Detailed Notes on Racial Disproportionality in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Racial Disproportionality in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

For Black children, school discipline experiences often lead to the criminal justice system rather than learning opportunities.
Implicit and explicit biases result in harsher treatment of Black children, who are perceived as more dangerous, leading to more expulsions compared to White peers.
Formal and informal pathways for removal exist, starting in preschool, with stark consequences for Black children.
Policies often ignore or facilitate racial disproportionality in the school-to-prison pipeline.
The chapter reviews factors driving disproportionality and the current policy landscape, identifying ways to disrupt the pipeline in schools and teacher preparation programs.

Introduction to the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Families expect schools to help children develop into productive members of society.
However, for Black children in the U.S., schools can divert them away from successful adulthood, increasing the likelihood of ending up in the criminal justice system.
This is known as the "school-to-prison pipeline."
The pipeline is a culmination of problematic steps, with suspensions and expulsions being visible turning points.
Disproportionate removal of children of color from learning environments starts early and is primarily due to implicit and explicit biases of educators, administrators, and policies.
Researchers find that children of color are not showing more violent behaviors; educators use subjective labels (e.g., “willful,” “defiant,” “disrespectful”) to justify harsher punishments.
Schooling is steeped in racism and can direct children toward a more difficult life based on their skin color.
The chapter describes the policy context, research on how steps occur along the pathway, and formal and informal approaches to end the crisis.
It will describe the scope, causes, and consequences of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline practices and policies from preschool through high school.
The chapter describes the factors that drive these disparities and opportunities for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to disrupt discriminatory patterns.
The review reflects shared identities as White female developmental psychologists engaged in community-oriented action research.
This positionality has influenced the questions we ask, the way we identify and make sense of current resources and literature, and the solutions we advance.
Supplement this chapter by reading the works of our colleagues, from a wide range of backgrounds, to get additional perspectives on the school-to-prison pipeline.

What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

The link between school discipline and later involvement in the criminal justice system has been dubbed the “school-to-prison-pipeline”.
Black children experience a more direct and expedited pathway from places of learning to places of incarceration compared to their White peers with similar misbehaviors.
Racial and ethnic disproportionality in discipline rates and severity in U.S. schools has been widely and conclusively demonstrated.
These disparities persist across settings (urban/suburban), study methodology (qualitative and quantitative), and data levels (national vs. local data sets), and even when interventions and reforms reduce the overall rate of removals.
Disproportional disciplinary rates became evident immediately following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1954, and with subsequent school desegregation.
The passage of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which codified the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, or national origin, additionally supported the initiation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which began collecting discipline data from all U.S. public schools in the 1960s to enforce civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination.
The pipeline begins well before removal from school occurs.
A myriad of factors at multiple levels contribute to discipline disproportionality in schools.
Black children are more likely to be perceived as dangerous or disruptive by their teachers, to be referred for special education services, to experience disruptions in their learning due to classroom shuffling, to have the police called on them in school, and to have their families be pressured by school officials to voluntarily withdraw their child from school.
White children displaying similar behaviors are more often afforded other exits and avenues off the pipeline to prison, through counseling and mental health services, substance abuse treatment, diversion programs, and alternative education settings.
From preschool, children of color walk into the classroom, their predominantly White teachers are viewing them as older than they are, creating developmentally inappropriate expectations for behavior.
White teachers tend to be less effective at creating strong teacher–child relationships across races than with same-race children, which are integral to a successful experience in school.
Children of color experience both racist interactions that instigate challenging behavior and policies that label subjective behavior as more challenging, creating a more hostile environment for learning and a direct pathway out of school and into the criminal justice system.

