The Impact of School Discipline Practices on School Climate and Student Development

Introduction: Disciplinary policies have important implications for students’ academic and behavioral outcomes (e.g., school dropout). Also, racial/ethnic minorities are disproportionately likely to experience harsh discipline. In exploring these policies, most research focuses on student characteristics. Implicitly, these models suggest that student characteristics explain exclusionary discipline rates and racial/ethnic disparities. However, these policies may be as likely to create contexts that promote poor outcomes, even for those who have not been suspended or expelled. If true, students’ perceptions of school climate and social and emotional (SEL) competencies might suffer. Among school climate factors, students’ relationships with teachers and peers, and their sense of school connection are important for predicting educational outcomes. Students use SEL competencies to understand and navigate their environment. Social awareness and relationship skills competencies are salient since they assess students’ ability to understand cues from their social environment and to manage their relationships. This poster uses a multi-level dataset to examine: A) Is there a relationship between schools’ use of exclusionary discipline and students’ experiences of school climate? B) Is there a relation between a school’s use of exclusionary discipline and students’ self-reported SEL competencies? C) Do racial/ethnic disparities in exclusionary discipline affect perception of school climate or SEL competencies?

Methods: Participants were 13,559 (36% White; 47% female; 54% middle) adolescents who attended 34 public middle and high schools in a large, Southern public metropolitan district. School-level measures of exclusionary discipline rates and racial/ethnic disparities were from the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights Database. Student-level school climate data was collected using the Tennessee School Climate Survey and the American Institutes for Research’s SEL competencies assessment. School climate dependent variables were supportive teacher and peer relationships, effective rules and sanctions, and school connectedness. Measures of SEL competencies included social awareness and relationship skills.

Results: Multilevel regression analyses revealed that schools’ use of exclusionary discipline inversely associated with students’ perceptions of school climate - supportive peer relationships (B = -1.33, 95% CI [-2.18, -0.48], p <.01) - and SEL competencies: social awareness (B = -0.79, 95% CI [-1.21, -0.38], p <.01), and relationships skills (B = -0.48, 95% CI [-0.92, -0.04], p <.05). However, racial/ethnic exclusionary discipline disparities did not associate with school climate or SEL competencies.

Conclusions: Results confirm relations between harsh discipline and aspects of school contexts, and suggest that these policies may negatively impact students who are not the targets of harsh discipline. Interventions that promote using less exclusionary discipline might be important for supporting school climate and SEL. Results will inform additional longitudinal study to determine causal relations among these variables and nuanced interactions between race and discipline.