Giving Compass' Take:

· After analyzing different research, Futurity addresses the racial gap in school discipline and how harsher punishments lead to more suspensions for black students.

· How can the education system work to close this gap and discipline students equally? How has school discipline changed within recent years?

· Here's how teacher are confronting racial bias to close disparities in discipline.

A new analysis finds that teachers’ different treatment of black and white students accounts for 46% of the racial gap in suspensions and expulsions from school among five- to nine-year-old children.

It shows that differences in the characteristics of schools that black and white children attend predominantly explain about 21% of the gap, while differences in student behavior account for 9% of the gap.

The results come on the heels of a 2018 US Government Accountability Office report showing that black K-12 students are 3.2 times more likely than white students to face suspension or expulsion.

The article also follows recent research showing a strong connection between high rates of suspension and expulsion and higher risk of poor school performance, school dropout, arrest, incarceration, and unemployment.

Combined with previous research, the analysis provides evidence that different treatment of children as they enter school could play a large role in the early criminalization of black students, says Jayanti Owens, an assistant professor of sociology at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Read the full article about the effects of harsher punishments on black students by Jill Kimball-Brown at Futurity.