Russel Sage Foundation

Little is known about the extent to which changing racial demographics over the past decade has shifted disciplinary practices and students’ racialized experiences in schools. Sociologists Jennifer Candipan and Chantal Hailey will combine school zone shapefiles with national data from the Census and Civil Rights Database Collection (CRDC) to explore how growth in Black and Latino populations in neighborhoods is associated with changes in racial disparities in school discipline. They will examine changes in out-of-school suspension, in-school-suspension, expulsion, and arrests at traditional public schools from 2010 to 2018, a period during which overall discipline rates declined. They will examine the extent to which changes in racial disparities are associated with students’ race and gender, the type of neighborhood experiencing change, the neighborhood’s location in metropolitan areas characterized by racial and economic inequality, and the developmental stage of the school—elementary, middle, and high schools. Neighborhood data from the 2010 Census, and 5-year estimates from the 2006-10 and 2014-18 American Community Survey will be used.