A Student Saved is NOT a Dollar Earned: A Meta-Analysis of School Disparities in Discipline Practice Toward Black Children

Exclusionary school discipline practices continue to play a key explanatory role in racially disproportionate outcomes in the justice system. Three decades of research substantiate the disproportionality of discipline practices and the negative effects on Black students. However, a meta-analysis of this phenomenon and its moderators remains absent but is warranted based on its practical and empirical import. Thus, this meta-analysis synthesized the research on school discipline disproportionality between Black and White students by aggregating odds ratios across studies. An exhaustive search of the literature and rigorous screening process produced a final pool of 29 studies representing 51 independent effect sizes. Based on the test for homogeneity we concluded that their was significant heterogeneity, Q(50) = 20115.40, p <0.001. Thus, a random effects analytic model was employed. After testing and adjusting for publication bias, the overall mean estimated odds ratio was 2.58, p <.001. Thus, the odds of being disciplined if Black are more than 2 and half times the odds of being disciplined if White. The subsequent moderator analysis results suggest that grade level and gender were not significant moderators of the disproportionality. Rather the results explicitly indicate that the ill-effects of school discipline are “equally” disproportionate toward Black male and female students across all K-12 grade levels. Results also indicate that statistically Jemimah L. Young, Jamaal R. Young, & Bettie Ray Butler Taboo, Fall 2018 Jemimah L. Young is an assistant professor and Jamaal R. Young is an associate professor, both with the Department of Teaching & Learning of the College of Education at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. Bettie Ray Butler is an associate professor in the Department of Middle, Secondary, and K-12 Education in the Cato College of Education at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina. E-mail addresses are jemimah-young@uiowa.edu, jamaal-young@uiowa.edu, & Bettie.Butler@uncc.edu © 2018 by Caddo Gap Press. A Student Saved is NOT a Dollar Earned 96 significant differences in effect size magnitude exist between disciplinary actions taken, and data collection methods. Implications of these results and suggestions for application and future research are provided.