Concerns that suspensions disproportionately affect students of color have led many school districts to prioritize other forms of school discipline, including detention, loss of privileges, and restorative or behavioral interventions and supports. A new study by Youngsun Lee and Jing Liu at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Emily K. Penner at the University of California, Irvine finds that the strategy hasn’t closed at least one large district’s racial and ethnic discipline gaps. Its schools continued to impose suspensions on Black students and milder forms of discipline on white students for the same infractions.
The researchers analyzed two years of administrative data, from 2022 to 2024, from a southern school district serving 70,000 students across 125 schools. They tracked 47 disciplinary actions, which the researchers grouped into seven categories: out-of-school suspension, in-school suspension, school resource officer (SRO) involvement, detention, loss of privilege, behavioral guidance interventions, and other. The researchers then compared students from the same school who were referred for the same violation and compared students involved in the exact same incident to isolate how race or ethnicity shaped disciplinary outcomes.
Black students made up 42 percent of district enrollment but accounted for 62 percent of disciplinary referrals and 74 percent of suspensions. White students, by contrast, made up 27 percent of enrollment but were underrepresented across every disciplinary category. The researchers found that fighting, the second most common infraction in the district and the leading cause of suspension, was where this gap was most pronounced. For fighting, Black students were roughly four percentage points more likely to receive an out-of-school suspension than white students, and about two percentage points less likely to receive an in-school suspension. Further isolating the effect of race, the researchers observed that even within the same fight, Black students were 2.5 percentage points more likely than white students to receive an out-of-school suspension and nearly three times as likely to have an SRO involved. Meanwhile, white students involved in the same fight were more likely to receive a loss of privileges as their most severe consequence.
These disparities weren’t consistent across every type of infraction. When researchers compared Black and white students who were referred for the same rule violation besides fighting, such as classroom disruption or rule noncompliance, they found little difference in how the students were disciplined. That suggests that racial disparities emerge less in day-to-day rule enforcement and more in the discretionary calls administrators make during higher-stakes incidents, like fighting.
The authors believe their results point to a blind spot in school discipline reform. Because alternatives to suspension are often framed as the equitable fix, researchers and policymakers have focused mainly on whether they reduce suspension rates overall, not on whether administrators apply them equally across racial and ethnic groups. The findings suggest that expanding the selection of disciplinary options isn’t enough to address the problem because administrators exercise wide discretion in choosing among them. Instead, the authors recommend clearer support and guidelines for administrators to apply options consistently, regardless of a student’s race.