Do school disciplinary policies have positive social impacts? Examining the attenuating effects of school policies on the relationship between personal and peer delinquency

Common misconceptions of suspension: Ideas and alternatives for school leaders

“…Not only do students who drop out of school tend to have significantly lower income and fewer job opportunities than high school graduates, they are also eight times more likely to be incarcerated than those who graduate from high school (Skiba et al., ). Research in the field of criminal justice reveals similar findings; students who experience exclusionary discipline (suspension/expulsion) are more significantly at risk for delinquency (Zimmerman & Rees, ).…”

Examination of the Relative Effects of Neighborhoods and Schools on Juvenile Delinquency: A Multilevel Cross-Classified Model Approach

“…And to what extent? Although previous multilevel research have produced a typical results indicating that most of the variation in delinquency comes from individual differences, followed by neighborhood or school differences (Beeck et al 2012;Bernburg and Thorlindsson 2007;Elliott et al 1996; Fagan and Wright 2012;Free 2014;Gottfredson and DiPietro 2011;Gottfredson et al 2005;Osgood and Anderson 2004;Payne 2008;Sampson et al 2005;Stewart 2003;Welsh et al 1999;Zimmerman 2010;Zimmerman and Rees 2014), no previous multilevel study on adolescent delinquency has directly compared the relative effect of neighborhood and school contexts on delinquency (Kirk 2009). The analyses for the second goal utilizing the cross-classified models study suggest that the effect of neighborhood on delinquency was about two or three times larger than that of school, which is also consistent with previous research findings from cross-classified studies in the field of education (Rasbash and Goldstein 1994;Raudenbush 1993).…”

“…Welsh (2000) also found that the clarity and fairness of rules as the measures of school climate had strong effects on various measures of school disorder, although the effects were stronger for less serious misconduct than more serious offending. More recently, Zimmerman and Rees (2014) claimed that strict disciplinary sanction policies of schools attenuated the effect of peer delinquency on students' own delinquency, although it had no direct effect on students' own delinquency.…”

“…Previous multilevel studies on delinquency, however, have examined the effect of one social context separately from the others; mostly neighborhoods (e.g., Bernburg and Thorlindsson 2007;Elliott et al 1996;Fagan and Wright 2012;Gottfredson, McNeil, and Gottfredson 1991;Peeples and Loeber 1994;Sampson, Morenoff, and Raudenbush 2005;Simcha-Fagan and Schwartz 1986;Zimmerman 2010), or schools (e.g., Beeck, Pauels, and Put 2012;Caspi et al 1993;Felson et al 1994;Free 2014;Gottfredson and DiPietro 2011;Gottfredson et al 2005;Osgood and Anderson 2004;Payne 2008;Stewart 2003;Zimmerman and Rees 2014). 1 Separate examinations of neighborhood-or school-context would limit our understandings about the mutual impact of these different and reciprocal social contexts on delinquency, since most adolescents are embedded simultaneously in both neighborhood and school contexts (Goldstein 2011;Kirk 2009;Raudenbush 2003;Sykes and Musterd 2011).…”

Punishing violent students: accounting for self-defense

“…Therefore, education systems in the USA (Skiba, 2013;Teske, 2011) and many other countries (SRSG on Violence Against Children, 2012), including Israel (Wininger, 2011), have adopted zero-tolerance policies that apply severe sanctions to any use of violence in school. Ostensibly, this is an appropriate way to assure youngsters' safety in school due to its ability to deter bullies (Zimmerman and Rees, 2014). Some believe, however, that punishment in school may have adverse implications as well (Dupper, 2010;Lewis et al, 2008).…”