Racial Disproportionality in Suspension and Expulsion

Removing children from the educational environment has become one of the most common forms of discipline in U.S. public schools.
Suspensions and expulsions have nearly doubled over the last four decades (increasing from 1.7 million students in 1974 to over 3.5 million in 2011–2012).
Over 17,000 of these removals were of preschool-aged children, and the practice may even start in infant and toddler care settings.
Expulsion from public preschool happens at a rate three times higher than that of K-12 settings, and estimates for private preschool expulsion are even higher.
At all grades and ages, Black children, particularly boys, are disproportionately excluded from school through suspensions and expulsions.
African American preschoolers are twice as likely as Latino and White preschoolers, and over five times more likely than Asian American preschoolers, to be expelled.
Even though Black children make up only 18% of children in public preschools nationwide, they make up 48% of those receiving multiple suspensions in a given year.
Boys constitute 51% of children in preschool, they receive 82% of suspensions and expulsions.
In public K-12 settings, Black students comprise only 15% of all U.S. students but make up 36% of those expelled and 44% of students with more than one suspension.
These racial disparities have grown over time— while discipline rates have decreased for Latino, Asian, American Indian, and White students from 1991 to 2005, rates increased for Black youth.
Boys are suspended in greater numbers than girls, and Black boys are suspended more than three times as often as White boys.
Black girls are six times more likely to be suspended than their White female peers and represent the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system.
Although some reports indicate similar overrepresentation of Latino students in disciplinary data, findings are not consistent across contexts.

Policy Context for the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Racial disparities in suspension and expulsion have been evident since the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights began collecting data in the 1960s.
Following an increase in school violence and shootings in the 1980s and ‘90s, school administrators were under increased pressure to respond to misbehavior aggressively with exclusionary punishments and by increasing the presence of police officers and school resource officers.
Rigid disciplinary codes, including zero-tolerance policies and three-strikes rules, were widely adopted despite little to no evidence of their effectiveness.
In response to increasing evidence of persistent racial disparities, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights issued joint school discipline guidelines in 2014.
Under the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights was particularly concerned with understanding and preventing these disparities.
Guidelines included examples of ways discrimination can occur and a list of potential evidence-based remedies, including restorative and schoolwide approaches to improving school climate and reducing misbehavior.
They also outlined a legal framework for assessing allegations of racial discrimination, a critical piece to systemic reform.
These guidelines led to a demand for training and tools for school personnel to reduce biases and harmful discipline practices, but opponents argued that the Department of Education (DOE) was infringing on the authority of local schools to make their own decisions about responding to student behaviors.
There has recently been a substantial shift in state and regional education policy regarding discipline.
In recognition of the overall rate and disparities in suspension and expulsion, states such as North Carolina and districts such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago have imposed restrictions on schools’ uses of suspension and expulsions, especially for their youngest students (e.g., preschool–second grade).
Some states, such as Illinois, have also passed sweeping legislation to reduce rates of exclusion across all sectors of early childhood education (in-home, private, and publicly funded infant, toddler, and preschool programming) through coordinated efforts across state boards of education, departments of child and family services, and other agencies.
These policy shifts are important but are only aimed at reducing the overall rate of suspensions and expulsions.
It is unclear whether or how such policy changes would ensure that schools better retain and serve Black children.

