The dynamic nature of student discipline and discipline disparities

Abstract

Researchers have long used end-of-year discipline rates to identify punitive schools, explore sources of inequitable treatment, and evaluate interventions designed to stem both discipline and racial disparities in discipline. Yet, this approach leaves us with a “static view”—with no sense of how disciplinary responses fluctuate throughout the year. What if daily discipline rates, and daily discipline disparities, shift over the school year in ways that could inform when and where to intervene? This research takes a “dynamic view” of discipline. It leverages 4 years of atypically detailed data regarding the daily disciplinary experiences of 46,964 students from 61 middle schools in one of the nation’s largest school districts. Reviewing these data, we find that discipline rates are indeed dynamic. For all student groups, the daily discipline rate grows from the beginning of the school year to the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving break, falls before major breaks, and grows following major breaks. During periods of escalation, the daily discipline rate for Black students grows significantly faster than the rate for White students—widening racial disparities. Given this, districts hoping to stem discipline and disparities may benefit from timing interventions to precede these disciplinary spikes. In addition, early-year Black–White disparities can be used to identify the schools in which Black–White disparities are most likely to emerge by the end of the school year. Thus, the results reported here provide insights regarding not only when to intervene, but where to intervene to reduce discipline rates and disparities.

Taking Note of Our Biases: How Language Patterns Reveal Bias Underlying the Use of Office Discipline Referrals in Exclusionary Discipline

“…Future research could disaggregate ODR open-ended text fields further by including additional student, classroom, and teacher demographic data and conducting additional analyses to examine differences between ODRs for more subjectively vs. objectively defined behavior incidents (Girvan et al, 2017) or other vulnerable decision points (Ash & Maguire, 2023; Darling-Hammond et al, 2023; McIntosh et al, 2021). Similarly, research should examine and account for the effects of student special education status, race/ethnicity classroom composition and school enrollment, teacher race/ethnicity and experience, administrators’ discipline orientation (Skiba et al, 2014), and the extent to which the school is implementing particular discipline interventions (Ash & Maguire, 2023).…”

“…Previous research linking racial/ethnic biases to discipline decisions in large, naturalistic samples generally relies on quantitative analysis of fixed indicators of the conditions associated with the discipline incident (e.g., selections of behavior type or perceived motivation from broad lists) and outcomes (Girvan et al, 2021;Smolkowski et al, 2016). The results of this work have shown, for example, that racial disparities are more likely for subjectively defined behaviors (Girvan et al, 2017), in particular settings and at particular times of day (Smolkowski et al, 2016), at particular times of year (Darling-Hammond et al, 2023), and related to community levels of explicit (conscious) and implicit (automatic) racial biases (Girvan et al, 2021;Riddle & Sinclair, 2019). None of these studies directly examine teachers' or administrators' understandings or interpretations of the events that resulted in the discipline in their own terms.…”

We built this culture (so we can change it): Seven principles for intentional culture change.

“…The framework is grounded in the authors’ expertise in the social psychology of culture, bias, and inequality and their work applying evidence-based insights to inform and assess organizational, institutional, and societal change efforts in real-world settings. For over a decade, they have studied these change processes systematically in collaboration with researchers and private and public sector leaders in criminal justice (e.g., Camp et al, 2021, 2023; Hetey, 2020; Rho et al, 2023; Voigt et al, 2017), economic mobility (e.g., Cheryan & Markus, 2020; Lyons-Padilla et al, 2019; Thomas et al, 2020, 2023), education (e.g., Darling-Hammond et al, 2023; Okonofua et al, 2016; Stephens et al, 2019), health (e.g., Hook & Markus, 2020; Howe et al, 2022; Louis et al, 2022), media (e.g., Griffiths et al, 2023; Reddan et al, 2023), and technology (e.g., Zhao et al, 2023). The framework is centered around the behavioral change aspects of intentional culture change 2…”