Dive Brief:

• Researchers from American University and the University of California, Davis, studied 1 million students and 50,000 teachers in North Carolina who were black or white and were in or taught first through fifth grade from 2008-2013, finding connections between race and the likelihood of exclusionary discipline.
• Professors Constance Lindsay and Cassandra Hart write for Education Next that, overall, all students were less likely to face exclusionary discipline, including suspension or expulsion, if their teacher was of the same race and the effect was particularly pronounced for black boys.
• Still, schools with larger populations of black students use exclusionary discipline more frequently, so black students paired with black teachers in these schools are still more likely to experience exclusionary discipline than their black peers in predominantly white schools who have white teachers.

Dive Insight:

Researchers concluded their paper by recommending that schools work harder to recruit more black teachers to the profession. Exclusionary disciplinary policies are increasingly considered detrimental to students in the long-term, in part because they make it more likely that students will have run-ins with law enforcement and in part because removing students from classrooms means they will not have access to the academic content they need.

But schools can’t stop at recruitment. The teaching force is vastly out of step with the diversity among the students it serves and that will be true for decades. In the meantime, schools need to take racial bias seriously, whether explicit or implicit. Teachers have to be reflective about the role they play in a reality where black and Latino students are disproportionately targeted for suspensions and expulsions. To do this, districts must hold high-quality diversity trainings as part of their professional development curricula.