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Anne Gregory remembers the child’s fondness for the Dewey decimal system. He would write down a combination of numbers and letters on a scrap of paper and hunt down the desired book in the library. Details were his thing. He once wrote several pages outlining the sequence of moves needed to beat a video game, she says.

But at the elementary school where Gregory worked as a counselor, educators saw a different child. A troublemaker. One teacher told Gregory that the boy frequently wandered about mid-lesson. So the teacher moved his desk to the far corner of the room, and sometimes sent him to the principal’s office.

Outside the principal’s door, the boy joined a queue of almost all Black boys. But Black and Latino students together made up just over half of the school’s student population. Gregory brought up her concerns with the principal. Why was that little boy always in trouble? Why did that line of supposed troublemakers skew Black and male?

This was the mid-1990s, a time when educators and researchers knew Black students, on average, scored lower on standardized tests than white students. This “achievement gap” was, by then, a cause for concern. But how educators treated Black children was rarely part of the discussions. The principal told Gregory that her concerns, while potentially valid, were “too hot” to tackle.

“I could just see how much the school structure itself was squelching this African-American boy’s potential and all his strengths,” Gregory says. “That, accompanied with the silence around this at his school, demonstrated to me the absolute urgency, the need, to point this out.”

Gregory, now a psychologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., has devoted her career to pointing out the problem. In the January 2010 Educational Researcher, she and colleagues used the term “discipline gap” to characterize what she’d observed: Black students, particularly boys, were punished more frequently and severely than their white peers — despite a lack of evidence that the Black kids were committing more offenses. Those punishments ranged from teachers sending students to the principal’s office to expulsion. Black students’ disproportionate removal from school may well underlie the achievement gap, Gregory and others contend.

In 2015, President Barack Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act, in part to curtail practices that pull students from class. The act required each state to collect and report data on discipline, and school districts had to formulate alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. A handful of states and districts have banned suspensions for minor offenses, such as talking back to a teacher.

But President Donald Trump’s administration rolled back key requirements. And as of July 2020, no states were fully reporting disciplinary data, according to an October 11 report by the Civil Rights Project, a UCLA group that promotes social justice research. In addition, Black students in middle and high school were four times as likely to be suspended as white students, based on federal data from the 2015–16 academic year.

Policy changes alone cannot close the gap, says Russell Skiba, a psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington who focuses on equity in education. Educators must also transform how they view Black students. “What we need are interventions that look at both a reduction in overall use of exclusionary discipline, but also focus on issues of implicit bias [and] structural racism,” Skiba says.

Removing Black students from the classroom robs them of a lifetime of opportunity, adds Daniel Losen, director of UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies and a coauthor of the October report. Compared with other students, punished students are more likely to fall behind academically, often by years, have lower test scores, drop out of school, earn less and end up in prison. “This is a massive civil rights violation,” Losen says.

Unequal burden

Although U.S. middle and high school suspension rates have been dropping, the gap between Black and white students has remained relatively unchanged, federal data show. Elementary rates are lower, but rising for Black children.

U.S. school suspension rates by race, 1972-2016

Source: D.J. Losen and P. Martinez/UCLA Civil Rights Project 2020

Punishing customs

Punitive practices in U.S. schools are nothing new. Teachers commonly paddled or whipped students into the early 1900s. Corporal, or physical, punishment remains legal in many states to this day. By the 1960s, teachers and other educational leaders also began suspending students for misbehavior.

Harsh discipline in all forms was falling out of favor until the crack cocaine epidemic began ravaging Black communities in the 1980s. Politicians launched “a war on drugs” to wipe out that scourge. Violent crime also peaked in the early 1990s. Those twin forces led to policy changes in the 1980s and ’90s that made prison sentences for drug and violent crimes harsher, including mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenses. At the time, people believed that criminals thrive in chaotic, lawless environments, Losen says. So law enforcement began giving citations for even minor violations.

