ABSTRACT
Racial disproportionality in exclusionary school discipline is a generational civil rights issue, with Black and Latinx students experiencing significantly higher levels of suspension and expulsion than their White peers. To explore the landscape of this issue in metropolitan Richmond, Virginia, as well as strategies for addressing it, the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC), a research practice partnership between the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University and six surrounding school divisions, commissioned a mixed-methods study in 2016. This chapter will detail the structures utilized by MERC to ensure egalitarian input from its practice side partners while still maintaining a commitment to critically examining and addressing racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. The authors contributing to this chapter each served on the study team for this research project and represent perspectives from both research (university) and practice (participating school divisions). The chapter will discuss how the team collaboratively framed our understanding of the problem, determined which methods would best investigate the issue of racial disproportionality in school discipline, helped collectively analyze and interpret the data, and determined the best strategies for dissemination to maximize the potential impact of the research while recognizing the different sociopolitical contexts in which it would be received. Throughout, the authors discuss the complexity of addressing such a persistent and prominent equity issue in schools, including the tensions that arose when navigating the research in both university and K-12 spaces.
