A new joint study from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University examines the potential effects of exclusionary school discipline polices—particularly school suspensions—on racial differences in reading and math achievement.
They use a hierarchical and longitudinal dataset drawn from the Kentucky School Discipline Study (KSDS) to create a final sample of 16,248 students drawn from grades 6–10 across seventeen different public schools with a demographic roughly representative of the southeastern United States. Data was collected over a three-year period between August 2008 and June 2011. Authors controlled for school-level variables (within-school variation on percent minority, percent free and reduced-price lunch, percent in special education, expenditures per student, school size, and total number of disciplinary offenses committed in a school in a given year), as well as student and non-school factors (race, socioeconomic status, the neighborhood in which the school is located, and a student’s likelihood of suspension).
They found that black students were nearly six times more likely to be suspended than whites, while other ethnic and racial minorities were over two times more likely. Schools with larger concentrations of black students had significantly higher rates of out-of-school suspension, while students who have been suspended in a given year scored 15 percent lower in literacy and 16 percent lower in math. Additionally, students who have a higher risk for low performance are at even greater risk of academic decline after suspension.
The author’s final analysis estimated the effect of group differences in exclusionary discipline policies, such as detention, suspension, or expulsion, on the racial disparity in achievement. Their findings suggest that 20 percent of the black disadvantage on reading achievement and 17 percent on math achievement could potentially be explained through students’ disproportionate exposure to these kinds of policies in school.
One thing that’s missing from this analysis, however (and the authors admit this), is the effect that removing a student from class might have on the academic achievement of other non-disciplined students over time. For example, unmeasured factors such as poor discipline in the classroom could contribute to lower achievement across the board.
In the end, the researchers found no direct causal link between suspension and lower academic achievement (there could be many factors influencing suspensions and student achievement) but did find an association with lower growth over time. They call for more research into whether it is punishment in itself, or the loss of classroom instruction time, that underlies this relationship.
SOURCE: Edward W. Morris and Brea L. Perry, “The Punishment Gap: School Suspension Achievement,” Social Problems (January 2016).
