By Amir Whitaker and Daniel J. Losen

Students of color in this country far too often face barriers to receiving quality public education – from unequal resources in schools, to overly punitive discipline administered more often to children of color. As the nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization, for more than a century, the NAACP has worked to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all persons and to eliminate racebased discrimination. Equal access to public education and eliminating the severe racial inequities that continue to plague our education system is at the core of our mission. This new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies brings new light to the practice of corporal punishment in schools. When an educator strikes a student in school, it can have a devastating impact on the child’s opportunity to learn in a safe, healthy, and welcoming environment. This is dangerous for all students, but corporal punishment is administered disproportionately to students of color in our nation’s public schools

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Rights Center and Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, 2019. 41p.

By Katherine Culliton-González, et al.

For this report, the Commission investigated school discipline practices and policies impacting students of color with disabilities and the possible connections to the school-to-prison pipeline, examined rates of exclusionary discipline, researched whether and under what circumstances school discipline policies unfairly and/or unlawfully target students of color with disabilities, and analyzed the federal government’s responses and actions on the topic.

Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2017. 224p.

By Ying Shi and Maria Zhu

Well-documented racial disparities in rates of exclusionary discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or bias, in which treatment for the same behavior varies by student race or ethnicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative data that contain rich details on individual disciplinary infractions. Two complementary empirical strategies identify bias in suspension outcomes. The first uses within-incident variation in disciplinary outcomes across White and under-represented minority students. The second employs individual fixed effects to examine how consequences vary for students across incidents based on the race of the other student involved in the incident. Both approaches find that Black students are suspended for longer than Hispanic or White students, while there is no evidence of Hispanic-White disparities. The similarity of findings across approaches and the ability of individual fixed effect models to account for unobserved characteristics common across disciplinary incidents provide support that remaining racial disparities are likely not driven by behavior.

Bonn, Germany: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2021. 38p.