Equal Time for Equal Crime? Racial Bias in School Discipline

Racial disparities in school discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or from bias, in which treatment for the same behavior differs by student race or eth-nicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative data from the United States. Two complementary strategies identify bias in disciplinary outcomes. The first uses within-incident variation in outcomes by student race. The second employs individual fixed effects to examine how consequences vary across disciplinary incidents based on the race of the peer involved. Both approaches find that Black students receive harsher punishment than Hispanic or White students but show no evidence of Hispanic-White disparities. 0.04 measuring are respectively. and lagged rather than potentially endogenous contempo-raneous in depending in. to fights, inappropriate language/disrespect,