Getting Tough? The Effects of Discretionary Principal Discipline on Student Outcomes

Abstract

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment. There is legitimate concern that this power can have negative consequences, particularly for the students who are excluded. This study uses linked disciplinary, education, and criminal justice records from 2008 to 2016 in North Carolina to examine the impact of principal-driven disciplinary decisions on middle school student outcomes. We find that principals who are more likely to remove students lead to reductions in reported rates of minor student misconduct. However, this deterrence comes at a high cost – these harsher principals generate more juvenile justice complaints and reduce high school graduation rates for all students in their schools. Students who committed minor disciplinary infractions in a school with a harsh principal suffer additional declines in attendance and test scores. Finally, principals exhibiting racial bias in their disciplinary decisions also widen educational gaps between White and Black students.

Making Schools Safer and/or Escalating Disciplinary Response: A Study of Police Officers in North Carolina Schools

“…In part because of the wide variations across schools in disciplinary environments (Sorensen et al, 2021), the removal and restriction of SROs could have significant implications for this largely positive trend in fewer suspensions, particularly for Black and Hispanic students. If the introduction of SROs is working counter to the recent decline in suspensions and racial disparity in suspensions, which is what our results suggest, then their removal or restriction should accelerate this encouraging trend.…”

The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime

“…We find that conditional suspension rates change substantially when new principals enter and exit, and that principals' effects on suspensions in other schools predict suspensions in their current schools. 2 While we 2 In a contemporaneous paper, Sorensen, Bushway & Gifford (2019) estimate the impact of principals on school suspensions and other outcomes using a principal switching design. Reassuringly, they also find that principals have a sizeable impact on conditional suspension rates.…”

Equal Time for Equal Crime? Racial Bias in School Discipline

“…This focus is motivated by two strands of literature; one underscores the role of principals and school administrators in influencing the severity of disciplinary outcomes (R. J. Sorensen et al, 2021), while the other documents benefits that accrue to under-represented minority students after exposure to a same-race teacher or administrator (Bartanen & Grissom, 2021;Dee, 2005;Gershenson et al, 2021Gershenson et al, , 2016. We limit the analyses to Black and White principals only, given the dearth of principals of other races and ethnicities in our sample.…”

“…These practices are increasingly controversial, as recent research document long-lasting negative effects of harsher disciplinary punishments on students' educational attainment and achievement (Bacher-Hicks, Billings, & Deming, 2019;R. Skiba, Arredondo, & Williams, 2014;Sorensen, Bushway, & Gifford, 2021). A related concern is that these policies facilitate the school-to-prison pipeline, a phenomenon in which increasingly harsh school policies Our empirical approach examines racial gaps in exclusionary discipline for students of different races who are involved in the same disciplinary incident for the same type of infraction.…”

“…This analysis is motivated by literature documenting the role of school principals as key players in disciplinary decisions (R. J. Sorensen et al, 2021) and research demonstrating academic benefits to exposing under-represented minorities to race-congruent teachers or administrators (Bartanen & Grissom, 2021;Dee, 2005;Gershenson, Hart, Hyman, Lindsay, & Papageorge, 2021;Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016). We find suggestive evidence that Black-White and Black-Hispanic gaps in exclusionary discipline are smaller in schools with Black principals, implying that the presence of minority principals may benefit students from under-represented minority groups through disciplinary channels as well.…”