Exclusionary Discipline

There is an issue occurring in public schools that is not often addressed and that is the Black-White disparity in exclusionary discipline. The conversation often centers around the "achievement gap" or more recently the "opportunity gap". But what are some of the factors that can be addressed in schools that are leading to these gaps? The main concept is first, students need to be in the schools to learn. Exclusionary discipline removes the students from their learning environment. In fact, exclusionary discipline affects Black students nationwide. According to the K-12 Civil Rights Data Collection's (2017) 2015-2016 nationwide report where Black students made up 15.4% of enrollment while 48.9% of the students were White. That same collection period nationwide identified 37.2% of the students receiving one out-of-school suspension were Black, while 33.6% of students were White. These disparities align with historical research as well as the research conducted for this study which focused on elementary schools and non-violent behaviors in a large school district in the Southeastern United States, the research states that Black students are underrepresented in the district, yet over represented in exclusionary disciplinary outcomes. This led to the purpose of this research which was to examine the degree of Black-White disparity in exclusionary discipline based on non-violent behaviors and to identify school characteristics such as school size, poverty level, and racial diversity level, that are associated with Black-White disparity in exclusionary discipline based on non-violent behaviors of elementary students. A quantitative approach was taken for this research due to the fact that the goal was to solely identify the elementary schools with the greatest Black-White disparity and determine if a commonality of characteristics exists between them. A Pearson r correlation analysis was conducted and was determined that there was no significant association between suspension rate of any type and school background characteristics that were examined in this study. It was identified however that lower severity level non-violent behaviors had a Black-White disparity level as great as 48.4%.