Study: Suspensions of Students of Color Go Down When Teachers of Color Are In Charge

Dr. Tolani Britton, coauthor of the study and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of EducationStudies repeatedly show that students of color in K-12 schools are suspended more often and more harshly than white students. Yet drawing from ten years of New York City public school data from grades 4 to 8, a new working paper found that Black, Latinx, and Asian American students were less likely to face such exclusionary discipline when their teachers matched their racial or ethnic background.

“This speaks to the national conversation about diversifying the teacher workforce not just as a good policy because we like diversity,” said Dr. Tolani Britton, one of the paper’s coauthors and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. “But we see that this has a real impact on student outcomes, both socially, emotionally, and academically.”

Dr. Adrian Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, also stressed the long-term negative consequences of disciplining students. Studies have shown that once children are suspended, they become less likely to go to college. Given the high stakes of these discipline disparities, Huerta said the paper’s “hyperfocus” on ethnoracial student-teacher matching is “profound.”

“If we can decrease the total number of suspensions in elementary and middle schools, that will not only enrich the learning environment overall but not mark some students as so-called bad kids,” said Huerta. “Because once a kid is suspended one, two, or three times, that kid is seen as a constant problem. They then become less likely to get support from their counselors and teachers about college opportunities in their future.”

From the New York City data that Britton and fellow researchers reviewed, Huerta said that he would like to find out where the students of color who had ethnoracially matched teachers later ended up. Such future studies could further illustrate why lowering stark discipline disparities for children matters.

“The same thing that we see in K-12 is what we see in college,” said Dr. Donald Easton-Brooks, dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, who has studied student-teacher ethnoracial matching’s positive impacts as well. “When students of color in college engage with advisors of color, their GPAs go up, their retention goes up, their feelings of belonging go up. These are really critical things throughout a person’s education.”

Alongside Britton, the paper’s coauthors, Drs. Matthew Shirrell and Travis Bristol, began this study after noticing research on student-teacher ethnoracial matching's impact on discipline disparities focused on Black students, not Latinx and Asian American students as well. They also wanted to study matching in a large, urban, highly diverse school district.