To educate or to incarcerate: Factors in disproportionality in school discipline

Highlights

• Measures demographic, individual, and family factors in disparities in office referral and suspension/expulsion.

• African Americans, students whose parents had less education, and boys were more likely to be suspended/expelled.

• More preparation for class, more homework hours, and less prior year delinquency were associated with less office referral.

• More homework hours & academic aspirations and less delinquency & marijuana use were associated with less suspension/expulsion.

• Students with parents with less education were suspended/expelled more when they indicated 1 of 4 factors.

• Interventions that promote student engagement in school may be protective against disproportionate school discipline.

Abstract

The school-to-prison pipeline describes the process by which school suspension/expulsion may push adolescents into the justice system disproportionately based on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. The current study moves the field forward by analyzing a survey of a diverse sample of 2539 students in 10th to 12th grade in Southern California to examine how demographic, individual, and family factors contribute to disparities in office referral and suspension/expulsion. African Americans, boys, and students whose parents had less education were more likely to be suspended/expelled. Higher levels of student academic preparation for class, hours spent on homework, and academic aspiration were associated with less school discipline. Findings suggest that helping students engage in school may be protective against disproportionate school discipline.

Introduction

Commonly referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline” (American Civil Liberties Union, 2012) or the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” (Children's Defense Fund, 2012), suspension and expulsion can push children out of school and into the juvenile justice system, a process that tends to more severely penalize students of color as well as those who are male, of lower socioeconomic status (SES), and who have disabilities (Krezmien, Leone, & Wilson, 2014). Over 2,000,000 secondary school students – or approximately 1 out of 9 – were suspended from U.S. middle and high schools during the 2009–2010 school year (Losen & Martinez, 2013). Suspension has increased in frequency in recent years coinciding with an increase in the gap in racial disproportionality. Between the 1972–1973 and 2009–2010 school years, rates of suspension doubled for African American (11.8% to 24.3%) and Latino (6.1% to 12.0%) students, whereas rates increased only slightly for White students (6.0% to 7.1%) (Losen & Martinez, 2013).

Krezmien et al. (2014) describe two pathways, one direct and the other indirect, through which suspension and expulsion can lead to students entering the justice system. In the direct pathway, schools refer students facing suspension/expulsion directly to the police and courts (Kupchik and Monahan, 2006, Krezmien et al., 2010). In the indirect pathway, suspensions lead to the youth's disconnection from school, reduced academic performance, increased delinquent activity, and incarceration (Butler et al., 2005, Krezmien et al., 2014, Skiba and Rausch, 2006). Students who are suspended and/or expelled, especially those who are repeatedly disciplined, are more likely to be held back a grade or to drop out than students not receiving such discipline (Arcia, 2006, Balfanz et al., 2014, Fabelo et al., 2011, Skiba and Rausch, 2006). School suspension hinders academic growth and contributes to racial disparities in achievement, accounting for approximately one-fifth of black-white differences in performance (Morris & Perry, 2016). School suspension is also associated with contact with the juvenile justice system the following year (Fabelo et al., 2011), antisocial behavior (Hemphill, Toumbourou, Herrenkohl, McMorris, & Catalano, 2006), and arrest in that same month versus months when youth had not been suspended or expelled (Monahan, VanDerhei, Bechtold, & Cauffman, 2014).

Most prior research has only included suspension and expulsion as outcome variables, but a smaller number of studies have also found office referrals (i.e., a teacher or school official sent a student to the office for disciplinary purposes) for students to be disproportionate based on race, SES, and gender (Bradshaw et al., 2010, Rocque, 2010, Skiba et al., 2002). Office referrals are an important form of discipline that can reduce student opportunities to learn (Scott & Barrett, 2004) and increase the risk for future suspension and dropout (Morrison & Skiba, 2001). As a result, this study examines both suspension/expulsion and office referrals as outcomes. The term school discipline will refer to all of these outcomes. Doing so also allows a comparison of factors for the different forms of discipline as they can operate via different processes (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010).

Despite extensive research linking the demographic factors of race, SES, and gender to school discipline, fewer studies address the role of multiple, varied risk and protective factors with disciplinary actions. The current study addresses this gap by testing whether individual risk factors (e.g., delinquency, substance use), individual protective factors (e.g., academic engagement and mental health), and family factors (e.g., alcohol and drug use, cultural values about family, parental monitoring) along with demographic factors (e.g., race/ethnicity, parent education, and gender) are associated with school disciplinary action.