Texas Study Raises Questions About Impact of School Discipline - NYTimes.com

Texas Study Raises Questions About Impact of School Discipline - NYTimes.com: ...Minority students facing discipline for the first time tended to be given the harsher, out-of-school suspension, rather than in-school suspension, more often than white students, the study said. (The nature of the offenses was not noted.) A disproportionate number of minority students also ended up in alternative classrooms, where some have complained that teachers are often less qualified.

“What we really need to do is go in to those districts and see if these really are choices being made,” Mr. Skiba said. “We don’t really know enough about the reasons for African-American and Latino over-representation in school discipline. We have enough data to show that it’s more than just poverty and any greater misbehavior. My guess is it’s very subtle interactional effects between some teachers and students.”

Mr. Thompson, of the Council of State Governments, said one of the study’s most important findings was how demographically similar schools disciplined students differently. Although Texas law requires suspension or expulsion for certain offenses, Mr. Thompson said that 97 percent of suspensions were discretionary, and that suspension rates might say as much about administrators’ discipline philosophy as about student behavior.