A new brief from researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University synthesizes current studies on how local educational agencies can reduce racial inequities in school discipline — particularly exclusionary discipline practices such as suspensions and expulsions — and examines why many discipline reforms fail to produce lasting change.
The report outlines evidence-based practices shown to reduce disciplinary disparities — including using disaggregated discipline data for continuous improvement, strengthening teacher-student relationships, implementing restorative justice (RJ) and equity-focused Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), and providing individualized coaching on culturally responsive practices. It also identifies common approaches that are less effective, such as one-time anti-bias trainings or adopting policies without explicit equity-focused implementation and accountability measures.
“Implementing restorative practices requires substantial school-wide commitment. It is not a program to be installed but a cultural shift that demands ongoing investment in staff training, coaching, and time for relationship-building routines to take hold,” according to the report. “Schools that treat RJ as an add-on or implement it only reactively are unlikely to see meaningful reductions in suspension rates or racial disparities.”
When students experience exclusionary discipline, they miss out on crucial instructional time, which contributes to lower academic performance, higher dropout and juvenile detention rates, worsened mental health outcomes and more. Black, Indigenous and Latino students, students with disabilities and students from low-income backgrounds face exclusionary discipline at much higher rates than their peers — a gap that cannot be explained by differences in behavior.
Recommendations
Researchers provide in great detail the ways in which successful practices rely on policy, classroom implementation and a focus on students.
Rather than taking part in one-time, lecture-based anti-bias training or adopting policy that limits exclusionary practices without pairing the policies with explicit equity goals, monitoring and supportive implementation practices, the report emphasizes the following:
LEA policy
Among the recommendations for schools and districts, the report calls on LEAs to begin by convening monthly discipline data reviews with information disaggregated by race, gender, grade and infraction type, paired with coaching, to provide a first step in helping teachers and administrators translate data patterns into changes in practice.
It’s also critical that, when adopting restorative justice and PBIS practices, LEAs provide ongoing professional development to ensure policies are not so vague as to ignore a “explicit, race-conscious equity focus,” according to the report.
Classroom implementation
Researchers found that teachers who use more culturally responsive practices — integrating cultural connections into the curriculum, understanding cultural differences and holding high expectations of all students, among other strategies — have higher levels of academic engagement and lower disruptive behavior than peers who use fewer.
“Culturally responsive classroom practices have been shown to reduce discipline disparities by strengthening teacher-student relationships and decreasing cultural mismatches that generate conflict,” the report states, noting that “Individualized coaching that helps teachers improve the quality of their interactions with students can reduce racial disparities in discipline referrals.”
Student focus
Interventions that aim to build students’ own sense of belonging can help children approach new teacher relationships in a more positive way and interrupt the negative cycles that drive discipline disparities.
Evidence-based practices cited in the brief that can help LEAs to accomplish this focus largely on academics. They include providing:
- Explicit instruction in writing strategies, such as how to plan, draft, revise and edit, which leads to sizable improvements in student writing quality and confidence
- Structured supports, such as prewriting activities, studying strong writing models and using rubrics that consistently produce meaningful improvements in students’ writing quality
- Time to regularly engage in peer feedback, as both those receiving feedback and those giving it revise more deeply, stay more engaged and develop stronger writing skills