Those draconian practices reached the classroom. President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 mandating expulsion for a minimum of one year of any student who brought a weapon to school, no hearing necessary. States soon passed zero-tolerance laws that led to suspensions or expulsions for even minor offenses. Students have been removed from school for wielding “weapons,” such as nail clippers or rubber bands, or distributing “contraband” cough drops. Today, zero-tolerance policies account for about 10 percent of the racial discipline gap, educational policy expert Chris Curran of the University of Florida in Gainesville reported in the December 2016 Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Educators’ explicit or implicit biases against Black children also keep the gap wide, research suggests. Those biases are present even in preschools. In one study, researchers fit 132 early education teachers with eye trackers and asked the teachers to watch video clips of four children — a Black girl, a Black boy, a white girl and a white boy — seated around a table. The researchers told the teachers to look for misbehaviors.

In truth, none of the children misbehaved, but the eye trackers revealed that the teachers spent more time gazing at the Black boy. And in an accompanying questionnaire that asked which child required the most attention, 42 percent of respondents chose the Black boy, 34 percent chose the white boy, 13 percent chose the white girl and 10 percent chose the Black girl, researchers from Yale University wrote in a report to federal and state officials in September 2016.

Another study shows how such biases contribute to teachers disciplining Black students more harshly than white students. Researchers asked 191 teachers of K–12 students to imagine teaching at a middle school depicted in a photograph. The teachers then read a series of vignettes about a student who got in trouble twice, once for insubordination and again for disrupting class. Researchers told half the teachers that the student’s name was Darnell or Deshawn, stereotypically Black male names; for the other half, the boy was named Greg or Jake, stereotypically white male names.

After each incident, the teachers answered questions on a seven-point scale. Questions included, “How severe was the student’s misbehavior?” and “How severely should the student be disciplined?” After the first bad behavior, the teachers were equally lenient toward the Black and white boys. But after the second bad behavior, the teachers rated Black boys as 25 percent more troublesome than white boys and recommended 30 percent harsher disciplinary responses, reported social psychologists Jason Okonofua and Jennifer L. Eberhardt of Stanford University in 2015 in Psychological Science. The researchers called this finding the “two-strikes” paradigm.

That study shows how bias can manifest in institutions, says Sean Darling-Hammond, a graduate student in education policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborates with Okonofua, also now at UC Berkeley, to continue that line of research. After repeated misbehaviors, teachers were more lenient with white students, but penalized Black students.

Color-blind corrections

The October report provides the most up-to-date snapshot of the discipline gap. Data for the report come from the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection and include information on student enrollment, demographics and discipline for every public school in the country.

Overall suspension rates were declining under the Obama administration, probably in part because 15 states adopted laws discouraging suspensions. California, for instance, flags districts that suspend more than 6 percent of their students and assists in bringing those districts’ rates down.

When grades K–12 were lumped together, suspension rates fell from 4 percent to 3 percent for white students and 16 percent to 13 percent for Black students, between the 2009–10 to 2015–16 school years.

But with Black students still suspended at four times the rate of white students, the report also spotlights the shortcomings of relying solely on policy changes to close the gap. No policy can capture the myriad interactions that happen in a school, says educational policy researcher Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware in Newark. Consider common scenarios — teachers praising white students while criticizing Black students, or calling mostly on white students.

Yet many current interventions aim to improve school climate while sidestepping issues of race. For instance, several programs rely on restorative justice. That concept is applied frequently in criminal justice settings, and brings victims and offenders together to discuss an incident and give all involved parties a voice.

Restorative justice practices can help teachers change how they handle discipline problems. Such approaches can also create school cultures based on trust and open communication, often in lieu of discipline. For instance, many schools use a multitiered system of support for students and staff. Tier one is preventive: Students come together in so-called community-building circles to discuss a prompt or question and listen to one another’s perspectives. At tier two, students involved in a minor dispute work together in “responsive circles” to solve the problem. And at tier three, everyone involved in a serious dispute participates in a “restorative conference” where a trained facilitator guides the dialog. If a student is still suspended, educators later welcome the student back to school and gauge his or her need for additional support to get caught up.

In 2006, the suspension gap between Black and white students in the large urban district of Denver was 12 percentage points: About 6 percent of white students had been suspended compared with 18 percent of Black students. By 2013, the gap had narrowed to 8 percentage points, researchers reported in Closing the School Discipline Gap, a 2015 book Losen coedited. Some of the drop may have been due to restorative justice training, which launched in the early 2000s.

