An Exploration of the Relationships Between Student Racial Background and the School Sub-Contexts of Office Discipline Referrals

Purpose: Reports have recently been issued by a variety of agencies calling for schools to reduce their use of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions (e.g. U.S. DOE, 2014).  At the same time, growing attention has been paid to racial disparities in these exclusionary discipline practices. In particular, Latino/a and Black students tend to experience office discipline referrals, out-of-school suspension and expulsion at higher rates than their White peers (Wallace, Goodkind, Wallace & Bachman, 2008).  In order to reduce the impact of exclusionary practices on students of color, research is needed that identifies the school sub-contexts where these youth are more likely to be disciplined. Studies suggest that discipline incidents happen in predictable places, yet commonly recommended interventions, such as peer mediation and other conflict-resolution programs, almost exclusively target individual students’ social and emotional skills (Astor & Meyer, 2001). Identifying the school sub-contexts in which students of color are most likely to be disciplined will help practitioners understand where and how to target interventions in order to disrupt disparities in exclusionary practices.

Methods:

Sample:  The sample included all Asian (3%), Black (15%), Latino/a (58%), White (21%) and Multiracial (3%) students (N = 89,595) in grades K to 12 who were enrolled in a large urban school district (n=190 schools) during the 2012-2013 school year.  Eleven percent of all students had a discipline incident one or more times during the school year.

Measures: A secondary dataset was created by merging school-level data with student-level discipline records and demographic information downloaded from the district’s student information system.  Dependent variables were the locations of discipline incidents and independent variables were students’ racial backgrounds. Covariates included gender, free and reduced lunch eligibility, special education status, grade-level, types of discipline offenses committed, and school composition. Previous research has documented relationships between these covariates and school discipline outcomes (Skiba et al., 2013)    

Analytic Approach: Multilevel multinomial logistic regression models accounting for the nested nature of the dataset (students within schools) were conducted to examine the relationship between student racial background and the locations of office discipline referrals.

Results:  Compared to White students, Black youth were significantly more likely to be referred from the hallway (RRR = 1.35, p < .05), as were Latino/a students (RRR = 1.34, p < .05). Black students were also significantly more likely to be referred from the cafeteria (RRR = 1.56, p < .05).

Implications:  Students of color are more likely to have referrals for discipline incidents in “unowned” and less structured school sub-contexts where students and school adults do not have consistent opportunities to build relationships and trust (Annear & Langhout, 2010).  As a result, discipline referrals from these locations may be “more likely to rely on potentially negative racial stereotypes than individualized knowledge about the specific students” (McIntosh, Girvan, Horner, Smolkowski, 2015, p. 10).  In order to reduce the susceptibility of referrals from these school sub-contexts to implicit bias, school social work interventions may need to enhance the development of positive relationships between students and authority figures in these locations.