Veering off track in U.S. high schools? Redirecting student trajectories by disrupting punishment and math course-taking tracks

The Process of “Pushing Out”: Accumulated Disadvantage across School Punishment and Math Achievement Trajectories

“…Jabbari and Johnson (2020) also found that disciplinary and academic baseline measures often maintained a strong relationship with their respective outcomes and that both suspensions and advanced math course-taking significantly influenced dropout status and college attendance. As a result, Jabbari and Johnson (2020) concluded that disadvantages may actually accumulate when students are excluded both from suspensions and advanced math courses. Nonetheless, in order to empirically establish this accumulation process, a continuous multi-time point path model is necessary.…”

“…Moreover, in order to best explore the various mechanism within this process, we focus on three different dimensions of achievement—attitudes, ability, and course-taking. While there are likely multiple aspects of disciplinary involvement and academic exclusion that, together, can push students out of schools, we follow Jabbari and Johnson (2020) and focus on suspensions and math achievement, whose trajectories can represent important pieces of larger opportunity structures in society, such as the School-to-Prison (STP) pipeline and the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline. Additionally, as many of the same groups of students that are underrepresented in math achievement and the STEM workforce are also overrepresented in suspensions (Skiba et al, 2002) and the criminal justice system (Pettit & Western, 2004), our analysis also focuses on race/ethnicity.…”

“…Given these trends, it is unsurprising to find that Black and Hispanic students were also more likely to be pushed out of high school (Bradley & Renzulli, 2011; McFarland et al, 2018). However, it is important to note that when punishment and math achievement are accounted for, Black students are far less likely to be pushed out (Jabbari & Johnson, 2020).…”

“…Nevertheless, recent research has demonstrated the relationships among pushout predictors and academic achievement—especially in relation to suspensions. For example, Jabbari and Johnson (2020) found that suspensions were significantly related to later course-taking patterns when accounting for prior course-taking patterns. Thus, even when students may appear to drop out as a result of current low academic achievement, it may be the case that students are actually being pushed out as a result of previous punishments that ultimately led to their low academic achievement.…”

“…While recent research has begun to explore the relationships among punishment, achievement, and pushout status (see Jabbari & Johnson, 2020), their analyses relied on a series of separate disciplinary and academic models, and thus they were not able to empirically establish accumulation effects in a continuous, (i.e., multi-time point) path model. Without understanding this process , stakeholders and policymakers may fail to recognize some of the underlying mechanisms that push students out of school, and as a result, offer remedies that only address problems at the surface and in the moment of the pushout occurrence.…”