Are Black and Latinx students suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than White students because of their greater exposure to punitive schools (“racialized sorting”) or because they are perceived and/or treated more harshly for identical misbehavior in the same types of schools?

This lecture disentangles these three key mechanisms of racial disparities in school discipline by combining school administrative data with an online video vignette experiment with 1,000 teachers across the U.S. I find that racialized school sorting plays the largest role: if White students were to equally attend disadvantaged and minority schools, they would experience similarly high rates of school discipline as Black and Latinx students.

This lecture is part of WCER's Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences.