In some circles today, it seems that following a teacher’s directions has become passé and cussing out teachers, tearing up furniture, and hallway brawls are all the rage. Worse, it seems that that’s OK with many policymakers and politicians. This year, California’s Senate Bill 274, which prohibits schools from administering suspensions for “willful defiance,” goes into effect. Since 2019, policies to limit the use of suspensions have passed in seventeen states.
Meanwhile, individual stories abound of classroom violence, disorder, and mayhem. Several representative surveys have found that such anecdotes are representative, not outliers. Rates of student misbehavior—including verbal harassment and physical aggression toward both teachers and fellow students—remain elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Whether or not the deconstruction of behavior codes caused a spike in such behavior remains unknown. Pandemic-era disruptions, broader societal disorder and crime rates, and social media are also plausible explanations.
Whatever the cause, the response by numerous activists, journalists, and policy types is to posit discipline reform as the proper solution for the uptick in misbehavior. For present purposes, we’ll define such reform as any policy that pushes schools away from punitive discipline. Stop punishing children. Talk to them, pursue “restorative justice,” or ignore their behavior. But never impose a consequence. In this article, I take up some of the most common arguments in favor of discipline reform and show why they’re wrong.
“Suspensions don’t work.”
This claim is not hard to find. Suspend a student once or a hundred times—the argument goes—and they’ll continue misbehaving. There’s simply no evidence that punitive discipline improves the behavior of a student who is prone to acting out. What’s more, suspensions depress the academic achievement of the disciplined student.
Perhaps counterintuitively, this one isn’t wrong with respect to youthful perpetrators themselves. I’ve worked at schools with strict discipline policies and students who talk out of turn, fight, or disrespect teachers continue to do so no matter how many times they miss a recess, talk to the principal, or sit through an in-school suspension. And reading the research, I cannot contest this fact: Suspensions, in particular, do not lead to permanent behavior change.
Yet focusing on the behavior of one student overlooks something important: the hundreds of other students in a school and the culture of that school. After all, a misbehaving peer is one of the single most detrimental factors to a child’s education, over and above other policies such as class size, teacher pay, school choice, or uniforms. The presence of misbehaving peers causes other students to act out and drives down student achievement. Given that high-poverty schools struggle the most with disciplinary challenges, keeping disruptive students in classrooms only widens the achievement gap.
Clear rules fairly enforced establish a system wherein every student can expect safety. They allow pupils to focus on learning without distraction, engage in discussion without a cacophony of voices, and play without a descent into chaos. One child’s desire to verbally harass his teachers or physically threaten his peers prevents every other child from safety and academic learning.
Current discipline debates in the American education system focus almost exclusively on the perpetrator. But we cannot forget the twenty-nine other children in the classroom who deserve an education.
Suspending or otherwise punishing a misbehaving child sends an important message to the rest of the students in a school: Such actions will not be tolerated because your learning is essential. Other students receive this message and act accordingly. When considering whether they should scurry to math class or slip into the corridor for a brawl, the threat of punishment incentivizes positive behavior for the majority.
Case studies, from Philadelphia to the entire state of Illinois tell the same story: When schools and districts abolish suspensions and other punitive discipline, academics plummet, disorder abounds, and the rate of extreme behavior such as drug use or violence increases. On one survey, when Illinois curbed the use of suspensions, only 14 percent of teachers reported a positive impact with 49 percent reporting that worsened both student behavior and school climate.
Consequences create healthy school environments. They safeguard the learning of the majority of students. They send a clear signal that improves the behavior of every other student. In other words, suspensions work.
“Schools are too strict.”
Last Spring, the Hechinger Report ran a long piece bemoaning the inclusion of “vague” disciplinary language such as “insubordination” or “disrespect.” This after the authors spoke to activists, district administrators, and academics, but not a single teacher.
Their journalistic bona fides aside, their argument boils down to the contention that much of the punitive discipline in American schools is unnecessary. Punish a kid for violence or drugs, sure, but are detentions really needed for a uniform infraction or talking out of turn?
Early in my education career, I held this view. Why pick a fight over hoodies or hats when kids are lighting up in the bathroom stalls? But the longer that I’ve taught in schools, the more I see that it’s imperative for teachers and administrators to hold the line on these smaller infractions—holding a student in the office until a parent can bring a pair of uniform-approved pants, for example—since doing so prevents larger transgressions.
It’s the theory of “broken windows policing” applied to schools. This theory, formulated in the late 1980s by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, suggests that low-level disorder such as a broken store window or trash-covered streets communicates to everyone that this community is the kind of place where people throw rocks, litter streets, and more. There won’t be a consequence, so why not? And why not go on to theft, assault, maybe murder?
Conversely, focus on the little things and less criminality will emerge. Order in the small things dissuades would-be vandals and petty thieves. Moreover, if you apprehend the folks who jump turnstiles, for example, it may turn out that these are the very same people who are likely to snatch a purse or pick a fight.
In fact, student surveys find that most prefer stricter teachers. They may bristle when corrected, but they respect the order and learning that it facilitates in the long run. Furthermore, students appreciate when a teacher corrects their misbehaving peers. Walk into any rowdy classroom and the many students who just want to learn are often more frustrated than the teacher.
