Rethinking Universal Suspension for Severe Student Behavior

ABSTRACT

Driven by a combination of concern for historically high suspension rates and substantial disproportionalities in suspension use, a recent wave of education reforms encourages schools to reduce their use of suspensions for student behavior management. Both academic and political discourse has focused on the extensive use of suspension for relatively minor behavioral infractions, with an implicit assumption or explicit articulation that suspension could still be used for severe infractions. This article tests that assumption, providing evidence that reductions in suspensions for severe infractions may produce positive impacts without harming school safety.

Using data from high schools in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), 2007–2014, we examine how declines in school reliance on suspensions for severe infractions are associated with changes in academic performance, attendance, and student reports of school climate for all students in the school. Recognizing the substantial methodological difficulty in obtaining impact estimates, we exploit a series of official and unofficial policy-induced changes to suspension practice, using school and student fixed effects models with extensive controls to reduce potential sources of bias in the estimates.

We find the reduction in out-of-school suspension for severe infractions was associated with small but statistically significant increases in student test scores, consequential attendance improvements (beyond the impact of fewer days suspended), and heterogeneity in changes to students' perceptions of school safety. Test score impacts are concentrated in racially diverse schools and those with low baseline suspension use. Attendance impacts are driven by schools predominantly serving African American students (which also had the highest baseline suspension rates); these schools also had large, significant improvements in perceptions of school climate.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Chicago Public Schools for ongoing data access and support. We also thank workshop and conference participants at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Stanford University, the Association for Public Policy and Management, the Association for Education Finance and Policy, and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, researchers at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, Stephen Raudenbush, Ofer Malamud, Amy Claessens, and Stephen Baker for helpful comments and discussions. Hinze-Pifer is grateful for support from the IES-PIRT fellowship (PR/Award #R305B140009), the University of Chicago Committee on Education, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Sartain gratefully acknowledges the Atlantic Philanthropies, as well as the Spencer Foundation and the Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation, whose operating grants support the work of UChicago Consortium.

Notes

1 Our definition of severe infraction is narrow—those the CPS Student Code of Conduct places in the three most severe categories. For example, two-person fights without injury are not severe. See the data section for a discussion of this choice and Table 1 for the included infractions.

2 Charter schools are not required to report student-level discipline information to the district.

3 Student attendance is calculated as the number of days present in school, divided by the difference between the number of days the student was enrolled and the number of days suspended.

4 For student fixed effects models, the cluster-robust estimator requires an inefficient degrees of freedom adjustment when students are not nested in schools. The magnitude of results do not appreciably change with mobile students included, but the adjusted standard errors are larger.

5 Expulsions are rare, and trending flat or down during this period. These numbers are substantively unchanged when infractions leading to expulsion proceedings are removed—largely because those infractions typically involve a suspension prior to the expulsion hearing.

6 This approach to grouping Chicago schools was used in prior UChicago Consortium analyses (e.g. Sartain, Allensworth, & Porter, 2015). Students of all races are counted as Latinx if their ethnicity variable indicates such. The African American group includes all non-Latinx students whose administrative race variables indicates such. School race/ethnicity classification is robust to classifying African American Latinx students in the African American group instead.

7 Students rate their agreement with the following statements on 4-point Likert scales, with measures constructed using Rasch analysis (UChicago Consortium on School Research, 2017).

 Student-Teacher Relationships: When my teacher tells me not to do something, I know they have a good reason; I feel safe and comfortable with my teachers at this school; My teachers always keep their promises; My teachers always listen to students' ideas; My teachers treat me with respect.

 Supportive Teachers: The teacher for this class… Helps me catch up if I am behind; Is willing to give extra help on schoolwork if I need it; Notices if I have trouble learning something; Gives me specific suggestions about how I can improve my work in this class; Explains things in a different way if I don't understand something in class.

 School Connectedness: I feel like a real part of my school; People here notice when I'm good at something; Other students at my school take my opinions seriously; People at this school are friendly to me; I'm included in lots of activities at school.