Nonetheless, educators were still suspending more Black students — at a rate of 10.42 percent versus 2.28 percent for white students. In effect, the color-blind approach worsened the racial suspension gap from a threefold difference between Black and white students to more than fivefold.

“Interventions for reducing disparities in … discipline cannot be race neutral,” says Indiana’s Skiba.

Addressing race

Decades have passed since Gregory observed that elementary school boy waiting outside the principal’s office. Yet she is still grappling with how to help children like him.

Two years ago, for instance, Gregory and her colleagues piloted a program at one elementary, one middle and one high school in New York City to confront racism in schools. That program combines a race-conscious version of restorative justice with socioemotional learning. The latter helps children regulate their emotions by teaching self- and social awareness and responsible decision making. During 25 hours of training, teachers come together in circles similar to those used in Denver. The prompt, however, asks teachers to consider how structural racism hurts children. After that initial training, coaches also work with the teachers one-on-one.

This facilitated dialog around race has helped teachers speak freely about their worries, Gregory noted in 2018 in the trade publication The Learning Professional. For instance, during the training circles, teachers often express concern that nonpunitive approaches are too soft or unstructured. When that happens, Gregory and her colleagues walk teachers through scenarios of alternative responses to students misbehaving.

Data collection is also key to the success of a new program, Gregory says. Crunching the numbers can illuminate disparities that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, the pilot middle school in Gregory’s study had a predominantly Black student population, making racial gaps in discipline less of a problem to begin with. School officials knew, however, that girls there had more behavioral problems than boys. Yet an examination of discipline data showed that teachers were punishing boys more frequently and more severely than girls.

In 2019, the team began scaling up the program to eventually reach 18 schools in Queens and Brooklyn. The researchers are also monitoring how school leaders are providing support, such as space for restorative circles and freeing up time for students to learn socioemotional skills. The pandemic, however, interrupted the expansion effort and the release of preliminary results, Gregory says.

But research in education and other fields shows that efforts to eradicate people’s biases rarely stick. So rather than targeting the bias itself, Darling-Hammond, Okonofua and UC Berkeley psychology graduate student Amanda Perez recently tried addressing its downstream consequences. That is, if harsh discipline is seen as the culmination of a process that begins with bias and ends with, say, expulsion, then what targets between those two points might be easier to change? The team identified activities that changed teachers’ thinking or helped them understand a misbehaving student’s perspective.

The two-strikes work from 2015 showed that educators were quick to label Black students as troublemakers. So the trio wondered if teachers could be convinced to adopt a “growth mind-set” — the belief that students and relationships could change. The team also theorized that once teachers adopted a growth mind-set, they would need time and space to get to know their students.

Okonofua and colleagues knew from the 2015 study that teachers recommended 30 percent harsher discipline for Black students than white students. So in a follow-up study, the team asked a different group of U.S. teachers to read vignettes about hypothetical students named Deshawn or Greg.

But this time teachers had extra vignettes to read. First, about half of the 243 teachers read a passage on the growth mind-set, specifically how teachers can change a student’s life. Second, the teachers read about how their relationship to students could grow. Third, they read about the student’s initial misbehavior. Fourth, they read about the student’s love of music and struggles outside school. And finally, the teachers read about the student’s second misbehavior, then answered a set of questions.

Teachers in a control group, meanwhile, read only the misbehavior vignettes interspersed with unrelated or subversive readings, such as a passage on how relationships cannot change.

The intervention made responses to both Black and white students more positive. Compared with teachers in the control groups, those who read the additional vignettes about Deshawn were less likely to label him as a troublemaker or expect him to get suspended in the future, and were more likely to feel they could build a strong relationship with him, the team reported October 16 in Science Advances. Though those teachers were also less willing to see Deshawn receive harsh discipline, that finding did not reach statistical significance. Darling-Hammond now hopes to see these interventions tested outside of the lab.

Course correct

Research suggests teachers are more lenient with white than Black students — a sign of implicit bias. Rather than tackle bias, a new study taught teachers how students and relationships can improve. The teachers also learned about the student. Those teachers were less likely than teachers who read unrelated text to label Black students as troublemakers.

