Racial achievement gap tracks with school discipline gap

An increase in the discipline gap or the academic achievement gap between black and white students in the US predicts a jump in the other, a new study shows. Similarly, as one gap narrows, so does the other.

Students of color are suspended at disproportionately higher rates than white students and, on average, perform more poorly on standardized tests. But no peer-reviewed nationwide research has documented a link between the two disparities—until now.

“Prior research has suggested that achievement gaps and discipline gaps may be two sides of the same coin,” says Francis Pearman, an assistant professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Education and lead author of the study in AERA Open. “This is the first study to document this relationship at the national level.”

From concept to data

Past studies have provided evidence of racial disparities in both school discipline and academic achievement, and for decades, researchers have tried to shed light on the causes and outcomes of each of these gaps, Pearman says. “But it wasn’t until recently that people started talking about these gaps as potentially being related to one another.

“The most influential work in this space has largely been conceptual—drawing on existing literature to make a theoretical argument for a link between the racial discipline gap and the academic achievement gap. Or it’s been local, looking at whether a relationship between the two gaps exists within a given school district.”

To study whether these theoretical arguments and local findings held nationwide, researchers analyzed disciplinary and achievement data for students in third through eighth grade in school districts across the US for the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years.

Achievement data came from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a massive collection of 350 million test scores from third- to eighth-grade students at every public school in the US. (In September, this data archive became more widely accessible to the public through the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, an initiative that education professor Sean Reardon directs to support work to reduce educational disparities.)

Disciplinary data came from the US Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection and socio-demographic information on school districts came from the Common Core of Data and the American Community Survey.

School discipline

The researchers found that a 10 percentage point increase in the black-white discipline gap in a school district predicts an achievement gap that is 17% larger than the average black-white achievement gap.

“As the racial discipline gap goes up, so too does the racial achievement gap,” Pearman says. “Likewise, as the racial discipline gap goes down, so too does the racial achievement gap.”

An increase in the achievement gap between black and white students also predicts a larger-than-average discipline gap, the researchers say. The current study is the first to examine the relationship in both directions.

Researchers also saw a significant association between the Hispanic-white achievement and discipline gaps. But were surprised to discover that other factors—such as local poverty and education levels—accounted for the relationship. Once they controlled for these differences as the community level, the relationship between the two gaps disappeared.

“This suggests that the mechanisms connecting the achievement gap to the discipline gap, such as teacher biases and feeling isolated at school, may be most salient for black students,” Pearman says.

How can we close the gap?

Because the research establishes a relationship between the two gaps at a national level, the findings hold particular implications for school administrators, teachers, and parents, the researchers say.

Last year the US Department of Justice and Department of Education rescinded federal guidelines put into place in 2014 to address racial disparities in school discipline. As a result, Pearman notes, school districts’ efforts to promote more equitable discipline practices may soon wane.

“Our findings should caution against such moves,” he says, because curtailing efforts to address discipline disparities could exacerbate the achievement gap.

Parents, teachers, and school leaders should pay attention to disparities at their child’s school, Pearman says. “If your district has higher suspension rates for students of color than it does for white students, it’s likely that it is also failing to meet the academic needs of its students of color as well as it does its white students.

Similarly, if your district is struggling to meet the academic needs of students of color, then it will likely have a racial discipline problem.”

Efforts targeted at closing one gap could have the indirect consequence of narrowing the other, he says.

For instance, educators might adopt ethnic studies programs and culturally relevant teaching to alleviate achievement disparities—efforts that could address the racial discipline gap as well.

Using non-punitive discipline practices such as positive behavior interventions and supports, instead of practices that exclude students from school, could also help raise the academic achievement of racial and ethnic minority students.

“These efforts are each targeted toward a particular end,” says Pearman, “but it is possible that they may have crossover effects.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Florida, the University of Louisville, and Drexel University.

Source: Carrie Spector for Stanford University

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