Disparities in Classroom Experiences and Relationships

Black children are at risk of experiencing a less optimal learning environment than their White peers.
This includes weaker relationships with predominantly White teachers, educators expecting them to misbehave, and a curriculum that values White culture disproportionately.
Teacher–child relationship quality varies by child race.
Teachers of all races rated their relationships with Black children as higher in conflict than those with other children, but non-Black teachers’ ratings were almost a full standard deviation higher than Black teachers’ ratings.
Lower-quality teacher–child relationships are associated with more negative teacher perceptions of Black children’s academic abilities.
These differential perceptions and expectations likely result from teachers not having been educated in racially responsive teaching practices or self-reflection about their biases.
Black children will have less supportive learning environments and more regular and harsh exposure to classroom discipline practices, diverting them toward the beginning steps of the school-to-prison pipeline (e.g., out-of-school suspension, special education referrals).
An often-cited hypothesis for disproportionate school suspensions and expulsions against Black children is that they are due to a racial mismatch between teachers and their students of color.
White teachers may be more likely to interpret impassioned or emotionally charged interactions among Black boys in particular as combative or dangerous.
One study also found that any student who engaged in a “stroll” style of walking—considered an African American style of walking—was judged by teachers as being more aggressive and less likely to achieve academically.
This may reflect the tendency that researchers have found for people to overinterpret emotional cues (e.g. sadness, fear, anger) for groups they harbor an implicit bias against.
A sample similar to the teaching population (90% White and female) perceived Black boys as significantly older (by 3 years on average) and less innocent than same-aged White children.
These studies explain the possible processes that drive racial stereotypes and result in higher rates of office referrals.
Several mechanisms have been raised as contributing to the fact that Black students are more likely than their White peers to be punished for more minor or ambiguous behaviors.
Research indicates that there are several perceptual differences that may lead to higher rates of disciplinary referrals for Black children:
- Teachers look at Black children more
- perceive their actions as more threatening
- may hold developmentally inappropriate expectations for them as compared to their White peers.
As an example, compared to Black teachers, White teachers rated Black boys as having greater increases in problem behaviors from fall to spring and as having more extensive behavior problems.
When Black children have Black teachers, they are rated as less disruptive and are suspended less often than when they have teachers of another race.
Black teachers may be better equipped to understand the needs of Black children and may implement a more culturally aligned pedagogy.

Disparities in Experiences After School Removal

The consequences of expulsion and suspension from school are significant, multifaceted, and well studied.
Exclusionary discipline is associated with poorer social and emotional development, lower affinity for school and learning, and lower academic and civic engagement, all of which are associated with more school dropout, delinquency, and incarceration.
Longitudinal analyses show that children who were suspended repeatedly were eight times more likely to be incarcerated than those never suspended.
Several mechanisms have been hypothesized to explain the association between school removal and problematic behavior that would bring a child into contact with the criminal justice system.
As Cohen and Felson (1979; Felson 1998) outline in the routine activity theory, in order for a crime to be committed, there must be a motivated offender, a suitable target, and, most relevant here, the absence of a suitable guardian.
When children are removed from school they are more likely to be unsupervised or poorly supervised for more hours in a day and in more contexts in which delinquent behavior could lead to an arrest.
Higher levels of parental involvement and monitoring are associated with lower levels of adolescent delinquency.
Unstructured socialization with peers is associated with greater risk of youth engaging in antisocial behavior, even if the peers themselves are not prone to deviance.
In a recent longitudinal study accounting for voluntary (truancy) and involuntary (suspension/expulsion) separations from school, Monahan, VanDerhei, Bechtold, and Cauffman (2014) found that students were more than twice as likely to be arrested during months when they were suspended or expelled than when not removed from school.
This risk was not moderated by race, indicating that while discipline may be administered differently across racial groups in schools, the consequences of increased risk for arrest following suspension and expulsion appear to be universal.
For nearly three decades, researchers have documented the associations between the decision to remove children from their learning environment and their subsequent academic, social-emotional, motivational, and behavioral declines.
As expulsion begets expulsion (Hwang, 2018), the earlier this pattern is established, the more likely children are to be expelled in elementary school, resulting in greater losses in cumulative instructional time and greater achievement gaps separating removed children from their included peers, particularly during critical periods of development.
Coupled with the persistent disproportional rates of removal for children of color, suspensions and expulsions exacerbate the U.S. achievement gap, so much so that Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera (2010) refer to the achievement and discipline gaps as two sides of the same coin.
School removals are also associated with children feeling more alienated from or less affinity for a school or schools (Hwang, 2018; Skiba et al., 2011), making them more likely to drop out (Archambault, Janosz, Fallu, & Pagani, 2009).
Excluded children are often labeled by teachers and administrators as “bad kids,” which can negatively impact children’s school relationships (Hwang, 2018) and lead them to perceive themselves as being a threat or danger to others (Welch & Payne, 2010).
This self-fulfilling prophecy may actually increase negative behavior as children act out when they are made to feel unwelcome (Walton & Cohen, 2007).
There is mounting evidence of the indirect negative consequences for other children in the classroom who witness repeated and disparate disciplinary practices.
When children observe inequities, they are learning who belongs or is welcome in their school, and who is not.
Such experiences not only perpetuate an exclusionary school climate but also reinforce racial biases that will remain with children well beyond their school years.
The consequences of being removed from the classroom are greatest for the children being removed—mostly students of color—but they are also harmful to all students and perpetuate systems of racial inequities that plague our entire society.