Indeed, the Hechinger Report piece entirely misunderstood the nature of school discipline. The infractions that they argue deserve no punishment—defiance, insubordination, direct refusal to comply with the orders of an adult—are really the root of the issue. Such behavior, however minor, undercuts a teacher’s authority. When administrators and teachers instead establish that rules must be followed, no matter how minor, fewer students will challenge injunctions against violence or drugs. Rarely are pupils suspended for “refusing to sit in their seat.” But imagine what it would mean if every student refused to do so.
“Punitive discipline is racist.”
If you’ve spent any time following education debates, you’ve likely read that exclusionary discipline maintains the school-to-prison pipeline. Students of different racial demographics are suspended, expelled, and given other punishments at different rates and so school discipline must therefore be racist. This reasoning underlies the Obama-era Dear Colleague Letter, which threatened schools with legal action if racial disparities turned up in their use of suspensions and expulsions.
While such disparities exist, these arguments ignore two basic realities: the behavioral differences that undergird these disparities and the unequal negative effects of discipline reform.
As to the first, AEI’s Max Eden has pointed out that Black students are substantially more likely than White students to report that they’ve been in fights at school, carried a gun, or skipped school. That’s not to suggest that White or Black students misbehave differently because of their race. But rather, as Mike Petrilli notes elsewhere, “kids growing up in poverty are more likely to experience all manner of challenges that make it more likely for them to misbehave,” such as growing up without a father, living in dangerous neighborhoods, or suffering abuse and neglect. When researchers control for class and underlying behavior, disparities in punishment largely (though not entirely) disappear.
Regarding the second reality, regardless of the cause, prohibiting schools from maintaining order tries to fix the problem at the wrong end of the pipeline.
When Philadelphia implemented its prohibition on the use of suspensions for low-level misbehavior, Black students actually spent more days out of school. They received fewer punishments but longer suspensions for more severe behaviors. When schools in Pittsburgh implemented an approach to discipline reform called restorative justice, the rate of classroom disruptions increased and academics fell for Black students in particular. Some studies find null effects on academics. Yet more have linked the use of suspensions to improved academics for non-suspended students.
It’s a particularly perverse approach to racial justice to try to close disparities in disciplinary measures by thrusting Black and Hispanic children into increasingly chaotic schools. It serves no student to be kept from a punishment only to attend classes that are full of vulgarity, threats of violence, and little learning.
“Alternatives to punitive discipline are more effective.”
Here’s the crux of the issue. No one argues that the current discipline structures in schools are perfect. But as with any call for reform, the burden of proof lies with those proposing change. Are their alternatives better? In this case, the two most popular discipline reforms are restorative justice and positive behavior intervention and supports (PBIS), neither of which has a strong grounding in research.
To date, two randomized-controlled trials exist that have investigated restorative justice. As previously mentioned, the first (Pittsburgh) found that schools that implemented restorative justice saw an uptick in classroom disruptions, a decline in math achievement, and no difference in arrest rates. The second (Maine) found no effects on either behavior or academics, but it was particularly difficult for teachers to implement. In other words, it placed a significant strain on teachers without materially improving outcomes.
Positive behavior intervention and supports, as the name implies, emphasize rewarding positive behavior instead of punishing negative behaviors. Students can earn tickets or points, which they can use to purchase various rewards or trinkets. The research in support of PBIS is stronger than that for restorative justice, though so far it focuses only on elementary school. And even there, it must always be a supplement to and not a replacement of standard disciplinary structures.
In my own teaching and administrating, I use elements of both restorative justice and PBIS. I praise and reward students who act as they’re expected. Any time I must dole out a punishment, I make sure I speak with the student and visit them during their detention or in-school suspension. But just as gutters and insulation will only keep the elements out when paired with the rigid structure of walls and roofs, restorative justice and PBIS will do little to improve behavior without traditional discipline.
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We cannot “solve” student misbehavior. As Kant famously said, “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” When applied to schools, this aphorism means that we cannot create a utopian system in which every child feels so fulfilled, accepted, and intrinsically motivated that they’ll never talk out of turn, throw a wadded paper ball, or talk back to their teacher. We will always need discipline in schools.
However, if we take a more expansive definition of discipline reform, there are certainly steps that we can take to improve upon the status quo.
For example, a recent meta-analysis examined the effects of “structure” in the classroom and concluded that “classroom management” has a strong relationship with student achievement (along with countless other factors). It’s a necessary condition for student success. Notably, the study found that proactive steps, such as establishing clear routines, were more important than imposing consequences or enforcement. Consequences are necessary but ineffective without other behavioral instruction.
Unfortunately, our teacher preparation programs spend more time reading critical theorists and debating policy than actually training teachers in these basic and essential classroom management strategies.
Other possibilities for worthwhile discipline reform could include experimentation with punishments other than suspensions, more thoughtful in-school suspension protocols, short-term “alternative placements” instead of outright expulsions, or the use of PBIS and follow-up conversations as supplements to consequences rather than replacements for them.
Such “discipline reform” could very well result in more orderly, safer, and more productive schools. But when “discipline reform” means a blanket reduction on the use of consequences, it is misguided at best and detrimental to schooling at worst.
