Chapter 16: The Achievement Gap And The Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The gap in achievement across racial and ethnic groups has been a focus of educational research for decades, yet, the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of Black, Latino, and American Indian students has received less attention. This article synthesizes research on racial and ethnic patterns in school sanctions and considers how disproportionate discipline might contribute to lagging achievement among students of color. It further examines the evidence for student, school, and community contributors to the racial and ethnic patterns in school sanctions, and it offers promising directions for gap-reducing discipline policies and practices.

Although our national discourse on racial disparity tends to focus on academic outcomes—the so-called achievement gap—in school districts throughout the United States, Black, Latino, and American Indian students are also subject to a differential and disproportionate rate of school disciplinary sanctions, ranging from office disciplinary referrals to corporal punishment, suspension, and expulsion.¹Ostensibly, the intent of school disciplinary interventions is to preserve order and safety by removing students who break school rules and disrupt the school learning environment and, by setting an example of those punished students to deter other students from committing future rule infractions. However, schools tend to rely heavily upon exclusion from the classroom as the primary discipline strategy,²and this practice often has a disproportionate impact upon Black, Latino, and American Indian students. The use of school exclusion as a discipline practice may contribute to the well-documented racial gaps in academic achievement. This suggests that there is a pressing need for scholarly attention to the racial discipline gap in order for efforts addressing the achievement gap to have greater likelihood of success.