The School Discipline Consensus Report

The School Discipline Consensus Report presents a comprehensive set of consensus-based and field-driven recommendations to improve conditions for learning for all students and educators, better support students with behavioral needs, improve police-schools partnerships, and keep students out of the juvenile justice system for minor offenses. More than 100 advisors representing policymakers, school administrators, teachers, behavioral health professionals, police, court leaders, probation officials, juvenile correctional leaders, parents, and youth from across the country helped develop more than two dozen policies and 60 recommendations to keep more students in productive classrooms and out of court rooms.

Educators remove over 3.45 million students from school annually for disciplinary reasons, despite strong evidence that school suspension policies are harmful to students. The research presented in this volume demonstrates that disciplinary policies and practices that schools control directly exacerbate today's profound inequities in educational opportunity and outcomes. Part I explores how suspensions flow along the lines of race, gender, and disability status. Part II examines potential remedies that show great promise, including a district-wide approach in Cleveland, Ohio, aimed at social and emotional learning strategies. Closing the School Discipline Gap is a call for action that focuses on an area in which public schools can and should make powerful improvements, in a relatively short period of time. Contributors include Robert Balfanz, Jamilia Blake, Dewey Cornell, Jeremy D. Finn, Thalia González, Anne Gregory, Daniel J. Losen, David M. Osher, Russell J. Skiba, Ivory A. Toldson “Closing the School Discipline Gap can make an enormous difference in reducing disciplinary exclusions across the country. This book not only exposes unsound practices and their disparate impact on the historically disadvantaged, but provides educators, policymakers, and community advocates with an array of remedies that are proven effective or hold great promise. Educators, communities, and students alike can benefit from the promising interventions and well-grounded recommendations.” —Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University “For over four decades school discipline policies and practices in too many places have pushed children out of school, especially children of color. Closing the School Discipline Gap shows that adults have the power—and responsibility—to change school climates to better meet the needs of children. This volume is a call to action for policymakers, educators, parents, and students.” —Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children’s Defense Fund

This edited volume fills a critical void by providing the most current and authoritative information on what is known about disciplinary disparities. School exclusion—out-of-school suspension and expulsion in particular—remains a substantial component of discipline in our nation’s schools, and those consequences continue to fall disproportionally on certain groups of learners. The negative consequences of frequent and inequitable use of school exclusion are substantial, including higher rates of academic failure, dropout, and contact with the juvenile justice system. As educators, policymakers, community leaders, and other youth-serving organizations begin the difficult work of creating more equitable school disciplinary systems, the need for effective disparity-reducing alternatives could not be more important. Drawing on the multi-year ground-breaking work of the Discipline Disparities Collaborative, the chapters in this book provide cutting edge knowledge supporting a new national imperative to eliminate race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation-based disciplinary disparities.

The foundation for a safe school rests on the creation of a healthy school climate, a caring community where students feel safe and relationships facilitate prosocial growth as well as academic learning. A balance of structure and support is essential, and requires an organized, schoolwide approach that is practiced by all school personnel. Codes of student conduct that rest on core ethical values rather than just rules and punishment are a start. Recognizing that teachers are moral educators and schools model expectations for citizenship undergirds the prosocial school. From PBIS and restorative justice to mindfulness and the importance of play, from academic integrity to peer group support, we examine the science and evidence-informed programs that support a prosocial approach to school discipline. Eight schools from across the country that have struggled and learned to be beacons of prosocial school approaches are highlighted through summaries and links to their stories. Proactive responses to the U.S. Department of Education's Guiding Principles on School Discipline are provided by education law experts from the National School Climate Center and the New Jersey Principal’s and Supervisor’s Association.

Truly international in scope, this Handbook focuses on approaches to discipline, surveillance and social control from around the world, critically examining the strategies and practices schools employ to monitor students and control their behavior. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, the chapters scrutinize, analyze and compare schools' practices across the globe, providing a critical review of existing evidence, debates and understandings, while looking forward to address emerging important questions and key policy issues. The chapters are divided into four sections. Part 1 offers accounts of international trends in school discipline, surveillance and punishment; Part 2 examines the merging of school strategies with criminal justice practices; Part 3 focuses on developments in school technological surveillance; and Part 4 concludes by discussing restorative and balanced approaches to school discipline and behavior management. As the first Handbook to draw together these multiple themes into one text, and the first international comparative collection on school discipline, surveillance and social control, it will appeal to scholars across a range of fields including sociology, education, criminology, critical security studies and psychology, providing a unique, timely, and indispensable resource for undergraduate educators and researchers.

The Business of Education—a comprehensive view of how education policy is made in the US and, in some cases, globally—analyzes and critiques the influence of educational policy networks in a wide range of contexts and from a variety of perspectives, including testing, college preparation, juvenile detention centers, special education, the arts, teacher evaluation systems, education of undocumented immigrants, college faculty preparation, and financial aid. A network chart in most chapters illustrates how the major political actors, mainly private philanthropic foundations, for-profit companies, government officials, and politicians involved in the network, are linked. Joel Spring, internationally renowned scholar and analyst of educational policy, situates and frames the network studies in an introduction discussing general theories of education policy networks.

This Brief reviews the past, present, and future use of school corporal punishment in the United States, a practice that remains legal in 19 states as it is constitutionally permitted according to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of school corporal punishment, nearly 200,000 children are paddled in schools each year. Most Americans are unaware of this fact or the physical injuries sustained by countless school children who are hit with objects by school personnel in the name of discipline. Therefore, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools begins by summarizing the legal basis for school corporal punishment and trends in Americans’ attitudes about it. It then presents trends in the use of school corporal punishment in the United States over time to establish its past and current prevalence. It then discusses what is known about the effects of school corporal punishment on children, though with so little research on this topic, much of the relevant literature is focused on parents’ use of corporal punishment with their children. It also provides results from a policy analysis that examines the effect of state-level school corporal punishment bans on trends in juvenile crime. It concludes by discussing potential legal, policy, and advocacy avenues for abolition of school corporal punishment at the state and federal levels as well as summarizing how school corporal punishment is being used and what its potential implications are for thousands of individual students and for the society at large. As school corporal punishment becomes more and more regulated at the state level, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools serves an essential guide for policymakers and advocates across the country as well as for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students.