Linking Teacher Quality and School Discipline Disproportionality

Abstract

The racial disparities in school discipline and lack of teacher diversity represent two pressing issues facing educational equity. While traditional measures of teacher quality center on experience and credentials, little extant literature situates teacher diversity as an aspect of teacher quality. To fill this gap, we explore how both teacher experience and racial diversity are associated with school-level student discipline outcomes, and how they vary by schools’ contextual factors. We find that while teacher diversity and experience predict both reductions in disciplinary incidents and consequences, only changes in the share of Black teachers a school employs are associated with reductions in the Black–White racial school discipline gap. We position our findings in the Diversity Intelligence and People as Technology frameworks and discuss implications for policy and educational human resources practices.