Testing the growth mind-set

Source: J.A. Okonofua, A.D. Perez and S. Darling-Hammond/Science Advances 2020

The virtual classroom

Meanwhile, Losen and others worry that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic could make shrinking the discipline gap even harder. Data collected during the pandemic are not yet available, but anecdotes of teachers punishing Black students for misbehaving during online classes have recently surfaced. Police arrived at the home of a 12-year-old in Colorado after his art teacher saw him playing with a neon green toy gun. The school later suspended the boy for five days. Police also visited a boy in New Jersey after a teacher saw him playing with a Nerf gun. School officials in Louisiana suspended a 9-year-old boy for having an unloaded BB gun visible in his bedroom.

During this pandemic, teachers have even less time and space to get to know what’s going on in their students’ lives. And everyone’s stress levels are at an all-time high, Losen says. “Unless we do something very different and really address needs in a way that we never have, we’re going to see a train wreck.”

Science News drew over 22 million visitors to our website this year. Our COVID-19 coverage was most popular. Here’s a recap of the other most-read news stories and long reads of 2020.

Top news stories

1. In a first, a person’s immune system fought HIV — and won

Scientists analyzed billions of cells from two people with HIV who don’t require medication to keep the virus under control. What the team found was astonishing: One person had no working copies of HIV in any of the cells, while the other person had just one working copy. What’s more, that one copy was imprisoned in tightly wound DNA.

2. The first room-temperature superconductor has finally been found

Up to 15° Celsius, a material made of carbon, sulfur and hydrogen can conduct electricity without resistance. While the room-temperature superconductor works only at high pressures, the discovery brings scientists a step closer to realizing a more energy-efficient future.

3. Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last

Computer simulations and observations of nearby galaxies have revealed that the Milky Way stretches 1.9 million light-years across. The measurement could help tease out how massive the galaxy is and exactly how many galaxies orbit it.

4. More ‘murder hornets’ are turning up. Here’s what you need to know

An invasion of Asian giant hornets into North America could spell trouble for honeybees. But the threat that the world’s largest hornet species poses to people is minimal.

5. A star orbiting the Milky Way’s black hole validates Einstein

The odd orbit of a star around the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center confirms Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Rather than tracing out a single ellipse, the star’s orbit rotates over time — the result of the black hole warping spacetime.

Favorite visualization

“A new 3-D map illuminates the ‘little brain’ within the heart” (SN: 6/2/20) enthralled online readers. An unprecedented view of the heart’s nerve cell cluster could help scientists better understand what those cells do and perhaps lead to targeted therapies for heart diseases.

Top feature stories

1. After the Notre Dame fire, scientists get a glimpse at the cathedral’s origins

A fire that ripped through Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral in April 2019 gave scientists the opportunity to dig into the cathedral’s history and study the building’s materials, including to learn more about climate change.

2. New fleets of private satellites are clogging the night sky

SpaceX and other private companies are planning to launch thousands of internet satellites into orbit around Earth. Hundreds of the satellites already in outer space are obstructing the view of ground-based telescopes and interfering with astronomers’ research.

3. It’s time to stop debating how to teach kids to read and follow the evidence

Research has identified the most effective approaches for teaching children how to read. Those findings could help resolve a long-standing debate that pits phonics against methods that emphasize understanding the meaning of words.

4. To fight discrimination, the U.S. census needs a different race question

The U.S. census has failed to accurately count certain minority groups. As a result, some sociologists are calling for more nuanced census questions that better reflect how respondents view themselves, as well as how society views them — a clearer metric for measuring discrimination.

5. What lifestyle changes will shrink your carbon footprint the most?

Individual actions around shelter, transportation and food can create ripple effects in society to help mitigate the effects of climate change. But to have the most impact, people need to tailor their efforts to their own circumstances.

Pandemic post

Science News has reported on the COVID-19 pandemic since it began, but none of those stories were included in our most-read lists of 2020. That’s because we think the coverage is in a league of its own.

Stories about when, during an infection, the coronavirus is most contagious and debunking the claim that the virus was made in a lab are among our most-read stories of all time. Readers also were drawn to stories about how the coronavirus spreads and C­OVID-19 v­accines.

