School discipline is an ongoing concern among teachers, administrators, parents, and students. All Learners would be familiar with the context of school discipline and bring this knowledge to the investigation. There are many types of school discipline to consider and official datasets usually contain information about in-school and out-of-school suspensions and arrests, by race/ethnicity and (dis)ability status. What these datasets show, over and over again, is that Black and Indigenous students, boys and students with disabilities are disproportionately disciplined in all categories (e.g., Anyon et al., 2018, Losen et al., 2014). This phenomenon has been named “the school-to-prison pipeline,” due to the fact that students who are suspended or arrested are far more likely to drop out and end up in the carceral system (e.g., Boudreau, 2019). Our goal through the investigation is for the Learners to understand the possible impact that zero tolerance policies and unconscious bias of the teachers and administrators have on the disproportionate disciplining of BIPOC students.
In this module, Learners will investigate one form of discipline, out-of-school suspensions. We note that it is impossible to obtain the dataset that we think would tell the full story of the racialized outcomes of school discipline. The ideal dataset, in our opinion, would tell us whether different groups of students got disciplined differently for the same offense using individual level data. The datasets that are publicly available typically only report incidents aggregated at the school level, not the individual level, due to confidentiality issues. Also publicly available datasets do not have specific information about the types of offenses students get disciplined for, nor is it possible to determine whether offenses were the same as there is a lot of variation in the way policies get interpreted by administrators. For example, many states and districts have policies that include “defiance” and “disorderly conduct” as punishable offenses (Blad, 2021), which can be interpreted in many ways, and seem to negatively impact BIPOC students.
Overview of the Module
This module draws on a state’s data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for 2017-18.Given the extensive number of variables which could be investigated, we chose to focus on enrollment, out-of-school suspension, and days missed through out-of-school suspension, each broken down by race.The dataset also has the Title 1 status for the schools when available. Learners begin the module by exploring the relative risk measures for individual schools and then use descriptive statistics to examine patterns of disproportionality across schools in the state (Days 1 & 2). This is followed by comparisons that are grouped by districts or Title 1 status, and exploring bivariate relationships (Days 3 & 4). Finally, the module ends with a report that Learners write outlining their findings and recommendations. It is assumed that each day is a 90-minute learning session. Adjustments would have to be made for shorter or longer sessions (e.g., combine Days 1 & 2 for first week and Days 3 & 4 for second week, with some parts being assigned as homework).
Note that a central goal of the module is to facilitate meaningful conversations informed by data about systemic racism, within the context of school discipline.
The instructor guide includes pedagogical suggestions, learning goals, resources to learn more about the issues around school discipline, and the slides and materials for each day with instructions. Specific discipline data for a state will be shared on request.
Outline
To keep the focus on systemic racism throughout the module, there is an overarching research question that guides the work: Is there evidence of racial bias in out of school suspensions in NC?
| Prior to Day 1(Optional) | Learners complete the pre-module survey to help the instructor gain an understanding of the experiences Learners have had with this particular issue and their comfort levels. |
| Day 1 | Learners start with a user-friendly exploration of the Miseducation database by ProPublica that is based on data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for 2015-16. Learners pay special attention to the Discipline measure that examines the discipline gaps between white students and students from other races. Learners explore schools that they are familiar with and can supplement their findings with their own experiences at the school. Learners are also introduced to the overall research question that will guide the module for the remaining days. |
| Day 2 | Learners are introduced to the dataset in CODAP and engage in the first step of the statistical investigative process of considering the data. Learners become familiar with the labels used for the variables (called attributes in CODAP). The statistical focus of the day is on measures of disproportionality and distributions of quantitative variables. First Learners learn about risk ratios and how to calculate them. Then they learn (or relearn) about analyzing data through graphs, measures of center, and spread. They use this knowledge to investigate the overall research question, particularly focusing on the risk ratio of Black to white students with OSS. |
| Day 3 | Learners, guided by the overall research question, design and explore a possible difference question (e.g., Is there a difference in the relative risk of Black students receiving OSS to white students between schools that are Title 1 status and those that are not?).The Learners read about the compounding effects of racial bias for homework. |
| Day 4 | Learners design and examine a possible relationship question involving two variables (e.g., What is the strength of relationships between the relative risk of OSS for Black and Hispanic students (both relative to white students)?). Learners also describe possible actions that they (as teachers) and students could take based on what they have learned in the module. |
Licensing
All of the materials shared here are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This means you are welcome to adapt and share these materials! If you do, please make clear that your materials are adapted from this curriculum and link back to the original materials. We suggest the following language: “These materials are adapted by [Your Name] from the [Module Name] from the project Designing Modules to Support the Development of Mathematics Pre-Service Teachers’ Critical Consciousness through Statistical Investigations of Systemic Racism. You can request the original unit here.”
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant # 2121364. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
