students of color.
After reviewing two new research studies in detail, we concluded that districts and schools need to particularly (a) target their new teachers (for three years or more), (b) in ways that are sensitive to their races and backgrounds, and to (c) the racial, grade, developmental, and life experience needs of their students, in the areas of:
- Gender, race, socio-economic, and related differences;
- Normal, abnormal, and ecologically-generated behavior;
- Building and sustaining positive staff-to-student and student-to-student relationships and interpersonal interactions;
- Classroom management and early intervention; and
- In-class strategies to address students’ interpersonal, disruptive, or noncompliance challenges.
This “targeting” should involve professional development that includes knowledge and information, skill and application, and confidence and competence. . . through in-services and then practice, coaching, supervision, evaluation, and accountability.
We ended this piece with a horrific recent example and reminder—as an extreme example of disproportionality in our schools—of what Black students still face at the hands of their peers—in addition to their teachers and administrators—in our country.
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If you would like to hear more on this subject, below is an Education Talk Radio interview that I did with host Larry Jacobs that provides expanding discussion, information, and implications.
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While taking continual deep breaths, know that it is hard to suppress my emotions when writing these columns on disproportionality. . . especially in the divided world that we now live in.
But this will never deter me from bringing critical research, information, and solutions to those who read this Blog, and from my commitment to help as many districts and schools as I can to address and solve these issues in the most effective ways.
If you or your colleagues need my assistance—to discuss ideas, consider solutions, and focus attention on proven practices and results—please feel free to contact me at any time.
Best,