As Feedback editor, I review every e-mail we receive from Science News readers. In 2020, more than a third of the thousands of e-mails that filled our inbox were about COVID-19. Hunger for information, for certainty in an uncertain time, has been insatiable.

We’ve strived to answer readers’ pandemic-related questions accurately, given the rapid pace of scientific research into the coronavirus and its effects. Some of those questions have been featured in the pages of this magazine, as well as in the Science News Coronavirus Update newsletter — a weekly e-mail that highlights the l­atest research, data and articles on the c­oronavirus and COVID-19.

Everyone at Science News thanks you, our readers, for your sharp, insightful comments and your continued support. We look forward to answering your many science questions, coronavirus-related and not, in the year ahead.

Correction

“Radiation measurement could help guide lengthy lunar missions” (SN: 11/7/20, p. 5) incorrectly stated that the average daily exposure to cosmic radiation on the moon is 1.5 million times as high as the average daily exposure on Earth. The average daily exposure on the moon is 1,500 times as high as the average daily exposure on Earth.

From the biggest merger of black holes to the world’s oldest string — fashioned by Neandertals, no less — discoveries in 2020 set new records that amazed and inspired.

Highest-temperature superconductor

After more than a century’s wait, scientists have found the first superconductor that works near room temperature. Superconducting up to about 15° Celsius (59° Fahrenheit), it’s made by squeezing carbon, hydrogen and sulfur between two diamonds and zapping the compound with a laser (SN: 10/14/20). The new material allows current to flow without any energy loss, but only at high pressures, which means practical applications are still a distant vision.

Oldest, biggest Maya monument

Underneath a previously unexplored site in Mexico called Aguada Fénix, archaeologists uncovered an enormous raised ceremonial structure (SN: 6/3/20). Built about 3,000 years ago and featuring a 1,400-meter-long rectangular plateau with a platform longer than four American football fields, the discovery shows that the Maya civilization built big from its beginnings.

Best evidence for anyons

Theoretical physicists have long predicted the existence of anyons, a type of bizarre quasiparticle resulting from the movements of electrons that together behave as a particle. In a mind-twisting discovery, physicists braided anyons, which exist only in two dimensions, by looping them around one another within complex layers of materials (SN: 7/9/20). The resulting disturbances observed in the 2-D sheets of material suggest that the quasiparticles are real.

Earliest modern bird

The nearly 67-million-year-old fossilized “Wonderchicken” (also known as Asteriornis maastrichtensis) is the oldest modern bird ever found, meaning that its descendants survived the asteroid impact that wiped out nonavian dinosaurs and led to the birds we see today (SN: 3/18/20). Wonderchicken did indeed look something like a chicken, if it were crossed with a duck and shrunk to the size of a quail.

Grossest discovery

For the first time, researchers observed a snake gnawing a hole in a toad’s belly, slithering inside and gorging on the innards — all while the toad was alive (SN: 10/2/20). The snake may have been avoiding poison that the toad releases from its neck and back, or finding a way to eat a meal too big to swallow whole.

Oldest string

Not only was this scrap of cord handmade more than 40,000 years ago, but the hands that made it belonged to Neandertals, close human relatives who don’t often get props for creativity. The string, made from bark fibers, was found clinging to an ancient tool discovered in France (SN:4/9/20).

Biggest black hole merger

A detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black holes led to a bevy of records (SN: 9/2/20). It’s the first definitive evidence that midsize black holes — those with a mass between 100 and 100,000 times that of the sun — exist. The resulting merger is the most massive spotted so far using gravitational waves, as well as the farthest (17 billion light-years from Earth) and the most energetic: It radiated the equivalent in energy of about eight times the sun’s mass.

Record-breaking animals

This year saw several record-breaking animal achievements, from the highest-living mammal — a yellow-rumped leaf-eared mouse found 6,739 meters above sea level in South America (SN: 7/29/20) — to the longest dive by a marine mammal, a nearly four-hour plunge by a Cuvier’s beaked whale (SN: 9/23/20). There was also the coldest bird, the black metaltail hummingbird, which chills to about 3° Celsius (37° Fahrenheit) overnight to conserve energy (SN: 9/8/20).