Disparities in the Decisions to Remove Children from School

Past researchers have hypothesized that Black children may actually engage in more frequent and severe rule-breaking behaviors, explaining why they are removed from school at a higher rate than their non-Black peers.
Increasingly, researchers are utilizing more advanced research methodology to explore whether and how children’s disproportionate removal is due not to qualitative differences in behavior, for example, but instead to racially discriminatory differences in perceptions of them and their behavior.
Despite the preponderance of studies of school removals, there are relatively few studies that can produce estimates of causal links between removals and unfavorable outcomes for students.
This is in part because a student’s history of suspension is likely both a symptom and a cause of unfavorable outcomes. Studies that simply compare students who have been removed with those who have not therefore produce biased estimates.
Most of the studies on school removal actually provide little insight into or empirical analysis of the behavioral and contextual dynamics that may be involved in the school removal process.
In an effort to produce better estimates, one study leveraged a unique data set that controlled for unobservable time-invariant child characteristics through individual-level quarterly reporting of academic performance and disciplinary actions across 3 years.
These robust and sensitive analyses of data for over 15,000 students in seventh–eleventh grades upheld the previously reported links between being suspended and falling behind academically.
Hwang’s analyses also replicated the persistent disproportionality in discipline for racial minorities and low-income students.
Petras and colleagues (2011) used longitudinal data from over 1,000 first-grade students, finding that children’s first school removal was predicted both by their initial individual and classroom levels of aggression and their risk of suspension.
Black youth in poverty were at highest risk of removal even after controlling for children’s early individual levels of aggression and disruption.
Group differences in the severity or frequency of disruptive or dangerous behavior do not explain the disparities in removals.
Teacher behavior plays a significant role in setting the stage for disciplinary problems and can influence student–teacher interactions and relationships.
Teachers in classrooms with higher levels of aggression may develop higher tolerance or have a higher threshold for what they deem to be "removable" behavior.
This may explain why teachers use disciplinary actions such as school removal to widely different degrees.
One study (Skiba et al., 1997) found that in one middle school, two-thirds of all disciplinary referrals came from less than a quarter of the teachers.
Another possible explanation for differences in teachers’ rates of referrals is systematic.
It is possible that teachers who have these higher thresholds and can tolerate more disruption are assigned to classrooms that have more aggressive profiles by principals.
Such administrative insight could serve as a buffer to higher expulsion rates.
All administrators and teachers make disciplinary decisions within systems of policy.
State and local jurisdictions may prohibit the use of some disciplinary measures or very clearly outline which measures can be used against which offenses.
For example, in Chicago public schools, Illinois Public Act 99-456 created guidelines to limit school suspensions and expulsion, including the prohibition of their use for children in preschool through second grade.
Less is known about school factors that may contribute to discipline disproportionality.
Some school-level factors associated with greater expulsion and suspension rates include:
- larger school size
- larger proportions of racial and ethnic minority and dual language–learning students
- larger proportions of students held back a grade
- high dropout rates
- lower average academic performance
- lower average family incomes
Despite these findings from correlational studies, more recent analyses using multilevel modeling have found mixed results and point toward the need for more research accounting for the full range of variables and factors.

