More than Just Suspension: Informal Discipline in K-12 Schools

In this paper we document the prevalence and distribution of informal disciplinary consequences in K-12 public schools and examine how they contribute to disparities in school discipline. Using administrative data from North Carolina, we first describe the landscape of informal consequences across grade levels. Informal consequences are the most common disciplinary response in the early elementary grades. In kindergarten, 47% of disciplinary incidents result in an informal consequence, and informal consequences are more common than suspensions through second grade. They become much less common in middle and high school. Decompositions of unconditional racial and socioeconomic gaps show that, much like suspension patterns documented in prior work, disparities in informal consequences arise primarily within schools. Using two complementary fixed-effects econometric approaches—one focusing on single-student incidents among first-time kindergarteners and another comparing students within the same multi-student incidents—we show that Black and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to be suspended and less likely to receive informal consequences relative to their peers. We then descriptively explore the infraction-citation margin by documenting racial and socioeconomic differences in how students are cited for specific infractions within incidents. Our findings demonstrate that understanding K-12 school discipline disparities requires consideration of more than just suspension.