Focused Classroom Coaching and Widespread Racial Equity in School Discipline

Abstract

We examined the effects of a teacher coaching program on discipline referrals using records from 7,794 U.S. classrooms in secondary schools. Some classroom teachers took part in a trial: They were randomized to receive intensive coaching in a focal classroom or to form a business-as-usual control group. The remaining teachers taught in the same schools as the teachers in the trial. Previous research suggested that the coaching program was associated with increasing equity in discipline referrals in focal, coached classrooms. The current study addressed whether effects found in the teachers’ focal, coached classrooms generalized to diverse classrooms in their course load. Results suggested that the coaching program had no generalized effects on reducing referrals with African American students or racial referral gaps in classrooms with coached teachers, relative to the control teachers and the other teachers in the schools. We offer implications for coaching programs and directions for equity-oriented efforts to reduce racial discipline gaps.

The Dimensions of School Discipline: Toward a Comprehensive Framework for Measuring Discipline Patterns and Outcomes in Schools

“…Although there are generally two types of suspensions (ISS and OSS) and millions of students receive ISS nationwide, only a handful of studies focus on ISS or differentiate between the two suspension types (Anderson et al, 2019;Anyon et al, 2021;Cholewa et al, 2018;Jabbari & Johnson, 2020;Noltemeyer et al, 2015;Smith et al, 2021). Even though a growing number of studies are including both ODRs and suspensions as outcomes in the same study (Anyon et al, 2014(Anyon et al, , 2016Bradshaw et al, 2010;Nishioka et al, 2021;Vincent & Tobin, 2011), within the robust school discipline literature, most studies tend to focus on either ODRs (Cook et al, 2018;Gion et al, 2020;Gregory et al, 2014Gregory et al, , 2019 or suspensions (Green et al, 2021;Gregory et al, 2018;Hashim et al, 2018;Lacoe & Steinberg, 2018).…”