The Impact of Suspension Reforms on Discipline Outcomes: Evidence From California High Schools

Abstract

Minority students are suspended at a disproportionately higher rate compared with others. To reduce racial suspension gaps, four California school districts banned schools from suspending students for willful defiance, a category consisting of relatively minor disruptive offenses. I evaluate the impact of these policies on high school student discipline outcomes using a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the temporal variation in the enactment of these policies across school districts. The results suggest that while these policies decreased willful defiance out-of-school suspension rates by around 69%, they did not reduce overall out-of-school suspension rates. In fact, the policies significantly increased out-of-school suspension rates among Black students, particularly in schools with a small share of Black teachers. Taken together, the results suggest that the willful defiance suspension bans failed to address implicit and explicit biases in California schools.