Education experts have long sounded the alarm about how school discipline is applied unequally among students of different racial and ethnic groups, and Black students face a disproportionate number of office discipline referrals (ODRs). English). The effects of such practices can reverberate throughout a student’s life, according to the American Psychological Association, leading to worse mental health and lower grades.
“We know that black students are punished more frequently and harshly, but what we really didn’t know was the extent to which all of this discipline was shared among educators rather than perpetuated by a few educators,” says Emily K. Penner, associate professor. . of education at the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine.
Penner is part of a group of researchers who shed new light on this problem after they were able to identify how a small number of teachers in a California district effectively doubled the discipline gap between white and black students. He study on “frequent teacher recommenders” was published in Education Researcher magazine this summer.
Jing Liu, assistant professor of education policy at the University of Maryland College Park, says he and his fellow researchers were surprised by their findings. This is largely due to what he says is a first in this field of research: access to data at an exceptionally high level of detail that allowed the team to track how many referrals to the office were issued by individual teachers.
“It’s concerning that they are only a small population of teachers (who are) much more likely to make a recommendation,” Liu says. “This points to our need to understand: Why is there such a small population of teachers making referrals and how can we help them stop this troubling pattern?”
The study also found that the ODR gap is being driven in particular by office referrals issued for interpersonal and challenge reasons, “which are arguably more likely to be subject to bias” compared to other less subjective circumstances, such as fights.
Penner’s previous policy work has examined factors within education that disadvantage students of certain races.
“We’re just starting to have this conversation about the role of educators, in particular, in school discipline,” he says. “A lot of the research on school discipline has really been done on the student side, thinking primarily about outcomes for students. But in reality, it is not just a one-sided issue. “There is an entire institution with people who also contribute to what happens with the school discipline of the students.”
For Penner, the study’s findings raise questions about the circumstances surrounding teachers who are great role models. Is there a policy that makes them feel like they have to issue referrals, do you offer, or are there particular school environments that lead to that? For example, could your classrooms be in areas where fights tend to break out more?
The data covers four school years from fall 2016 to spring 2020 in a “large, diverse, urban-intensive school district in California,” as described in the document. Liu says district leaders approached researchers with the data because of their desire to investigate inequality within student discipline at the school, and the conversation about referrals began with the district’s department that handles student welfare. the students.
“In reading the literature, we quickly discovered that much research on student discipline focuses on suspension, which is the end result of disciplinary processes,” Liu says. “I really think that understanding referrals — who makes them, who receives them — can really help us take one step closer to understanding the origins, the sources, of racial disparities in school discipline.”
Who is in the top 5 percent?
Taking a step back to look at all teachers who worked in the school district during the four years captured by the data, about a third of them sent at least one student to the office with an ODR during a given school year. About half of those teachers issued five or fewer referrals during the time period.
The researchers analyzed gaps in the number of office referrals issued to white students and their peers in different racial and ethnic groups. (Data does not include suspension rateswhich the researchers describe as a disciplinary outcome of ODRs.) They were able to see the impact of “top referral” teachers by starting the analysis with just teachers who issued one or two office referrals, then adding teachers who issued three to five referrals. to the sample, observing how the number of references issued to each ethnic group changed as the teachers who issued a greater number of references became part of the sample.
When the top 5 percent of referents (teachers who issued 46 or more ODRs in a school year) were added to the sample, gaps in disciplinary actions between racial groups of students increased.
The top 5 percent of referring teachers were responsible for creating the widest discipline gap between white and black students. Before adding them to the sample, the data showed that black students were issued 1.6 ODRs for every ODR issued to white students. After adding the top 5 percent of referring teachers, that ratio jumped to 3.4 office referrals for black students for every one sent to white students.
According to the study, primary referents gave black and Hispanic students an outsized proportion of ODR relative to the proportion of black and Hispanic students in their classes.
Black students made up only 7 percent of the district’s students and 12 percent of the students in the classrooms of the most highly recommended teachers. However, the analysis found that Black students made up 22 percent of all students who received ODR and 27 percent of students sent to the office by the most recommended teachers.
While still disproportionate, racial gaps were less severe between white students and students from other groups, such as Hispanic and Asian students.
The researchers also found that teachers who were white, early in their careers, and taught in middle schools were “those who engaged in extensive referencing the most,” the study says.
“I think in high school there are a lot of new routines and developmental changes that are happening for students, a lot of different types of boundary testing, and increasing expectations in terms of self-management,” Penner says. “A disproportionate number of people in the top 5 percent were novice teachers, so it underscores the need for ongoing support and in-service preparation around classroom management, around routines to support disruptive students and interact with them”.
Black and Hispanic teachers were less likely than their white colleagues to issue a recommendation to the office and to be among the top referrers. Asian teachers were even less likely to issue a recommendation, but were just as likely as white teachers to rank among the highest-recommending teachers, “suggesting varied referral behavior among Asian teachers.”
Liu says that when it comes to teaching experience, teachers are less reliant on disciplinary referrals from the office once they reach 11 years in the profession. The data shows that the number of times teachers sent students to the office began to decrease once they reached three years of experience.
There is still work to be done to understand why some teachers request office referrals so frequently.
“We think it’s very possible that new teachers will be trained to follow a procedure around what happens with student discipline,” Penner explains. “A more seasoned teacher would know how to handle the situation or react to students in a way that might alleviate things, and a (novice) teacher might not have that in their repertoire yet.”
Next steps
Since the study’s publication, Liu says more school district leaders have reached out to ask researchers for a similar analysis of their offices’ referral data, including a partnership in the works with a school district in North Carolina.
As for the California district that is the subject of the recent study, Liu says the research team is working with the school district to identify teachers in the top 5 percent of benchmarks, not to punish them, but to find out what is contributing to its high rate. of ODRs and find ways to support them.
“We may need to provide more support to new teachers, (give them) a less challenging student body, or more specific professional development for those teachers,” Liu says, “but by identifying this group of teachers who are more likely to be role models, we are more likely to reduce the number of referrals and racial gaps.”
