Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Exclusionary discipline practices that suspend or expel children from school have drawn harsh criticism from education researchers and policymakers. While away from school, disciplined students receive little academic instruction, lose access to school resources, and are often in unsupervised environments; all factors that are unlikely conducive to learning. Indeed, previous research has demonstrated that exclusionary discipline is associated with lower levels of academic achievement, continued misbehavior, and increased likelihood of both dropout and crime. Moreover, several studies reveal disparities in the application of exclusionary discipline policies between black and white students as well as students from low- and higher-income families.

However, a careful examination of student discipline requires not only studies of how discipline affects punished students but also of how discipline policies and punished students affect other students. It could be that removing disruptive students from school yields safer, more productive learning environments—and keeps teachers from switching schools or exiting teaching. If that is the case, then the use of exclusionary discipline becomes a question of tradeoffs. Policymakers must consider the costs of exclusionary discipline to suspended or expelled students against the costs of non-exclusionary discipline to these students’ peers.

This study contributes to the growing literature on student discipline by examining how frequently disciplined students affect their peers and teachers. Our data, which come from the Louisiana Department of Education, span the 2000-01 through 2013-14 school years, and include detailed information about infraction types, infraction dates, and punishments, along with information about student demographics, student achievement, and teacher employment. Using these data, we examine how the entry of frequently disciplined students to school-grades affect their peers’ academic achievement and behaviors as well as their teachers’ career decisions. We identify frequently disciplined students based on their number of suspension or expulsion-resulting infractions in the prior year using Tukey’s (1977) outlier method for skewed distributions.

Our analysis focuses on two sets of outcomes. For students, we examine how exposure to frequently disciplined peers affects achievement gains on Louisiana’s statewide assessments and their own discipline records. For teachers, we examine how exposure to frequently disciplined students affects their rates of school transfer and exit from the teaching profession. We conduct these analyses using models with different combinations of student, school, grade, and year fixed effects. For example, we examine how student and teacher outcomes respond to year-to-year fluctuations (within school and grade) and grade-to-grade fluctuations (within school and year) in the number of incoming frequently disciplined students in that school-grade.

This study contributes to the growing research—and public conversation—on student discipline and misbehavior. We believe it is the first study of its kind to assess how disciplined students affect their teachers in addition to assessing how they affect other students.