Targeting Training to Just a Few Teachers Could Help Cut Racial Discipline Gap in Half

Students of color continue to be disciplined at higher rates than their white peers for the same behaviors—so much so that last month the Biden Administration warned schools that inequitable discipline practices could violate federal civil rights laws.

But a new study published this week in the journal Educational Researcher suggests targeted teacher supports could do a lot to shrink discipline gaps.

That’s because about 5 percent of teachers—mostly those in their first three years in the field—accounted for nearly 35 percent of all discipline referrals, the study found. In practical terms, these teachers sent a student to the office for discipline on average once every four days, while their colleagues referred fewer than one student for discipline, on average, every other month.

Jing Liu and Wenjing Gao, education researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Emily K. Penner at the University of California, Irvine, tracked office discipline referrals—generally the first step in the discipline process—from more than 2,900 K-12 teachers in more than 100 schools in a large, unnamed urban school district in California. They analyzed data on more than 79,000 K-12 students from 2016-2020.

The 5 percent highest-referring teachers were much more likely to refer students of color than their white peers—so much so that their discipline referrals essentially doubled the discipline gaps between Black and white students, and Hispanic and white students, in their schools.

The average teacher referred 1.6 Black students for every white student sent out for misbehavior. But the top-referring teachers referred more than twice as many Black students for every white student.