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.

与其他人相比，少数族裔学生的停学率高得不成比例。为了减少种族停学差距，加州的四个学区禁止学校因故意违抗而停学学生，这一类别包括相对轻微的破坏性罪行。我使用差异中的差异策略评估这些政策对高中学生纪律结果的影响，该策略利用跨学区制定这些政策的时间变化。结果表明，虽然这些政策将故意违抗的校外停学率降低了约 69%，但它们并没有降低整体的校外停学率。事实上，这些政策显着增加了黑人学生的校外停学率，特别是在黑人教师比例很小的学校。综合起来，