Racial disparities in school-based disciplinary actions are associated with county-level rates of racial bias

Abstract

There are substantial gaps in educational outcomes between black and white students in the United States. Recently, increased attention has focused on differences in the rates at which black and white students are disciplined, finding that black students are more likely to be seen as problematic and more likely to be punished than white students are for the same offense. Although these disparities suggest that racial biases are a contributor, no previous research has shown associations with psychological measurements of bias and disciplinary outcomes. We show that county-level estimates of racial bias, as measured using data from approximately 1.6 million visitors to the Project Implicit website, are associated with racial disciplinary disparities across approximately 96,000 schools in the United States, covering around 32 million white and black students. These associations do not extend to sexuality biases, showing the specificity of the effect. These findings suggest that acknowledging that racial biases and racial disparities in education go hand-in-hand may be an important step in resolving both of these social ills.

Race, explicit racial attitudes, implicit racial attitudes, and COVID-19 cases and deaths: An analysis of counties in the United States

“…Thus, we ran separate analyses for Explicit Racial Attitudes and Implicit Racial Attitudes. This approach is also consistent with Riddle and Sinclair [28].…”

“…However, for many of the reasons articulated by Payne et al [19,20]., bias captured at the community-level is likely to offer better explanatory power (see also [23]). Consistent with this position, community-level racial attitudes are linked with racial differences in infant health outcomes [24], Black individuals' death rates due to cardiovascular disease [25], and mortality risk [26], as well as other important community outcomes, such as lethal force in policing [27], punishment of Black school children [28], and reactions to social justice movements [29], among others.…”

Understanding the linkages between racial/ethnic discipline gaps and racial/ethnic achievement gaps in the United States

“…Furthermore, as hypothesized by CRT, research has also found that the racial/ethnic disparities in schools cannot be explained by differences in individual-level factorssuch as differential rates of misbehavior by students across races/ethnicities (Owens & Mclanahan, 2019;Skiba et al 2015). Rather, differential treatment (Owens & Mclanahan, 2019), across-and within-school differences (Gopalan & Nelson, 2019) as well as implicit racial biases (Riddle & Sinclair, 2019) at the county-level are significantly associated with racial/ethnic discipline gaps. In other words, this study calls for a closer look at such contextual factors using national data.…”

Maximizing prediction

“…For instance, this approach has revealed that in regions where White people are more implicitly biased against Black people, more Black people are killed by police (Hehman, Flake, & Calanchini, 2018). Other research adopting a regional approach has found links between regional intergroup biases and health (Leitner, Hehman, Ayduk, & Mendoza-Denton, 2016a, 2016bOrchard & Price, 2017), segregation (Rae, Newheiser, & Olson, 2015), ethnic diversity (Sadler & Devos, 2018), education (Riddle & Sinclair, 2019), and federal policy (Leitner, Hehman, & Snowden, 2018;Ofosu, Chambers, Chen, & Hehman, 2019).…”

“…racially segregated housing, the number of Black individuals killed by police, disparities in education-related outcomes, and disparities in income. 2 Previous work has linked these outcomes with White-Black racial bias (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000;Hehman et al, 2018;Rae et al, 2015;Riddle & Sinclair, 2019). Segregation was represented by the isolation index as calculated by Logan and Stults (2011), and disproportionate deaths from police as calculated by Hehman and colleagues (2018).…”