Office Discipline and Student Behavior: Does Race Matter?

More Than a Metaphor: The Contribution of Exclusionary Discipline to a School-to-Prison Pipeline

“…Emerging evidence suggests a negative relationship between exclusionary school discipline and multiple measures of student academic achievement, including state accountability examinations (Rausch & Skiba, 2005), reading achievement (Arcia, 2006), school grades (Rocque, 2010), and writing achievement (Raffaele Mendez, Knoff, & Ferron, 2002). In a longitudinal investigation of a matched sample of suspended and non-suspended middle school students, Arcia (2006) found a significant negative relationship between reading achievement growth and the number of days suspended over a three-year period.…”

“…School exclusion also appears to increase short-term factors, such as loss of educational opportunity (Muscott, Mann, & LeBrun, 2008) and student engagement, that have been shown to increase the risk of negative academic and behavioral outcomes. It is not surprising then, that school exclusion through suspension and expulsion is associated with decreases in academic achievement for both the overall school (Davis & Jordan, 1994;Rausch & Skiba, 2005) and individual levels (Rocque, 2010), and an increased risk of negative behavior over time (Tobin, Sugai, & Colvin, 1996). Together, one would expect that disengagement and deteriorating academic and social outcomes would be mutually reinforcing, greatly increasing a student's risk for failure to graduate or school dropout, and indeed the literature appears to provide substantial support for a link between school suspension and school dropout (e.g., Suh & Suh, 2007).…”

“…Although definitions of the school-to-prison pipeline may include police presence or school arrests as components of that model (see, e.g., Price, 2009;Thurau & Wald, 2009/2010, due to space limitations, this paper will focus only on the extent to which exclusionary discipline practices contribute to a set of negative developmental outcomes that might be considered pathways in a school-to-prison pipeline model. 2.…”

Can equitable punishment be mandated? Estimating impacts of sentencing guidelines on disciplinary disparities

“…Therefore, we are able to study the potential links among punishment mandates associated with different offense types. Lastly, Kinsler (2011) shows that punishment disparities within any particular school are minimal and race-based disciplinary inconsistencies that do exist are largely independent of principals' racial characteristics (see Rocque, 2010, for similar evidence). 2 Consequently, disciplinary disparities are most likely to occur between schools, providing an opportunity to investigate how these disparities are affected by state-level guidelines and more clearly understanding factors that could aid in crafting policies that ensure more equitable access to educational opportunities.…”

Influence over school discipline policy: Variation across levels of governance, school contexts, and time

“…Such outcomes, in turn, potentially have large economic costs to society (Marchbanks et al, 2015;Rumberger & Losen, 2016). Furthermore, the use of such practices disproportionately impacts minority students, with the rate of suspensions and expulsions being approximately three times larger for Black students than White students (Balfanz, Byrnes, & Fox, 2015;Curran, 2016a;Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010;Rafaelle-Mendez, 2003;Rocque, 2010;Rocque & Paternoster, 2011;Shollenberger, 2015;Skiba et al, 2002). Responding to this evidence, the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice released a "Dear Colleague" letter calling for improved equity in school discipline and a move away from exclusionary practices, and many states and school districts have implemented reforms to school discipline policy (Steinberg & Lacoe, 2017; U.S. Department of Education & Department of Justice, 2014).…”