DISCRIMINATORY SCHOOL DISCIPLINE IS A CRISIS! WE MUST LEAD.
When I was teaching at UT Austin, school discipline was a dissertation topic that students wanted to investigate, but there weren’t available faculty at the institution that were conducting research in the area at the time. As a result, student interest in the disparate and unequal discipline practices occurring in schools began to drive my own interest in the area. So we began an informal research group that would meet once a month or so to coordinate and discuss our school discipline research. While there were several students working on the issue, I’d like to quickly highlight two of the students that I worked with. Rebecca Cohen was probably one of the sharpest graduate students I chaired at UT. Her dissertation was entitled Discipline without Derailing: An Investigation of Exclusionary Discipline Practices in Schools. She found:
Maintaining a safe and orderly learning environment in schools is fundamental to the greater goals of education, but determining optimal disciplinary responses to student misbehavior is often complicated. While there is an abundance of research that speaks to the negative impact of exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspension, expulsion or any other disciplinary response that removes a student from the traditional classroom setting) on student behavioral and academic outcomes, there is an absence of work that examines if, when, and to what extent a student is actually better off receiving non-exclusionary dispositions. Using multivariate regression analysis on a unique dataset from an urban Texas school district, this study directly compares the impact of exclusionary vs. non-exclusionary discipline on student outcomes (controlling for student characteristics, school characteristics, and offense type). Additionally, the study examines the extent to which offense type influences the relationship between disposition and student outcomes. The study’s findings suggest that a student is generally worse off in terms of academic progress and risk of future offenses when she/he receives an exclusionary disposition for any disciplinary infraction. The impact of exclusion, however, was shown to vary by student offense.
I tried to recruit Dr. Rebecca Cohen to California State University. She’d make a fantastic faculty member.
Then there is Dr. Heather Cole. I don’t think I have encountered a graduate student who was more prolific writer during graduate school. We published six pieces together while she was in graduate school! 6! Relevant to this blog, we also took on school discipline in two pieces about school-based Youth Courts.
Cole, H. & Vasquez Heilig, J. (2011). Developing a school-based youth court: A potential alternative to the school to prison pipeline. Journal of Law and Education, 4(2), 1-17.Cole, H., Vasquez Heilig, J., Fernandez, T., Clifford, M., & Garcia, R. (2015). Social Justice in action: Urban school leaders address the school to prison pipeline via a youth court. In M. Khalifa, C. Grant, N.W. Arnold and A. Osanloo (Eds.), Handbook of Urban Educational Leadership (pp. 320-328). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield.
I’ll come back to Youth Courts in a moment. Last night, here in Sacramento, the NAACP sponsored a community-town hall to address school discipline.
A new report entitled The Capitol of suspensions: Examining the racial exclusion of Black male in Sacramento countyauthored by Luke Wood, Frank Harris and Tyrone Howard shows the Sacramento City Unified School District suspends Black students more than any other school district in the state. The report also shows that several other districts in the Continue reading: Discriminatory School Discipline is a Crisis! We Must Lead. | Cloaking Inequity
