Discipline Disparities In Education

This paper, grounded in our histories of working within and alongside the field of special education and our linkages and commitments to anti-prison and prison justice movements, will offer a summary of the history of the development of the category of special education. This discussion will include an analysis of the flexibility of the category, and how categories and classification systems for special education cannot be disentangled from ongoing ideologies of White supremacy. Second, we briefly outline the impact of this history and how it is intertwined with our carceral state. Students of color are not only misidentified in categories that do not fully support their academic and economic futures and track these youth toward the STPP, but the categories themselves are deeply linked to racialized forms of capture completely intertwined with our prison nation.  We close by highlighting national and local organizations working for change.

Disparities in the use of school discipline by race, gender, and sexual orientation have been well-documented and continue to place large numbers of students at risk for shortand long-term negative outcomes. In order to improve the state of our knowledge and encourage effective interventions, the Discipline Disparities Research to Practice Collaborative, a group of 26 nationally known researchers, educators, advocates, and policy analysts, came together to address the problem of disciplinary disparities. Funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and Open Society Foundations, the Collaborative has spent nearly three years conducting a series of meetings with groups of stakeholders—advocates, educators, juvenile justice representatives, intervention agents, researchers, and policymakers—in order to increase the availability of interventions that are both practical and evidence-based, and to develop and support a policy agenda for reform to improve equity in school discipline. The project has ...

Greater local economic activity could improve the educational attainment of children by increasing the resources available to investment in education. However, increased economic activity could also result in no gains in children's education, particularly in the expected manner. This paper studies the role of violence in explaining this paradox, with a focus on Colombia, an oil producing country with a long-standing civil conflict. Existing evidence shows that oil price booms fuel civil conflicts. This paper explores whether this increased violence undermines any positive effect higher oil resources might have on educational attainment. To assess how oil price shocks affect educational outcomes, this paper exploits exogenous increases in international oil prices and the rich geographic variation in oil production. The estimates suggest that the rise in oil prices between 1998 and 2005 had a limited effect on the number of years of schooling, and whether children are behind grade for their age. Moreover, oil price booms had small but surprising negative effects on primary school enrollment. My analysis reveals that these results might be driven by the investment of additional oil resources in social sectors other than education, and by oil price booms fueling civil conflicts. In Colombia, instead of improving education, higher oil revenues encouraged illegal right wing paramilitary groups to steal oil resources, resulting in an 8% increase in paramilitary violence in oil municipalities. The higher paramilitary violence is likely to have affected children's education, by producing stress and anxiety, forcing their families to migrate out of violent areas, and reducing the quality of education in high conflict regions.

Skiba, R., Arredondo, M., Gray, C. Rausch, M. (2016) What do we Know about Discipline Disparities? New and Emerging Research. In Disparate Opportunity: Understanding and Addressing Inequality in School Discipline. Skiba, K., Medirratta, K., Raush, K.(eds). Palgrave/MacMillan