Can “de-biasing” Strategies Help to Reduce Racial Disparities in School Discipline? Summary of the Literature

Scholarship about implicit, or unconscious, racial bias has become increasingly sophisticated and robust in the past decade. This research suggests that most individuals harbor stereotypes that affect, often unknowingly, their perceptions of the character and qualities of different races and ethnic groups. The most sophisticated test, the Implicit Association Test, measures the ease and speed with which test participants can match concepts such as “violent” or “peaceful” with photos of people of different races. Results show that both White and Black test takers match Black faces more quickly than White ones with words representing violent and aggressive concepts. The striking aspect of this test is that this bias pattern exists both among those who express explicit prejudices and those who deny them. As our knowledge about how implicit racial bias is triggered, and how its impact on our decisions and actions has grown, a strong hypothetical case can be made for its contribution to the stark racial disparities that figure so prominently in school discipline data. We underline the term hypothetical because there is not yet, to our knowledge, any direct evidence that the implicit