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Abstract
This article argues that school choice/competition ought to play a central role in determining school discipline policy. Unfortunately, the status quo emphasizes disciplinary rules established by central authorities and school choice is often limited. The author provides an overview of these issues and presents a model of rules- versus discretion-based discipline policies and school choice. Policies that suppress school choice lead to inflexible and unsatisfactory discipline policies, and centralized discipline policies reduce the positive aspects of school choice. Stronger incentives for schools are expected to help remedy this and vigorous school choice/competition is likely to be an avenue for doing so.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For comments on a previous version of this article, I thank participants at the Association of Private Enterprise Education annual conference.
Notes
1. The press release and materials are available at http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-departments-education-and-justice-release-school-discipline-guidance-package-
2. See http://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/School-Discipline-Compendium for details.
3. See http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201401-title-vi.pdf. Also, note that disparate impact claims entail a centralized approach because such concerns necessarily imply that ED/DOJ are not convinced that the disciplinary outcomes based on schools’ decision making is appropriate.
4. See pages 19–20 of the Dear Colleague Letter.
5. See pages 20 and 21 of the Dear Colleague Letter, which discuss record keeping.
6. See the appendix of the Dear Colleague Letter.
7. See page 1 in that document at http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/school-discipline/guiding-principles.pdf
8. See page iii of the ED’s Guiding Principles: A Resource Guide for Improving School Climate and Discipline (U.S. Department of Education, Citation2014).
9. See Center for Education Reform (Citation2013).
10. Dobbie and Fryer (Citation2013a) obtain results broadly similar to those of Angrist, Pathak, and Walters (Citation2013), though they do not find the particular importance of the No Excuse school discipline policy.
11. See Figlio and Loeb (Citation2011) for a review.
12. Naturally, if knowledge is held centrally or relevant information is easily transmitted to central authorities, then a rules-based approach can work where rule-making and decision-making authority is held by the center.
13. Hanushek (Citation2009) discusses the impediments in various states to dismissing poorly performing public school teachers and estimates a very large gain from being able to do so.