New Study Exposes School Discipline Myths

How many American children are suspended or expelled in their middle and high school years? Who are these students, and what happens to them?  A new statewide study, released last week with support from the Open Society Foundations and Atlantic Philanthropies, helps answer these questions.

Breaking Schools’ Rules, published by the Council of State Governments Justice Center in partnership with the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M, examines nearly one million Texas public school students in middle and high school and tracked them for at least six years. It tapped rich databases from the state’s education agency (both individual student and campus records) and the juvenile justice system—powering a longitudinal study that drew from more than six million records.

Access to such comprehensive data made it possible for the researchers to match juvenile justice records to education records at the individual student level—without identifiers. The data supported complex analyses that could control for 83 different student and campus variables. Researchers were able to isolate the effect of a particular variable from all others studied (such as students’ race or whether they had a particular educational disability) on such outcomes as not graduating or juvenile justice system contact. The study did not include information on such informal actions as being sent to the principal or after-school detention. Only those actions that are coded as a formal disciplinary action in the Texas Education Agency database were included in the study.

The results were startling even to education specialists and policymakers within Texas (to glimpse some of the reactions, see the webcast of the discussion among judges, legislators, school officials, and education and criminal justice agency representatives at the Texas roll out of the report). Findings include the following:

• Nearly all the actions taken against students for misbehavior at school were at the discretion of school officials. Only about three percent of the disciplinary actions were for behaviors that have a mandated school response under state law.
• Almost 60 percent of the students studied received at least one disciplinary action (including in-school suspensions ranging from a single class period to several days, with no cap per year).
• More than 30 percent of all students studied had out-of-school suspensions of up to three days, with no cap on the number of suspensions per year; about 15 percent were sent to Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs (averaging 27 days); and about eight percent were placed in Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (averaging 73 days).
• Another unexpected finding was that 15 percent of the students had 11 or more disciplinary violations between seventh and 12th grades; about half of those frequent violators had subsequent contact with the juvenile justice system.
• African-American students were more likely to receive discretionary actions than Hispanic or white students. Controlling for many different factors, the study revealed that a disproportionate number of students with particular educational disabilities (especially those coded as emotionally disturbed) were also highly involved in the disciplinary system.
• Each disciplinary action increased the likelihood that the students removed from their classes or schools would drop out, repeat a grade, or have subsequent contact with the juvenile justice system.
• And, in what appears to be new ground for such studies, researchers found that schools that are statistically similar on a large number of measures (such as expenditures per student, teacher experience, percentage economically disadvantaged, teacher and student diversity, and many other campus factors) were found to vary in their disciplinary rates.

The study is complemented by an FAQ that addresses what readers can take away from these findings and cautions against making judgments about teacher or student actions.  This resource points out that tolerance for misbehavior and the use of effective strategies in preventing and addressing bad behaviors can affect discipline rates. It recognizes the challenges that teachers face in the classroom and urges careful interpretations of the findings.

What the study authors do not offer are specific recommendations. The authors purposefully chose to focus strictly on what the data do (and do not) reveal. The Council of State Governments Justice Center plans to assemble school officials, advocates for parents and students, and the many professionals who serve the education, juvenile justice, child welfare, behavioral health, law enforcement, and myriad other systems and agencies committed to making schools safer and more conducive to learning. The goal is to develop cross-system, consensus-based recommendations. The Justice Center will also work with its partners across the nation to support the recently announced collaboration between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Education’s Supportive School Discipline Initiative.

Links to the publication download, a press release about this initiative, and examples of media coverage (including the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press and NPR) of the report are available on the Council of State Governments Justice Center website.