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The gap in achievement across racial and ethnic groups has been a focus of education research for decades, but 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.

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S pecial education was borne out of, and owes a debt to, the civil rights movement. That is, the inspiration for, and the strategies used by, advocates whose efforts resulted in the first national special education legislation emerged from the struggles of the civil rights movement (Smith & Kozleski, 2005). Concerns about racial inequity were central to litigation (e.g., Mills v. Board of Education, 1972) that led to the promulgation of the first special education legislation (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, Public Law No. 1975). Thus, it is highly ironic that racial disparities in rates of special education service remain one of the key indicators of inequity in our nation's educational system.The disproportionate representation of minority students is among the most critical and enduring problems in the field of special education.

The term and construct "school-to-prison" pipeline has been widely used by advocates, researchers, and policymakers to describe the relationship between school disciplinary practices and increased risk of juvenile justice contact. It has been unclear whether the construct is a useful heuristic or a descriptor of empirically validated relationships that establish school disciplinary practices as a risk factor for negative developmental outcomes, including juvenile justice involvement. In this article, we examine the literature surrounding one facet of the pipeline, school exclusion as a disciplinary option, and propose a model for tracing possible pathways of effect from school suspension and expulsion to the ultimate contact point of juvenile justice involvement. Available multivariate analyses suggest that regardless of demographic, achievement, or system status, out-of-school suspension and expulsion are in and of themselves risk factors for a range of negative developmental outcomes. Recommendations are offered to assist schools in replacing disciplinary exclusion with a range of alternatives whose goal is to preserve both school order and provide all students with educational opportunities.