School disciplinary practices affect student academic and life outcomes. Many schools have recently shifted towards the prevention of behavioral disorders rather than the punishment of such disorders, but disciplinary actions are still disproportionately meted out to Black students. We took advantage of a natural experiment in a large school…

Districts have been engaged in efforts to reduce "differential processing" of discipline-referred students based on their racial backgrounds. They strive for fair assignment of exclusionary consequences across racial groups. The current study examines discipline records for one academic year in an urban school district (N = 9,039…

Recent scholarly work indicates Black students in K-12 are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled than their White peers. However, little empirical work exists in the post-secondary environment, raising questions about the discrimination Black students encounter in the university student conduct process. This study explored racial…

Disparities in school discipline data indicate that children of color, particularly boys, receive more frequent and harsher disciplinary actions than their white peers, and this begins in early schooling. Within today's print-centered, bodily restricted school curricula, literacy instruction is often reduced to highly controlled, leveled readers…

Restorative approaches to school discipline are increasingly being implemented throughout the United States in an attempt to reduce reliance on suspension and eradicate the racial discipline gap. Yet, little is known about the experience of students in classrooms utilizing restorative practices (RP). This study draws on student surveys (N = 412)…

The overuse of school suspensions has been linked to a host of negative outcomes, including racial disparities in discipline. School climate initiatives have shown promise in reducing these disparities. The present study used the Authoritative School Climate Survey--which measures disciplinary structure and student support as key measures of…

The purpose of this study was to identify statewide trends in school approaches to student discipline and examine the associations between punitive discipline practices and student, school, and local education agency (LEA) characteristics. In addition, we compared punitive disciplinary practices for schools and LEAs that do and do not allow…

Racial disparities in rates of exclusionary school discipline are well documented and seemingly intractable. However, emerging theories on implicit bias show promise in identifying effective interventions. In this study, we used school discipline data from 1,666 elementary schools and 483,686 office discipline referrals to identify specific…

Using an intersectional feminist critical race lens, we utilized the Education Longitudinal Study (2002) data comparing tenth grade African American girls to White girls, analyzing whether the student was ever held back, teacher reports of problem behaviors in classrooms, and whether the student did not graduate from high school in the four years…

The purpose of this study was to examine differences between academic and behavioral outcomes for three cohorts of sixth grade boys enrolled at Starlight Middle School, a large, urban school in the Midwest. A comparison was made between pre-, partial, and full intervention data, during three consecutive years of implementation of School-wide…

This study examines the rates of exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspensions and expulsions) among English learners and non-English learners in six diverse Oregon districts that serve a third of the state's English learner students. Using 2011/12 databases from the Oregon Department of Education, the study found that differences in suspension and…

Social promotion is an ongoing issue in education and is frequently seen as a dichotomy with retention. While retention is a commonly researched topic, the information regarding the academic and behavioral outcomes of socially promoted students is much sparser. The problem is that many students who are socially promoted into high school after…

There is little data on whether school discipline or juvenile justice sanctions are directed disproportionately toward sexual minority youth (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning; LGBQ) compared with heterosexual youth and even less on factors that may relate to such disparities. We tested for sexual orientation-based disparities in school…

The racial discipline gap--the finding that Black and Latino students are more likely to be disciplined at school than White students, and often more harshly--has implications for students' academic success. This study concluded that differences in students' behavior do not fully explain the disproportionate likelihood that Black students are…

Research from the past 40 years indicates that Black students in primary and secondary school settings are subjected to exclusionary discipline, including suspension and expulsion, at rates two to three times higher than their White peers (Children's Defense Fund, 1975; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Although this phenomenon has…