Understanding the Racial Discipline Gap in Schools

We explore the discipline gap between Black and White students and between Hispanic and White students using a statewide student-level panel data set on Indiana public school students attending prekindergarten through 12th grade from 2008-2009 through 2013-2014. We demonstrate that the Black-White disciplinary gaps, defined in a variety of ways and robust to a series of specification tests, emerge as early as in prekindergarten and widen with grade progression. The magnitude of these disciplinary gaps attenuates by about half when we control ,fin- many student- and school-level characteristics, but it persists within districts and schools. In contrast, we find that Hispanic-White gaps are initially null and statistically insignificant at the prekindergarten/kindergarten level and attenuate substantially after adjustment for cross-school (district) variation and other covariates. We further disentangle the discipline gap using a decomposition technique that provides empirical support for the hypothesis that Black students nonrandomly sort into more punitive disciplinary environments.