Teaching What the Research Says

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

By Sarah D. Sparks — June 16, 2023 3 min read
Serious white male teacher helps or disciplines a Black male middle school student during class. The teacher has a serious expression on his face while talking with the student.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

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.

Teachers tended to fall back on sending students to the office when they had less experience or fewer skills in other classroom management approaches. For example, a majority of schools now report using restorative discipline, which requires students in conflict to come together to talk through a problem and find solutions, but teachers have reported limited training in how to use the approach successfully.

Differences showed up by licensing, too. “Teachers who have credentials in special education and English learners are less likely to be top referrers, probably because they got more training about how to manage student behavior when they got credentials,” Liu said.

While novice teachers are much more likely to be among the top discipline referrers in a school, “it’s not something that stays with one person,” he said. “As teachers get more senior, when they accumulate more classroom management skills, they are no longer in the top referral category.”

Prior federal efforts to close discipline gaps have focused on limiting exclusionary practices like out-of-school suspensions, but that doesn’t always change teachers’ office referrals, an earlier step on the discipline continuum. The California district studied limited student suspensions to objective misbehaviors like drug use, violence, or truancy, but Liu found “teachers are still making a ton of referrals based on the reason of pupil defiance,” or other subjective class behaviors.

The results suggest school leaders may be able to significantly close discipline disparities by collecting systematic data on each teacher’s discipline referrals and providing mentoring and classroom-management support for those who have high or disproportionate referral rates.

“We must try very hard to not blame any individual teachers, because we really see that those early-career teachers are more likely to teach in very challenging contexts, and they’re lacking the tools and resources to deal with student behavior,” Liu said. “So I think professional development, especially on classroom management, can be very helpful for early-career teachers. I don’t think anyone would continue with that excessive referring if they realized how much of an impact their referrals would have on their students.”

Exclusionary discipline can devastate students. Prior studies suggest every out-of-school suspension reduces a student’s likelihood of ultimately graduating high school, and disproportionate discipline practices mean that Black students, for example, can end up missing five times as much school their white peers for the same misbehaviors.

Liu said he and his colleagues hope to pick apart what makes some new teachers less likely to use discipline referrals.

A version of this article appeared in the July 12, 2023 edition of Education Week as Targeting Training to Just a Few Teachers Could Help Cut Racial Discipline Gap in Half

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Classroom Technology Webinar
How to Leverage Virtual Learning: Preparing Students for the Future
Hear from an expert panel how best to leverage virtual learning in your district to achieve your goals.
Content provided by Class
English-Language Learners Webinar AI and English Learners: What Teachers Need to Know
Explore the role of AI in multilingual education and its potential limitations.
Education Webinar The K-12 Leader: Data and Insights Every Marketer Needs to Know
Which topics are capturing the attention of district and school leaders? Discover how to align your content with the topics your target audience cares about most. 

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Teaching Spotlight Spotlight on Student Engagement & Motivation
This Spotlight will help you with insights into educators’ strategies for engagement, explore how podcasts are boosting engagement, and more.
Teaching Do Teachers Have to Be Entertainers? Here's What They Say
Teachers speak out about how they work to engage students, and the fine line between teaching and entertaining.
5 min read
A teacher plays the guitar for students during the first day of hybrid instruction at Jason Lee Elementary School on April 1, 2021, in Portland, Ore.
A teacher plays the guitar for students during the first day of hybrid instruction at Jason Lee Elementary School on April 1, 2021, in Portland, Ore.
Tom McKenzie/AP Images for Portland Public Schools
Teaching Opinion Want to Engage Students? Model Real-World Experiences
Students like a challenge. Give them an opportunity to imagine how they would solve a problem.
14 min read
Images shows colorful speech bubbles that say "Q," "&," and "A."
iStock/Getty