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Student discipline
Who refers whom? The effects of teacher characteristics on disciplinary office referrals
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers affect a wide range of students’ educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students’ involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students’ likelihood of receiving a… more →
Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities
Topics: Student Well-BeingTeachers’ sense-making of student behavior determines whether students get in trouble and are formally disciplined.
Second Time's the Charm? How Sustained Relationships from Repeat Student-Teacher Matches Build Academic and Behavioral Skills
Topics: Student LearningWe examine the dynamic nature of student-teacher match quality by studying the effect of having a teacher for more than one year. Using data from Tennessee and panel methods, we find that having a repeat teacher improves achievement and decreases absences, truancy, and suspensions. These results… more →
Strictly Speaking: Examining Teacher Use of Punishment and Student Outcomes
Topics: Student Well-BeingWhile a growing body of literature has documented the negative impacts of exclusionary punishments, such as suspensions, on academic outcomes, less is known about how teachers vary in disciplinary behaviors and the attendant impacts on students. We use administrative data from North Carolina… more →
Student Misconduct and Learning Outcomes Evidence from Pennsylvania’s K-12 Building Records: 1999-2018
Topics: Student Well-BeingTags: Poverty, Student disciplineThis paper compares and contrasts two required building level school violence measures under NCLB, arrests and incidents of well-defined school misconduct acts, across 20 years of Pennsylvania’s approximately 3,000 public school buildings. Generally, both arrests for school violence and… more →
The Thin Blue Line in Schools: New Evidence on School-Based Policing Across the U.S.
Topics: Student Well-BeingU.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet, little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national… more →
The Effects of Student-Teacher Ethnoracial Matching on Exclusionary Discipline for Asian American, Black, and Latinx Students: Evidence From New York City
Topics: Student Well-BeingAlthough Black and Latinx students disproportionately face exclusionary school discipline, prior research finds that the likelihood of suspension for Black students decreases when they are taught by greater proportions of Black teachers. Little prior work, however, has examined whether these… more →
Who’s Left Out of Learning? Racial Disparities in Teachers’ Reports of Exclusionary Discipline Strategies Beyond Suspensions and Expulsions
Topics: Student Well-BeingWe documented (1) the use of strategies, beyond suspensions and expulsions, that exclude young students from learning opportunities and (2) how teacher-reported use of these strategies varied according to student racial/ethnic composition. In a sample of 2,053 teachers and 40,771 kindergarten… more →
Desegregated but still separated? The impact of school integration on student suspensions and special education classification
Topics: Student Well-BeingIn this paper I study the impact of court-mandated school desegregation by race on student suspensions and special education classification. Simple descriptive statistics using student enrollment and outcome data collected from the largest school districts across the country in the 1970s and… more →
From Referrals to Suspensions: New Evidence on Racial Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline
Topics: Student Well-BeingWe use novel data on disciplinary referrals, including those that do not lead to suspensions, to better understand the origins of racial disparities in exclusionary discipline. We find significant differences between Black and white students in both referral rates and the rate at which referrals… more →
School Discipline and Racial Disparities in Early Adulthood
Miles Davison, Andrew M. Penner, Emily K. Penner, Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej, Sonya R. Porter, Evan Rose, Yotam Shem-Tov, Paul Yoo.Topics: Student Well-BeingDespite interest in the role of school discipline in the creation of racial inequality, previous research has been unable to identify how students who receive suspensions in school differ from unsuspended classmates on key young adult outcomes. We utilize novel data to document the links between… more →
Effects of Four-Day School Weeks on Older Adolescents: Examining Impacts of the Schedule on Academic Achievement, Attendance, and Behavior in High School
Topics: Student LearningFour-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States in recent years, reaching over 650 public school districts in 24 states as of 2019, but little is known about their implementation and there is no consensus on their effects on students. This study uses district level panel data… more →
A Promise Unfulfilled? How Modern Federal Civil Rights Enforcement is Used to Address Racial Discrimination in School Discipline
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceUsing newly available data on all civil rights complaints submitted to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights related to racial discrimination in discipline between 1999 and 2018, I provide the first systematic evidence on how modern federal civil rights enforcement is used… more →
Equal Time for Equal Crime? Racial Bias in School Discipline
Topics: Student Well-BeingWell-documented racial disparities in rates of exclusionary discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or bias, in which treatment for the same behavior varies by student race or ethnicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative… more →
A Descriptive Analysis of Cream Skimming and Pushout in Choice versus Traditional Public Schools
Topics: School ChoiceOne of the controversies surrounding charter schools is whether these schools may either “cream skim” high-performing students from traditional public schools or “pushout” low-achieving students or students with discipline histories, leaving traditional public schools to educate the most… more →
Examining the Educational Spillover Effects of Severe Natural Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Maria
Topics: Student Well-BeingThis study examines the effects of internal migration driven by severe natural disasters on host communities, and the mechanisms behind these effects, using the large influx of migrants into Florida public schools after Hurricane Maria. I find adverse effects of the influx in the first year on… more →
Categorical Inequality in Black and White: Linking Disproportionality across Multiple Educational Outcomes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceWe characterize the extent to which Black-White gaps for multiple educational outcomes are linked across school districts in the United States. Gaps in disciplinary action, grade-level retention, classification into special education and Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement course-taking… more →
The effects of higher-stakes teacher evaluation on office disciplinary referrals
Topics: Teacher and Leader DevelopmentDespite frequent political and policy debates, the effects of imposing accountability pressures on public school teachers are empirically indeterminate. In this paper, we study the effects of accountability in the context of teacher responses to student behavioral infractions in the aftermath of… more →
Restorative for All? Racial Disproportionality and School Discipline Under Restorative Justice
Topics: Student Well-BeingThe well-documented racial disparities in school discipline have led many school districts in the U.S. to adopt restorative justice practices. The restorative justice philosophy differs from traditional disciplinary action by placing an emphasis on restitution and improving behavior rather than… more →
Disparities and Discrimination in Student Discipline by Race and Family Income
Topics: Student Well-BeingBlack and poor students are suspended from U.S. schools at higher rates than white and non-poor students. While the existence of these disparities has been clear, the causes of the disparities have not. We use a novel dataset to examine how and where discipline disparities arise. By… more →