Since its release, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recent report on discipline disparities has generated substantial heat, but no new light. Based on an analysis of the most recent discipline data collected by the Office of Civil Rights, it concludes that “Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined…in K–12 public schools.” But if that sentence contains any new information, it is well hidden. And as the report acknowledges, by themselves these disparities “do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred.”
Using a generalized linear regression model—basically a more flexible version of ordinary linear regression—the authors of the report investigate the relationships between various school-level characteristics and discipline outcomes. However, as they acknowledge, their methodology has at least two important limitations.
First, because they don’t have student-level data, the authors can’t actually control for poverty and other factors at the student level. Thus, although the study finds that schools with more black students have higher suspensions rates—even after controlling for the number of poor kids—it doesn’t show that poor black students are more likely to be suspended than poor white students.
Second, as the authors once again acknowledge, “some variables that may be related to student behavior and discipline are not available in the data.” Consequently, their estimates are vulnerable to omitted variable bias, meaning (in this case) that their control variables may not fully account for school level differences in behavior.
Because of these limitations, the authors characterize their results as “associational” rather than causal. And instead of actually reporting the estimates generated by their model, they merely categorize the associations it reveals as positive, negative, or insignificant.
So much for the claim that the report proves the existence of racial bias.
But what of the more important question—that is, whether suspensions have a negative impact on suspended students? Or even more to the point, whether their costs outweigh their benefits?
Here the report provides no new information whatsoever. Worse, its tone is decidedly biased. For example, the first page notes that “research has shown that students who experience discipline that removes them from the classroom are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system.” But of course it doesn’t follow that removing students from class is the cause of these negative outcomes. (Why do I feel like I’m repeating myself?) In fact, the problems with the discipline studies the report cites are well documented—and the most plausibly causal studies, which suggest that suspensions may have negligible costs—are conspicuous in their absence. And the question of how suspensions and other disciplinary actions affect other students—including students of color—is never raised in the report, despite the fact that it is central to the debate.
In short, despite the fuss the report has generated, there isn’t anything new in it. So informed readers needn’t question their preconceived notions of school discipline on account of its findings: As was the case prior to the report’s release, racial bias either does or doesn’t have a significant impact on suspension rates. The costs of suspensions either do or don’t outweigh the benefits. And the Department of Education either has or hasn’t overstepped in its attempts to right the discipline wrongs it perceives via regulation.
SOURCE: “Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities,” United States Government Accountability Office (March 2018).
