This project examines how disciplinary experiences in schools matter for political and civic inequalities in young adulthood. In this project, primary attention is given to the relations that schools organize and the ways students experience them. Schools are the sites where individuals have their first, formative experiences with the rules and cultures of public institutions, authority relations with officials, and what it means to be a member of a rights-and-obligations-bearing community of putative equals. This project first examines how race (in conjunction with class and gender) structures experiences of school relations and disciplinary experiences and, second, how these school experiences matter for citizens’ positions and dispositions in the polity. Initial analyses show that in the current period American schools work to convert social hierarchies into civic and political inequalities by disproportionately sanctioning students of color. Moving forward, the project is beginning to look at this over time with three nationally representative datasets (HS&B, NELS, and ELS) to assess whether the prevalence and distribution of these disciplinary experiences have changed over time, and also whether the effects of these experiences on later young adult outcomes have changed over time. It could be that suspensions/expulsions (or other experiences) are more common now but maybe not as disproportionately distributed by race. And, it could also be the case that regardless of prevalence and distribution that these experiences have become more consequential in their effects on social incorporation.