“Broken windows” discipline and racial disparities in school punishment

Abstract

A 1982 article in The Atlantic famously theorized that visible signs of disorder lead to higher rates of violent crime (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). In the decades since, police forces around the world have adopted a “broken windows” approach to social control, increasing enforcement against minor offenses like panhandling or public intoxication (Kohler-Hausmann, 2018). Increased enforcement has targeted poor and Black residents disproportionately, heightening both betweenand within-neighborhood racial inequalities in police encounters (Fagan and Davies, 2000; Kohler-Hausmann, 2018; New York Civil Liberties Union, 2018). But even as the broken windows approach has come to be recognized as a key driver of inequality in the penal system, it has been embraced by school reformers whose aim is to reduce inequality (Lemov, 2010). In an effort to improve outcomes for marginalized students, the founders of the “no excuses” model of education “adopted political scientist James Q. Wilson’s ‘broken windows’ theory and applied it to schools” (Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 2003: 67). Promoted by influential funders and training institutes, the no-excuses model plays a central role among education reform efforts in the United States (Golann and Torres, 2018). Despite the widespread adoption of the no-excuses approach, little is known about its implications for punishment and inequality in schools. Like arrests in the policing context, exclusionary punishments such as suspensions and expulsions have been shown to have long-lasting negative consequences for individuals subjected to them (Morris and Perry, 2016; Ramey, 2016; Bruch and Soss, 2018). The frequency and distribution of those formal sanctions across demographic groups can thus have important implications for social inequality. This study draws on an original dataset of 7726 U.S.