Disparities in Behavior Perception and Management in School

Racial disparities in discipline are rooted in systemic and structural discrimination, but individual racial biases are central to perpetuating racist systems.
Bias matters at every step along the school-to-prison pipeline.
Administrator perspectives on discipline are a stronger predictor of racial disparities in out-of-school suspension than are children’s behaviors.
Teachers’ attitudes predict their greater propensity to approve of the use of force by police when responding to Black students’ misbehavior compared to that of White students.
Attitudes of educators might reflect their tendency to center behavior problems as stemming from something “within” a child (fundamental attribution error) without recognizing or attributing behavior to a child’s reaction to a set of circumstances or challenges.
When Black children exhibit behaviors that are the result of their disproportionate exposure to trauma, poverty, or discrimination, teachers aim to punish the children rather than acknowledge the underlying issues.
Schoolwide efforts that address these larger problems, such as raising academic expectations and students’ sense of safety at school, have increased student achievement and are needed as part of a holistic plan for achieving student success.
Another factor that leads to disproportionate reactions to Black children’s behaviors is the stereotype (endorsed by educators) that Black children are dangerous.
Researchers have documented that across ages and settings, teachers perceive Black boys as more defiant and disruptive than other groups of children.
Observational studies find that the frequency of such “disruptive” behaviors does not actually differ by race; Black students do not engage in more severe or more frequent disruptive or dangerous behavior.
Black middle-schoolers are referred to the office more often than their peers for offenses that have a high degree of subjectivity in interpretation, such as “disrespect” or “loitering”.
They then receive harsher levels of punishment for less serious behaviors than other children, a reflection of administrator racial biases.
Experimental studies that systematically vary the child’s race across conditions have further documented teachers’ tendency to discipline Black children differently than their White peers.
Teachers shown office referral records for student misbehavior were more likely to identify children with stereotypical Black names as “troublemakers” and escalated the severity of their responses to Black students more so than when the student had a stereotypically White name, even when the Black student’s record had only one minor infraction.
Because many educators believe Black children are dangerous, they also believe that keeping them in schools may lead to less safe school environments.
Questions about safety were brought to light as the Office for Civil Rights 2014 guidelines were put into place—decreasing removals from school—and in confluence with several prominent school shootings (even though gunman were nearly exclusively White).
In response to public concern, the DOE, led by Betsy Devos, convened a commission on school safety in 2018, which recommended rescinding the 2014 guidelines, claiming that Obama-era measures to reduce disciplinary disparities made schools less safe.
Devos called for schools to consider partnering with local law enforcement officials for the training and arming of school personnel to increase school safety.
Increasing the number of armed school personnel, however, has been shown to make Black children feel less safe and increases the likelihood that they will be brought into the criminal and juvenile justice systems.
There is a reason to believe that the increased presence of police and security personnel may be conditioning children to a culture of being watched and policed.
Black students are disproportionately arrested and restrained in schools.

Known and Plausible Solutions

The gross disproportionate representation of Black children within the school-to-prison pipeline occurs in a system with many players, policies, and problems.
Underlying this complex system, however, is one main idea that needs to be addressed: racism.
Racism is ever-present in the United States, impacts everyone in school settings, and requires multifaceted solutions.
Addressing racism begins with far-reaching, comprehensive training for all educators and policymakers so that they can begin to recognize racism in their own classrooms and how to interrupt it when they see it.
Educators need more support when they are noticing problems that they do not have the capacity to handle, so that removing the child from the school is not the only answer.
Professional development, teacher coaching, and exposing teachers to more racial literacy content in preservice preparation programs may be supports that are promising and worthy of future research.
Three main approaches to decreasing the overrepresentation of Black children in the school-to-prison pipeline:
- increasing educator knowledge and skills in a professional learning community
- providing holistic supports to teachers
- enhancing preservice teacher preparation

Build a Race-Focused Professional Learning Community in Every School

Learning about race and developing an ability to be reflective about one’s own role in racist systems is a deeply personal and never-ending process.
Educators need a forum in which to work together to learn about race over time, in trusting relationships.
Such a learning community should examine educators’ biases, create a schoolwide anti-racist vision, examine data on disproportionalities, and provide a space to call each other out and into a school culture that is committed to anti-racism.

Provide More Holistic Support Services for Teachers

When educators are faced with challenging behaviors, they need additional supports to understand and deal with the behaviors without removing children from school, and to deal with their own stress.
Dealing with teacher stress directly and via additional teaching supports is critical because educators are highly stressed.
Teachers who are stressed are up to three times more likely than their peers to expel a child.
Providing teachers with additional classroom aides and supports for managing behavior and promoting children’s social and emotional skills has been shown to reduce expulsion, but only when those supports lower teachers’ stress levels.

