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We use novel data on disciplinary referrals, including those that do not lead to suspensions, to better understand the origins of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. We find significant differences between Black and white students in both referral rates and the rate at which referrals convert to suspensions. An infraction fixed-effects research design that compares the disciplinary outcomes of white and non-white students who were involved in the same multi-student incident identifies systematic racial biases in sentencing decisions. On both the intensive and extensive margins, minoritized students receive harsher sentences than their white co-conspirators. This result is driven by high school infractions and applies to all infraction types. Reducing racial disparities in exclusionary discipline will require addressing underlying gaps in disciplinary referrals and the sys tematic biases that appear in the adjudication process.

We document externalities of the civic unrest experienced in Ferguson, MO following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control method estimates compare Ferguson-area schools to neighboring schools in the greater St. Louis area and find that the unrest led to statistically significant, arguably causal declines in students' math and reading achievement. Attendance is one mechanism through which this effect operated, as chronic absence increased by five percent in Ferguson-area schools. Impacts were concentrated in elementary schools and at the bottom of the achievement distribution and spilled over into majority black schools throughout the area.

Recent research exploits a variety of natural experiments that create exogenous variation in annual school days to estimate the average effect of formal schooling on students' academic achievement. However, the extant literature's focus on average effects masks potentially important variation in the effect of formal schooling across the achievement distribution. We address this gap in the literature by estimating quantile regressions that exploit quasi-random variation in the number of school days between kindergarten students' fall and spring tests in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). The marginal effect of a typical 250-day school-year on kindergarten students' math and reading gains varies significantly, and monotonically, across the achievement distribution. For example, the marginal effect on the 10th percentile of the reading achievement distribution is 0.9 test score standard deviation (SD), while the marginal effect on the 90th percentile is 2.1 test score SD. We find analogous results for math achievement.