A replicable identity-based intervention reduces the Black-White suspension gap at scale

A replicable identity-based intervention reduces the Black-White suspension gap
at scale
By José L. Arco-Tirado, Faculty of Education, University of Granada (Spain)
A recent study published in the American Educational Research Journal reported on an intervention to bridge the suspension and office disciplinary referral gaps between Black and White seventh and eighth grade students.
The student-focused self-affirmation intervention the authors investigated builds on decades of social-psychological theory and research concerning self-affirmation, and involved a series of expressive writing exercises asking students to reflect on positive aspects of their identities. The assumed underlying mechanism was that the self-affirmation intervention provided Black students with psychological resources to manage social identity threats.
The authors hypothesized that first, the intervention would be less beneficial for students who were less often disciplined and less often stereotyped as troublemakers, and second, that Black students who were suspended during their first year in middle school (prior to the seventh-grade intervention) were particularly at risk of being stereotyped as troublemakers. To demonstrate their hypotheses, the authors conducted two double-blind randomized field trials across two independent yearly cohorts totaling over 2,000 seventh graders in all 11 racially-diverse middle schools from a Midwestern school district.
Three important findings could be highlighted: First, the self-affirmation intervention was most beneficial for Black students, with no evidence of effects on other racial/ethnic groups, which means that a typical Black student in the control group of their sample was suspended once per year, while a similar Black student assigned to self-affirmation writing exercises was suspended half as frequently. Second, these treatment effects were more pronounced among Black students with prior suspensions, who experienced a full one-suspension reduction due to treatment. And third, Black students who participated in the writing exercises with no prior ODRs (Office Disciplinary Referrals) saw a one-and-two-thirds reduction in ODRs in middle school compared to students who did not participate in the writing exercises. Black students with a prior history of ODRs had four fewer ODRs in seventh and eighth grades than their control group counterparts.
Authors concluded that the intervention cut the middle school Black-White gap in suspensions by 67% across the school district. In practical terms, these estimates suggest that a cohort of 150 Black middle-school students would receive approximately 82 fewer suspensions over the seventh and eighth grades. Supplemental results examining treatment effects on ODRs bolster these findings, suggesting a 66% reduction in the Black-White gap in ODRs, or 249 fewer ODRs among a cohort of 150 Black middle-school students, all else equal.
Such reductions promise meaningful improvements for overall school and district climate, improved teaching and learning opportunities within classrooms, and more positive student-teacher relationships.

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