Historical Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in School Discipline in the United States

Abstract

This visualization represents the historical patterns and trends in racial/ethnic differences in punitive school discipline over the last five decades in K–12 public schools in the United States. Overall, out-of-school suspension rates show an inverted-U trend with significant increases between 1970 and 2010 followed by decreases in the last decade. On the other hand, corporal punishment rates (and associated racial/ethnic disparities) show a consistent negative trend since the early 1980s following statewide bans in the use of corporal punishment in schools since the 1970s. However, racial/ethnic disproportionality in school discipline remains persistent across the board; indeed, increasing until the very last few years for Black and American Indian/Alaskan Native students compared to White students.

In 1975, the Children’s Defense Fund’s cross-sectional analysis highlighted the overrepresentation of Black students in exclusionary school discipline outcomes in data collected by the Office for Civil Rights (Children’s Defense Fund 1975). Exclusionary discipline in schools has been tied to a host of longer-term negative outcomes—including lower educational attainment and increasing involvement in the criminal justice system (Bacher-Hicks, Billings, and Deming 2019; Billings, Deming, and Rockoff 2014). Although studies continue to find racial discipline disparities using statewide or district-level administrative data (Anderson and Ritter 2020; Gopalan and Nelson 2019; Skiba et al. 2002, 2014), to our knowledge, no other study has examined long-term, nationwide patterns in racial/ethnic disproportionality in student discipline using multiple indicators. Figure 1 fills this gap by illustrating historical patterns in out-of-school suspension (OSS) and corporal punishment (CP) over the last five decades, using the Civil Rights Data Collection.

Figure 1.

Historical patterns and trends in school discipline in the United States.

Out-of-School Suspension

Our longitudinal graphs covering approximately five decades show a few distinct patterns, particularly the persistence of racial/ethnic discipline disparities. First, between 1970 and 1990, we see a steady increase in OOS suspension rates, with Black students facing 2 to 4 times higher likelihood of suspension than White students. ¹ This early post-civil rights era trend exemplifies the resistance to court-ordered desegregation from several Southern states. In many Southern districts, “second-generation” segregation took hold as legal efforts reduced “first-generation” segregation (e.g., between schools; see McClellan 2024). Even during the turn of the century, the Black-White OSS risk ratio continued to rise to almost 4 to 1. Although not as stark, we see similar patterns for American Indian/Alaska Native students. The Hispanic-White risk ratio (i.e., relative differences in discipline rates between White and Hispanic students), on the other hand, is much more modest, largely constant over time with slight declines in the last decade. Throughout this time, we do not observe significant disparities between Asian/Pacific Islander and White students; indeed, Asian/Pacific Islander students have lower OSS rates.

Corporal Punishment

In contrast, we see a more consistent decline in the use of CP during this period, as several states started banning its use in schools. ² Despite the longitudinal, downward trend in CP rates across all race/ethnic categories, Black-White and Alaska Native-White disproportionality in CP remained persistent, with Alaska Native and Black students facing about 1 to 3 times higher likelihood of receiving CP than White students throughout this period. Both Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander students had lower rates of CP than White students throughout this period.

Punitive School Discipline

Declines in overall use of punitive school discipline practices likely reflect the combined effects of significant advocacy by think tanks, such as the Children’s Defense Fund, that led to policy reforms, including imposing state-level bans in the use of CP (Dhaliwal et al. 2024; Gershoff and Font 2016), issuing federal policy guidance (U.S. Department of Education & U.S. Department of Justice 2014), and banning suspensions for selective instances in some districts/schools (Anderson 2018; Hashim, Strunk, and Dhaliwal 2018; Steinberg and Lacoe 2018). Recognition of long-term harmful effects of punitive school discipline (Council on School Health et al. 2013; Curran 2016; Duarte et al. 2023) have also led to calls for using promising preventive approaches, such as restorative justice policies (Adukia, Feigenberg, and Momeni 2024; Davison, Penner, and Penner 2022), over the last decade.

Nevertheless, 70 years since Brown v. Board and 60 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, our visualization highlights that the racial/ethnic gradient in exposure to punitive school environments created by a series of interlocking, systemic factors (e.g., segregation, implicit and explicit bias) remained persistent and growing for Black and Alaska Native American students. Continued monitoring of punitive student discipline ³ is warranted to understand whether minoritized students, who are more likely to attend low-resourced and punitive schools (Gopalan and Nelson 2019), continue to bear the brunt of exclusionary school discipline (Losen and Haynes 2016).

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241285105 – Supplemental material for Historical Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in School Discipline in the United States

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241285105 for Historical Patterns and Trends in Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in School Discipline in the United States by Maithreyi Gopalan, Sarah Asson, Michael Cattell and Erica Frankenberg in Socius