Beginning in the early 1990s, states and districts enacted zero-tolerance discipline policies that relied heavily on out-of-school suspensions. Recently, districts nationwide have revised these policies in favor of more tempered disciplinary responses. In 2012-2013, Philadelphia reformed its discipline policy to limit suspensions for nonviolent…

Mounting evidence indicates that students of color are more likely than their white peers to receive exclusionary discipline (out-of-school suspensions and expulsions), but alleviating these disparities requires an understanding of what drives them. In this study, we use seven years of student- and infraction-level data from every public school in…