Race, Gender, School Discipline, and Human Capital Effects

Abstract

Noncognitive factors such as discipline (and its mirror, punishment in the form of discipline referrals) can affect school and labor market outcomes, human capital development, and thus the economic well-being of communities. It is well-known throughout the United States, but particularly in rural areas of the south that black males drop out of school more frequently than white males, face higher levels of unemployment, and are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate compared with their white cohorts. Also students in low-income homes were three times more likely to drop out than those from average-income homes and nine times more likely than students from high-income homes. This paper tests the hypothesis that the odds of a student being referred for disciplinary action in the middle school setting (8th grade) increases if the student is male, black, in special education classes, or is poor. We conclude that is indeed the case, with the exception of students assigned to special education classes. In particular, we find that low income students are up to eight times more likely to be sent for disciplinary referrals than others. We next tested the hypothesis that the gender and race of the teachers who refer students for disciplinary action have a significant impact on the first hypothesis. Here the evidence that there is a "color to discipline" in this school district is weak.

Middle School Black and White Student Assignment to Disciplinary Consequences

“…This finding supports the research of Jordan and Anil (2009) who documented that in their study of Grade 8 students in four middle schools, Black students had a 1½ times greater chance of receiving a discipline referral than White students. Grade 8 Black students received ISS more than 2 times as much as Grade 8 White students.…”

A Teacher Like Me: A Review of the Effect of Student–Teacher Racial/Ethnic Matching on Teacher Perceptions of Students and Student Academic and Behavioral Outcomes

“…Yet, as was the case with other outcomes reviewed thus far, results are somewhat contingent on the use of estimation strategies that account for the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers. One study examining disciplinary referrals in an unnamed rural district in Georgia found Black teachers to be more likely than White teachers to refer a Black child to the front office (Jordan & Anil, 2009). Sullivan, Klingbeil, and Van Norman (2013) study student suspensions in an unnamed urban school district in Wisconsin and find no evidence of a relationship between the percentage of White teachers and a student's risk of being suspended and the direction of the odds ratio is opposite of what is to be expected if improved teacher representation is linked to the reduced use of exclusionary disciplinary practices within a school.…”

The School Discipline Dilemma: A Comprehensive Review of Disparities and Alternative Approaches

“…In a two-part study, Okonofua and Eberhardt (2015) presented male and female K-12 teachers with hypothetical situations of student misbehavior to examine whether teacher responses to misbehavior were driven by racial stereotypes; they found that (a) teachers were more likely to deem students' behavior as indicative of a pattern if they were Black and (b) misconduct of Black students was approached more harshly than identical misconduct by White students. Jordan and Anil (2009) used discipline data from four middle schools, OLS, and logit regression to examine the correlations among race, gender, SES, special education classification, and the frequency of teacher referrals and found no significance in the likelihood of receiving an ODR for White teacher and Black student matches or for female teacher and female student matches. The study did, however, find significance in the interaction between Black male teachers and Black students, suggesting that a Black student was 1.4 times more likely to be sent to the office by a Black male teacher than any other racial or gender combination of teachers and students.…”