Does discipline in schools hurt students more than it helps?
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A bill backed by Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne that would have tied school discipline to their letter grades was rejected by the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Two Republicans sided with Democrats in voting down the measure.
Senate Bill 1459 would have required public and charter schools to report the number of disciplinary referrals their teachers make — and how many of them resulted in disciplinary action. If the district doesn’t carry out the discipline in at least 75% of cases, the school could have seen its letter grade go down.
"If teachers are teaching in conditions of anarchy, they can't teach. And that's why almost as many teachers who said they left because of salaries, they left because of discipline. If the school board promulgates a permissive social-emotional approach," said Horne. "'Oh, you poor darling. It's not your fault. It's you come from a poor background. So you're misbehaving because of society.' If they take that approach, you have anarchy in your classrooms, kids do not learn and teachers leave the profession."
It’s all part of Horne’s efforts to support teachers he says don’t often feel supported in disciplining students. He argues reducing letter grades for schools is the answer.
But not everyone agrees that more discipline will help students do better in school. In fact, there’s a lot of academic research that says it does just the opposite.
Shantel Meek is executive director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University. Meek talked with The Show about school discipline, social emotional-learning and efforts like Horne’s.
Interview highlights
Is there a sense that schools aren't disciplining students anymore?
MEEK: I think there is a sense in some factions of that world — and particularly I think political operatives with agendas in this space. And so I think, you know, there, there's a racialized history to explosions and suspensions and to how we administered explosions and suspensions as part of the school system. I think there is widely accepted research and data coming from, you know, many years of study researchers across the country and, and most recently, the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine, putting together a report that summarizes this issue really with the consensus that these harsh forms of discipline are not effective and, and are are not having positive outcomes. And in fact, they're having very negative outcomes for kids across the country. Disproportionately, black children; disproportionately, children with disabilities, and some other groups as well.
You're talking specifically about suspensions. What other forms of discipline are even up for grabs these days?
MEEK: It depends on the age grade. So the the age of, of the kid, right? And, and the the type of school we're looking at and so in the younger years, which is where we do a lot of our work. There is a whole number of, of forms of discipline. We talk about harsh discipline in particular and addressing harsh forms of discipline for little kids like preschoolers, kindergartner first-graders, right? That can look at like a number of different things — suspension, expulsion, surely — but also expulsion and removing the child from the learning environment. So that could be time out. That could be sending them to a different classroom. It could be withholding things like recess or withholding, you know, a variety of different positive experiences for kids. And then it could be just verbal pieces. So we see things like shaming or belittling or embarrassing or calling out or these other forms of harsh discipline that, again, are harmful to kids, right?
And so they can take a number of different forms. As we get older, the U.S. Department of Education, they collect data on lots of forms of discipline in the pre-K-12 space. So it involves in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension. They collect data on restraint and seclusion. They collect data on discipline infractions that involved police and and things like that. And so there are other categories that are collected at the federal level. But we usually see a lot of those other ones on on older kids.
Talk a little bit about the long-term impacts of suspensions has shown to have on kids' lives.
MEEK: Yeah. So there is a lot of research and a lot of data that has documented short- and long-term negative impacts on the child being suspended or expelled. And so one of the the key findings is that a suspension and expulsion predicts a later suspension, expulsion — and a later suspension explosion. So if you're expelled or suspended as a kindergartner, right, it's more likely that it'll continue happening. And if there is a certain subset of people that see suspension-explosion as a solution, while the research finds it as the opposite. It's not like they stop being suspended and expelled. Right? That is one piece of it.
There are certainly associations with a whole number of other pieces like school engagement, grade retention, high school graduation and so on. And you can envision how that happens, right? So, say you're a kindergartner and you are suspended. You miss five days of school. So now you've missed five days of content on whatever your classmates are learning. There is now a rift with your teacher. You're being labeled, right? And kids are perceiving and ... doing that as well. So you're kind of being labeled the problem child or the child with difficulties. And so how are you going to feel walking in on your first day back? And so you can imagine how this kid might come home and be like, "School is terrible. School is not for me. School is hard. School is not a place where I feel like I belong, where I'm wanted." And so is that associated with school engagement? So it happens again, because that's what the research finds. You then get suspended again.
So now multiply the amount of time away, multiply the adults involved that you have, you know, this negative in the relationship with, and it kind of snowballs from there. So you can envision how that happens.
One of the lines of attack from Superintendent Tom Horne has been against social-emotional learning. Is that an alternative to discipline? How does that kind of factor into this conversation?
MEEK: Yeah. It's certainly, an alternative. I think building schools and structures, right. That are supportive for all students and their needs and their mental health and their social-emotional development ... especially after the pandemic. And so there's all these pieces right that are telling us that should be pretty common sense. Like, we need to address children's mental health, we need to ensure that they are emotionally safe. We need to ensure that, that we're building up explicitly those social skills that they may have missed out on from being away from peers for so long. We need to do all of that before a kid can sit down and learn effectively. Because if you're stressed ... if you are worried, if you're having mental-health challenges, if you're deregulated — all of that stuff, it's kind of foundational and a prerequisite to sitting down and, you know, learning division. How are you going to focus on that? So, yeah, it's critical.
