Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Sociologists and educational researchers have long associated patterns of exclusionary discipline with the racial and socioeconomic composition of schools, with a preponderance of evidence suggesting that minority and low-income students, on average, receive harsher punishments than their white and more affluent counterparts for similar offenses. An emerging hypothesis for the observed link between the racial composition of schools and exclusionary discipline is the theory of racial threat, which suggests that predominantly white administrators and school staff perceive elevated proportions of black students as a threat to existing power relations, such that explicit social control is required, oftentimes in the form of punitive, exclusionary measures.

A nested view of racial threat, however, which emphasizes places as embedded in larger contexts, suggests that the source of racial threat may be rooted, in part, outside school walls. A recent trend in the American housing market opens a possibility for exploring this hypothesis. As low-income communities of color increasingly find themselves subject to processes of racialized gentrification, i.e., the replacement of low-income, minority residents with more affluent, white residents, a natural question emerges about the role of community racial turnover in shaping aggregate patterns of school discipline. Little is known, however, about the relation between rapid demographic change at the community level and school-level disciplinary patterns.

The motivating question for this paper was whether changing patterns of racial threat associated with gentrification related to the exclusionary discipline practices of local schools. School data were gathered from the 2011-12 Civil Rights Data Collection and combined with data from the 2000 Census and the 2009-13 American Community Survey. The primary analysis matched schools located in communities that underwent gentrification during the assessment period (2000-2013) with similar schools located in potentially-gentrifying communities at baseline (2000) that did not undergo gentrification. I matched on baseline school and community characteristics as well as the observed change in school composition from 2000 to 2012, leaving open the observed variation that occurred at the community level, which I subsequently categorized and modeled in terms of gentrification.

Results provided support for a nested view of racial threat hypothesis in which an influx of white and affluent residents into an otherwise high-poverty, high-minority community were associated with a reduction in the proportion of black students who were suspended and expelled in local schools, that is, regardless of the compositional changes that occurred at the school level. In addition, the strength of the association between gentrification and black students' suspension rates varied according to the amount of poverty in schools' surrounding communities, with the strongest disciplinary benefits accruing to those black students attending schools in the most impoverished neighborhoods that underwent gentrification. I also found that suspension rates for white and Hispanic students were unrelated to patterns of gentrification in schools’ broader communities, also consistent with racial threat hypothesis.