Black and brown students are more likely to receive harsher and more frequent punishment than white students. The solution isn't just about teachers.

• Black kids make up 15% of grade school students, yet account for 31% of law enforcement referrals.
• Experts say a more diverse teacher pool could help solve the discipline disparity.
• But that's not the only solution - staff at all levels need to buy into an equal school experience.

After 12 years of teaching, Felicia Dangerfield-Persky knows the importance of interpreting her students' misbehavior with grace and empathy.

On some occasions, she's had no choice but to report students who show up to school with weapons or drugs. But more often, she said, it's up to her to decide whether a student's tone of voice, for instance, is worth shuffling them off to the administration for formal discipline.

How a teacher responds to those situations can come down to cultural understanding.

"Some students are loud because they don't have a choice. They may live in a house with 12 people where they have to yell to get their point across," Dangerfield-Persky said, citing eye or neck rolls as examples of body language accepted as displays of passion in Black communities that are often misinterpreted as defiance in schools.

But if teachers don't understand that, she added, "that's when culture differences lead to disrespect, lead to defiance, lead to subordination, lead to going home."

Dangerfield-Persky teaches math in a North Carolina middle school that serves a high percentage of Black and Latinx students, but she's part of a much smaller percentage of Black teachers employed there, which is reflective of a national trend.

About 7% of K-12 teachers and 11% of principals in the United States are Black. Those numbers are largely a result of school-desegregation policies in the 1960s and '70s displacing Black educators from their once segregated community schools.

Although Dangerfield-Persky may err on the side of addressing frustrating student behavior through informal conversation, federal data showed that not every educator shares her perspective.

Discipline disparities could hurt the future workforce

Black students make up about 15% of students enrolled in American grade schools, yet in the 2015-2016 school year, they accounted for 31% of all referrals to law enforcement or school-related arrests, showed a report from the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

Yet white students, who make up nearly half of the total population, accounted for 36% of referrals and school-related arrests.

The disparities are not as stark for Hispanic or Latino students, but they're there: Hispanic males make up 13% of all students, yet they accounted for 16% of expulsions during the 2015-16 school year.

Those disparities are simultaneously greasing the school-to-prison pipeline - the trend of zero-tolerance discipline policies funneling students into the juvenile or adult criminal-justice system - and disengaging students from learning, which research showed widened academic achievement gaps.

And it's setting up American society, which demographers predicted could become minority white by 2045, for additional social and economic stress.

If that's the future of the country, disciplining a disproportionate percentage of Black and brown students "could hurt the general success of society and preparing people for the workforce," said Kaisheka Jurée Capers, an associate professor of public policy at Georgia State University whose research focuses on racial inequities in public education. That might not be apparent right now, but "we could be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to the future workforce, and we could also have a greater demand for needs," she said.

Capers added that although Black boys typically dominate conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline, increasingly high rates of discipline of Black girls compared to their white peers are also cause for concern.

Over the past year alone that's been laid bare by a number of high-profile incidents, including the story of a Black 15-year-old whom a Michigan judge sent to a juvenile detention center for not completing her homework.

"Subjective disciplinary actions like disrespect or dress-code violations are where we see the highest levels of discipline disproportionality," Capers said, adding that Black girls who experience harsh discipline as a result are more likely to use social-welfare programs later. "If we continue in this way, we could see a greater reliance and possible burden on the social safety net."

'Teachers can't solve it all'

Although some research has shown that students are less likely to be formally disciplined by teachers who identify as the same race, "teachers can't solve it all," said Angelica Salazar, a former teacher and the director of education equity for the California chapter of the Children's Defense Fund, a nonprofit focused on child advocacy and research.

Building and district-level policies and priorities also play a role.

"Let's do anti-racism teacher training," Salazar said, "but let's also staff up the schools with more counselors, more mental-health professionals, nurses, and school psychologists so they can serve students and support learning and the school community's collective social-emotional health." She added that educators need to be aware that some of their students are bringing outside experiences of poverty and institutionalized racism into the classroom.

"If you feel pretty safe in a classroom - safe enough to make a mistake and safe enough to be yourself - you'll be much more likely to learn," Salazar said.

But teacher training programs don't always equip educators with the tools to take that approach to classroom management, said John Williams III, an assistant professor of multicultural education at Texas A&M University who instructs future teachers.

"Students are still developing. Yet often we look at students - particularly Black and brown students - as adults who made a decision, and that's the end of the road," Williams said. He added that even if a penalty is warranted, considering how to reengage students after the fact can prevent repeat problems. "We need culturally competent teachers who understand their students" and look for alternatives to harsh penalties, Williams said.

To make that happen, teachers "need to know the school and the community they're working in," Williams said. He said teachers should be ready to adjust their own experiences to the assets of their students - not make students adjust to who they are.

For that mindset to become the norm, there will need to be buy-in from teachers, administrators, and policymakers at every level.

But, 67 years after the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, Williams said the low number of Black teachers and high rates of discipline of Black students were evidence of continued resistance to realizing an equitable education system.

"We've allowed certain groups to opt out of integration," Williams said. He added that he was the first Black boy to graduate from his private middle school in Belleville, Illinois, in the mid-1990s. That was not long after a wave of litigation started halting court-ordered desegregation, making it easier for schools to resegregate and racial hierarchies to persist through policies such as punitive discipline.

But, Williams said, "because not enough people are negatively affected by these rulings, things just keep going on as they are."