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Results demonstrate that schools located in more segregated districts tend to have lower racial disparities in suspensions for black students,
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Results confirms that black students are facing far more school discipline than what we would expect given the racial composition of schools.
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With regard to school demographics, we see that larger schools have a higher disciplinary imbalance than smaller schools while schools with a higher percentage of students from low-income families have a lower disciplinary imbalance.
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As schools are more segregated than the population of the district would suggest, the suspension imbalance ratio decreases. In more segregated districts, suspensions administered to black students take place at a rate closer to what we would expect, given enrollment patterns, than in less segregated districts.
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Findings suggest that increasing levels of segregation decrease the racial suspension imbalance significantly for black students enrolled in public secondary schools. In other words, as the proportion of black students attending school with the average white student increases in a district beyond what we would expect given the district’s composition, so does the suspension
imbalance ratio for suspensions administered to black students.
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They find that compositional measures of segregation at the district level explain far more of the variation in disciplinary imbalance than measures that capture how students are distributed across schools.
2016 - Distribution, Composition and Exclusion: How School Segregation Impacts Racist Disciplinary Patterns
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Middle schools and high schools (N = 585) in the state of Georgia from two US Department of Education sources, the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ Data Collection (CRDC) and the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data (CCD).
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The 2011-s2012 dataset focuses on the disciplinary practices of schools in addition to course offerings, basic demographics, and staff/faculty characteristics.
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They selected the state of Georgia because Georgia’s racial suspension rates by gender and race are very close to national rates.
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DV: Discipline Disparity
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They created a suspension imbalance ratio by comparing the proportion of black students enrolled in a school and the proportion of suspensions (both one-time and multiple) administered to black students.
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IV: Measures of segregation. In order to measure segregation, the authors use 5 indexes; Dissimilarity index, Entropy index, Exposure indices, and the Isolation index.
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Control Variables: School demographics, school organizations, and school resources.
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School demographics include the proportion of students in the school receiving special education services, the socioeconomic composition of the student body (measured as the proportion of the student body enrolled in the Free/Reduced Lunch program), total school size (divided by 100), the grade composition of the school, and the racial composition of the school.
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School organization includes school governance, teacher quality, and curricular structures.
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School Resources includes two variables; student-teacher ratio and institutional expenditures per student.
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They use two theories to create their hypothesis; contact theory and racial threat theory.
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Contact theory suggests that, under certain conditions, increased contact between groups generates empathy and understanding, resulting in less conflict between groups.
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Racial threat theory, which suggests that the relative size of population groups influences levels of intergroup conflict.
Are levels of school segregation associated with differing levels of racialized disciplinary imbalances?