Russell J. Skiba

The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment.

The disproportionate discipline of African-American students has been extensively documented; yet the reasons for those disparities are less well understood. Drawing upon one year of middle-school disciplinary data for an urban school district, we explored three of the most commonly offered hypotheses for disproportionate discipline based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. Racial and gender disparities in office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions were somewhat more robust than socioeconomic differences. Both racial and gender differences remained when controlling for socioeconomic status. Finally, although evidence emerged that boys engage more frequently in a broad range of disruptive behavior, there were no similar findings for race. Rather, there appeared to be a differential pattern of treatment, originating at the classroom level, wherein African-American students are referred to the office for infractions that are more subjective in interpretation. Implications for teacher training and structural reform are explored.

The Achievement Gap and the Discipline Gap Two Sides of the Same Coin

The gap in achievement across racial and ethnic groups has been a focus of education research for decades, but the disproportionate suspension and expulsion of Black, Latino, and American Indian students has received less attention. This article synthesizes research on racial and ethnic patterns in school sanctions and considers how disproportionate discipline might contribute to lagging achievement among students of color. It further examines the evidence for student, school, and community contributors to the racial and ethnic patterns in school sanctions, and it offers promising directions for gap-reducing discipline policies and practices.

School Discipline at a Crossroads: From Zero Tolerance to Early Response

Dramatic incidents of school violence have thrust school discipline to the forefront of public consciousness. Despite a dramatic increase in the use of zero tolerance procedures and policies, there is little evidence demonstrating that these procedures have increased school safety or improved student behavior. Moreover, a punitive disciplinary climate may make any attempt to include more students with behavioral problems a cause for conflict between general and special educators. A preventive, early response disciplinary model increases the range of effective options for addressing violence and disruption across both general and special education. Ultimately, the effectiveness of any disciplinary system may be judged by the extent to which it teaches students to solve interpersonal and intrapersonal problems without resorting to disruption or violence.

Achieving Equity in Special Education: History, Status, and Current Challenges:

Among the most-longstanding and intransigent issues in the field, the disproportionate representation of minority students in special education programs has its roots in a long history of educational segregation and discrimination. Although national estimates of disproportionality have been consistent over time, state and local estimates may show varying patterns of disproportionality. A number of factors may contribute to disproportionality, including test bias, poverty, special education processes, inequity in general education, issues of behavior management, and cultural mismatch/cultural reproduction. This article provides a report on the history, measurement, status, and factors contributing to disproportionate representation in special education, and offers recommendations based on an understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in special education as a multiply determined phenomenon.

Disparate Access: The Disproportionality of African American Students with Disabilities across Educational Environments:

This study investigated the extent to which the overrepresentation of African American students in more restrictive special education settings is attributable to their overrepresentation in disability categories more likely to be served in more restrictive educational environments. Within 5 disability categories (emotional disturbance, mild mental retardation, moderate mental retardation, learning disabilities, and speech and language), African American students were overrepresented in more restrictive educational environments and underrepresented in less restrictive environments relative to all other students with the same disability. Disproportionality was most evident in those disability categories served primarily in general education settings. Given the social consensus regarding inclusion, disproportionality in restrictiveness of educational environment may represent a more serious challenge than disproportionality in disability categories.

Unproven Links: Can Poverty Explain Ethnic Disproportionality in Special Education?

The high degree of overlap of race and poverty in our society has led to the presumption in both research and practice that ethnic disproportionality in special education is in large measure an artifact of the effects of poverty. This article explores relationships among race, poverty, and special education identification to arrive at a more precise estimate of the contribution of poverty to racial disparities. District-level data for all 295 school corporations in a midwestern state were analyzed for this study. Records included information on disability category, general and special education enrollment by race, socioeconomic level, local resources, and academic and social outcomes for 1 school year. Simple correlations among the variables demonstrate that correlations between race and poverty of even moderate strength do not guarantee that the 2 variables will function in the same way with respect to outcome variables, such as identification for special education services. Results of regression analyses indicate that poverty makes a weak and inconsistent contribution to the prediction of disproportionality across a number of disability categories. On the other hand, rates of suspension and expulsion consistently predict district rates of special education disproportionality. Inconsistent relationships between special education disproportionality and achievement may indicate a developmental trend in the systemic contribution to racial disparity. Ideal-type analyses examining race— poverty relationships indicate that where poverty makes any contribution above and beyond race in predicting disability identification, its primary effect is to magnify existing racial disparity.

Parsing Disciplinary Disproportionality: Contributions of Infraction, Student, and School Characteristics to Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion

In the context of a national conversation about exclusionary discipline, we conducted a multilevel examination of the relative contributions of infraction, student, and school characteristics to rates of and racial disparities in out-of-school suspension and expulsion. Type of infraction; race, gender, and to a certain extent socioeconomic status at the individual level; and, at the school level, mean school achievement, percentage Black enrollment, and principal perspectives all contributed to the probability of out-of-school suspension or expulsion. For racial disparities, however, school-level variables, including principal perspectives on discipline, appear to be among the strongest predictors. Such a pattern suggests that schools and districts looking to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in discipline would do well to focus on school- and classroom-based interventions.

Special Education and School Discipline: A Precarious Balance

The 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act brought together, for the first time, all of the disciplinary provisions pertaining to students with disabilities, attempting to guarantee a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) for students in special education while preserving a safe school environment for all students. Yet the discipline of special education students has continued to create controversy, with critics suggesting that those provisions create a dual system that limits the options of school administrators with respect to school discipline. A review of the literature reveals little or no evidence that suspension and expulsion make any contribution to reducing disruption or violence and some evidence that those procedures target certain populations disproportionately. Seeking to move toward a unified system of discipline that implements effective and accountable disciplinary options will be more likely to preserve FAPE and guarantee safe and civil schools for all children.

Teaching the Social Curriculum: School Discipline as Instruction.

Abstract Though less explicit than the academic curriculum, the expectations, rules, and consequences that form the social curriculum of schools are no less important in determining school success. Methods of discipline that emphasize school removal have not yielded evidence of effectiveness in teaching appropriate behavior or ensuring safe and effective school climates. In contrast, reviews have consistently identified preventive, collaborative, and instructional methods as effective or promising in reducing school violence or disruption. One effort to increase the implementation of effective instructional methods of school discipline and the promising results from the 1st year of implementation are described. First-year results from that program provide some evidence that school discipline need not be equated with punishment and exclusion.

Beyond Guns, Drugs and Gangs: The Structure of Student Perceptions of School Safety

SUMMARY The failure to consider factors that make a key contribution to violence and its prevention may create serious problems of construct validity for school violence surveys. Further, few studies have assessed the relative importance of variables contributing to perceptions of safety by examining correlations between survey items and overall feelings of school safety. This study describes the development of a self-report survey, the Safe and Responsive Schools Safe School Survey, explicitly designed to assess perceptions regarding criminal violation and serious violence as well as day-to-day disruption and climate issues. Principal components analysis identified four factors involving student connectedness, incivility, feelings of personal safety, and delinquency/major safety. Further multivariate analysis suggests that, in at least some cases, feelings about connectedness and climate may be more critical than serious violence in shaping student perceptions of school safety.