Schooling While Black: Analyzing the Racial School Discipline Crisis for Behavior Analyst
Treat racial disproportionality in discipline as a measurable behavior variable, not a political footnote.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sevon (2022) wrote a position paper for school-based BCBAs.
She reviewed national data on who gets suspended and expelled.
The paper shows Black students are removed far more often than white peers for the same behaviors.
No new experiment was run; the goal was to wake up behavior analysts.
What they found
The review found zero evidence that Black kids act worse.
Schools simply punish them faster and harder.
Sevon says our behavior plans must treat this racism as a real variable, not a side note.
How this fits with other research
Crowe et al. (2021) extends the same idea to disabled youth.
They map how school removals feed straight into jails.
Together the papers paint one pipeline: Black and disabled kids → suspension → incarceration.
Kim et al. (2024) adds another layer.
They show schools also move Black and Hispanic students with autism out of the autism category and into "intellectual disability" or "other health impairment."
This mislabeling can hide the very kids Sevon wants protected.
The three papers do not clash; they show racism working at every school step: labeling, discipline, and exit.
Why it matters
If you write a BIP in a public school, you now have three homework items.
Check your data for race gaps in suspensions, referrals, and eligibility labels.
Add an explicit goal that the plan will not add to disproportionality.
Share the numbers with the team each quarter; treat equity as a response class you actually graph.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The persisting issue of racial injustice within disciplinary action referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline has been frequently examined and studied across multiple disciplines spanning education, public policy, criminal justice, and others. The racial school discipline crisis is the disproportionate and differential use of exclusionary action against Black children in school. While disproportionate exclusion occurs throughout the educational continuum, early childhood expulsions and suspensions are a growing concern and are linked to further problems in kindergarten and beyond. With national attention from civil rights organizations drawing eyes to the injustices, educational systems are looking to solve the over-use of suspension and expulsion to address student behavior. Behavior analysts are often tasked with addressing and reducing the behavioral concerns of students; however, there is a gap in the behavior analytic literature on racism in schools. Bringing awareness to anti-Black racism in American schooling is an initial step for behavior analysts to take toward dismantling oppressive systems within education.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2022 · doi:10.1007/s40617-022-00695-8