Abstract: The racial landscape of metropolitan areas (MAs) shifted tremendously over the past decade. This project combines school boundary shapefiles with national data from the census and Civil Rights Database to explore whether growth in Black populations in neighborhoods predicts changes in racial disparities in school discipline. We examine changes from 2010 to 2018, a period during which overall discipline rates declined. We ask whether changes in racial disparities depend on the type of neighborhood experiencing change, as well as whether disparities increase more in MAs characterized by racial inequality. We find that school discipline disparities between Black students and other racial/ethnic groups generally widened during our study period, particularly in neighborhoods experiencing racial change, in suburban and rural areas, and in neighborhoods located in more racially segregated MAs. While absolute inequality may have decreased for most racial/ethnic groups in most places, the relative inequality between Black students and their non-Black peers increased. Given demographic change reconfiguring communities, our study contributes key knowledge about how discipline is racialized in areas undergoing racial change.

Bio: Jennifer Candipan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brown University and a faculty affiliate at Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, Spatial Structures for the Social Sciences, and Urban Studies Program. Her broad research and teaching interests are in stratification, urban sociology, race/ethnicity, and sociology of education, with specific interests in how social and spatial contexts, like neighborhoods and schools, produce racial/ethnic, health, and economic inequalities. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Spencer Foundation, National Academy of Education, and Russell Sage Foundation, among others.