Work with Higher Education to Prepare Preservice Teachers

It is important to think about working with preservice teachers in higher education to improve their racial awareness, knowledge, and skills before they begin their teaching career.
States should prioritize race-related teaching competencies in their credentialing requirements.
Efforts to enhance race-related skills and knowledge must be paired with an equally intensive effort to build a more diverse cohort of incoming teachers.

Leading to Disrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline

There are ways to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, and through examples, we would like to share one vision for a school leader working to create a better pathway for children of color.

Scenario #1: Racial Disparities in Children’s Learning Experiences and Relationships

A teacher complains to the principal that a Black boy is habitually disengaged during reading time.
The principal remembers that implicit bias and racism can surface for teachers interacting with young boys and reminds herself to pause, consider the situation carefully, and get more information.
Specifically, she decides to ask the teacher questions that move the conversation beyond subjective descriptors to concrete and factual details.
Later in the day, the principal decides to stop by the classroom with a picture book featuring a young Black boy, to read and connect with the child and learn more from a first-hand interaction.
While there, the principal notices how many competing demands there are for the teachers’ attention and realizes how difficult it would be to attend to each child during reading time. The principal decides to re-examine the allocation of volunteers so that this teacher will have more support.

Scenario #2: Racial Disparities in Behavior Perception and Management in School

During his monthly review of behavioral reports, a principal is struck by one report that uses particularly strong language when describing a hallway altercation between a Black girl and a teacher.
The principal decides to get more information.
He pulls out all of the behavioral reports submitted by that teacher over the past year and schedules a meeting to reflect with him on his word choices and to inquire further about the nature of this particular interaction.
By looking at all of the reports submitted over the course of the year, the principal can invite the teacher to compare incidents across races and look together to see if there are any patterns they should be thinking about.

Scenario #3: Racial Disparities in Decisions to Remove Children from School

A Black student is brought to the principal’s office because pills were found in his backpack.
The principal noticed herself quickly concluding that expulsion was the proper response to bringing drugs to school.
She worried she might be jumping to conclusions and decided to think about all of the possible reasons why a child might have pills in his backpack.
The principal decided to call the child’s parents so they could figure out the problem together. After listening to the child and conferring with the parents, she learned that the pills were a generic Tylenol he was taking because of a sprained wrist.
Although school policy stated that the school nurse needed to be notified of all medications taken on school property, the principal knew this was an honest oversight and that expulsion would be a gross overreaction.

Scenario #4: Racial Disparities in Children’s Experiences After Removal

A truancy officer brings to school a child whose chronic absenteeism has already resulted in multiple suspensions.
Due to district policies, the principal had to expel him.
At the same time, the principal was keenly aware of the fact that this child was now at risk of referral to the juvenile justice system.
To try to head off this path and instead put him on one to learning how to address the issue, the principal reached out to the school psychologists and resource officers to develop a protocol for how to assist the child and his family to find mental health and behavioral supports.
The principal made sure the family got information about those supports and called repeatedly during the expulsion to check in and keep the lines of communication open.

Conclusion

Suspensions were down nationwide in the 2015–2016 school year compared to 2013–2014, during that same period, arrests and referrals for Black children continued to increase.
Efforts to reduce overall exclusionary discipline rates, therefore, will not end racial disparities and may even lead schools to utilize more severe responses (i.e., calling the cops on Black children when they previously would have suspended the child).
Racial disproportionality in expulsions and suspensions are the results of racism that continues to plague the U.S. educational system, affecting children, families, and educators at every step along the school-to-prison pipeline.
passing legislative bans on expulsion without allocating funds to confront systemic racism directly may exacerbate disparities, as well as burnout of an already stressed teacher workforce.
With bold, collective, and unwavering efforts, it is possible for educational leaders, policymakers, administrators, teachers, families, and university faculty to weaken—and even end—the school-to-prison pipeline.
This will require active learning about race, willingness to engage in honest and critical self-reflection, embracing each other as allies, and courage to lead fervent advocacy.