Does anyone benefit from exclusionary discipline?
I have written before about discipline. Here, I summarize an article that adds to our understanding. Wang, Scanlon, & Del Toro (2023) published “Does Anyone Benefit from Exclusionary Discipline? An exploration on the direct and vicarious links between suspensions for minor infraction and adolescents’ academic achievement” in American Psychologist. I begin with the edited impact statement and abstract (I am omitting references for sake of brevity but all claims are well-documented):
Past research on school suspensions has focused on adverse effects for suspended students’ academic engagement and achievement, but little is known about whether there are consequences for their non-suspended peers. The intended purpose of exclusionary discipline is to improve the learning environment by removing disruptive students; however, emerging evidence has suggested that these practices may have the opposite effect. Exclusionary discipline—especially policies that use suspensions as punishment for minor, developmentally normative behavioral infractions—is a known threat to suspended students’ academic achievement, but few have examined whether and how these suspensions may vicariously affect non-suspended classmates’ academic achievement. Results showed that students who received a suspension for a minor infraction were more likely to have poorer academic achievement. In classrooms where suspensions for minor infractions were used more frequently, students had lower academic achievement, with student engagement partially mediating this relation. These results add to a growing body of school discipline literature that advocates for replacing exclusionary discipline with more developmentally responsive policies and practices.
They begin by pointing out that “k-12 students in the US purportedly lost 11,360,004 days of instruction due to out-of-school suspensions during the 2015-2016 school year.” They add that 40-55% of these suspensions were for “nonviolent, minor infractions, such as violating dress code, texting friends, or catchall categories such as ‘disruptive’ or ‘willful defiance’.” We know that “suspensions for minor infractions have been linked to more negative school climate perceptions, poorer academic achievement, and a higher risk of school dropout.” They then note that “Classrooms, however, are inherently social spaces where students influence each other through the process of social contagion and shared experiences of disciplinary events.” Their focus here, then, is on non-suspended students. They add that, “school disciplinary responses influence a set of shared beliefs that inform whether students perceive their classroom as a supportive, equitable environment focused on fostering academic engagement and success. . . . Because shifting developmental competencies make adolescents particularly attuned to injustice within their social surroundings, they are more likely to perceive the use of exclusionary discipline in response to minor, nonviolent behavioral infractions as unwarranted, excessive, or unfair, especially if these disciplinary responses are inconsistent from classroom to classroom.”
What I like about their samples is using 41 science classrooms with 558 participants and 64 math classrooms with 1302 participants. These are gender-balanced, ethnically diverse classrooms with 62% and 64% eligible for free or reduced lunch. They confirmed previous research findings that suspended students experience lower academic engagement and achievement. They assert that a student suspended for a minor infraction may well feel “less sense of belongingness in the classroom and trustworthiness of their relationships with teachers and school administrators. . . . Ultimately, this environment may foster discontent, disengagement, and disenfranchisement among students suspended for minor infractions.”
Turning to non-suspended students, they found that “engagement and achievement declined only when the rate of suspension for minor infractions was high.” They add that, ”When students observe inconsistency in the application of disciplinary policy, they may begin to question the trustworthiness of teachers alongside the legitimacy of the school’s disciplinary approach.”
In their discussion, they note:
Perhaps the biggest takeaway message from this study is that suspensions for minor infractions affect all students’ ability to fully engage in their school education. . . . [P]rogressive school districts have started to reform disciplinary policies by adopting restorative justice programs. These programs combine school-based racial socialization practices with the academic, behavioral, and relational resources inherent to schoolwide positive behavior interventions and supports to reduce disciplinary referrals and suspension.”
Finally, they say, “schools with high rates of disciplinary referrals may benefit from teacher training geared toward empathic, trauma-informed responses to student behavior.” This is a potentially positive recommendation but an expensive one. We have to be willing to invest in teacher training, administrative re-training, and personnel to implement positive strategies in dealing with developmentally predictable behavior.