Key points:
- The jump in racial gaps caused by top referrers is largely driven by referrals issued for more subjective reasons
- Repeated disciplinary actions can hurt student engagement, achievement, and long-run success
- See related article: Addressing the digital divide’s effects on education and the workforce
The top 5 percent of teachers most likely to refer students to the principal’s office for disciplinary action do so at such an outsized rate that they effectively double the racial gaps in such referrals, according to new research from the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
These gaps are mainly driven by higher numbers of office discipline referrals (ODRs) issued for Black and Hispanic students, compared to White students. The study, published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of AERA, was conducted by Jing Liu at the University of Maryland, College Park, Emily K. Penner at the University of California, Irvine, and Wenjing Gao at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Based on highly detailed school data, this first-of-its-kind study documents teachers’ use of ODRs and examines the role referrals play in racial disparities in exclusionary school discipline. Office referrals are typically the first formal step in the discipline process and precede the potential use of further formal consequences, including suspension. The authors drew on data from the 2016–2017 to 2019–2020 school years involving more than 2,900 teachers and 79,000 students in grades K–12 in 101 schools in a large, diverse urban district in California.
“We were really surprised to find this small group of teachers engaged in extensive referring and how big an impact they had on expanding racial disparities,” said Jing Liu, an assistant professor in education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. “The positive takeaway was that the group of top referrers in our study represented a relatively manageable number of educators, who could be targeted with interventions and other supports.”
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