Education Week - September 8, 2021 - 7

WHAT THE
RESEARCH SAYS
4 Myths About Suspensions
That Could Hurt Students
In The Long Term
from continuing to support students' social and
emotional development.
A masked teacher facing a room of
masked students wants to continue
imparting social-emotional skills. What
are some of the workarounds? Is this an
opportunity to teach new skills?
I think it's absolutely an opportunity to teach
new skills, beginning with the most basic. We have
traditionally relied on a lot of facial expressions
to help talk to students about what emotions
mean and look like and feel like. This is an
opportunity to expand our language and awareness
about emotions. Those emotions include facial
expressions, and they also include body language,
they also include tone of voice, and what people
may be saying through their eyes or their eyebrows,
and helping students to tune into that type of social
awareness. We've seen in a lot of classrooms the
use of pictures and even emojis to do temperature
checks with students, to create that time to share
how they're feeling and what their perspectives are.
I would say, what was critically important before
the pandemic but especially now is building a
really, really strong sense of community in every
classroom. This means making time and space
for students to learn about each other on a more
personal level, to share their interests with one
another, to ask each other questions, to collaborate
on projects. If we're concerned that masks get
in the way of relationship building, this is an
opportunity to increase our relationship-building
strategies and I think our classrooms will be better
for it.
You know, teachers are also using more physical
gestures and hand gestures to demonstrate what
they're thinking and feeling and this might be good
for the classroom whether or not you have a mask.
An important component of SEL is good
decisionmaking. How could this time
offer a lesson in building that skill?
I think we've seen this throughout the pandemic.
This brought up a lot of conversations in classrooms
and homes with students about what does it mean
to be a good community member. And what does
it mean to make decisions that are responsible
and that benefit not just myself, but my family
and other people? Whether or not schools are
choosing to have masks on right now, it's opened
up a conversation for students to engage in around
how can we keep each other safe and healthy. And
what factors do I need to weigh to make those types
of decisions? What are some of the pros and cons,
exactly? And then, how can we all work together
to make those healthy decisions that keep our
community safe?
The only thing I would add is, we often talk
about SEL within the school walls, but there's
so much SEL that's going on at home and in the
community as well. Even if students have moments
where they're masked at school, they have so
many opportunities to practice facial recognition
of emotions and things like that at home with their
families, or outside on the playground. I just want
to think about SEL beyond the confines of school.
-ARIANNA PROTHERO
By Sarah D. Sparks
High school students who get suspended out of school are
significantly less likely to earn academic credits in the following
year-and their peers get no academic benefit from their
absence.
Those findings come from a new American Institutes of
Research study that looked at more than a decade of discipline
and academic data from New York City public schools,
the largest district in the country, with more than a million
students.
" You can't replicate the classroom experience for someone
who's going to return to the classroom by removing him or her
to some other place, " said David Osher, an AIR researcher and
co-author of the study, " because the nature of good approaches
to learning in schools these days is such that students are
interacting with each other. That's one of the reasons why
we find out that kids who are suspended, when they return
to school continue to do badly, because they've missed the
dynamic of what's going on in the classroom. "
These results build on a growing base of evidence that the use
of so-called exclusionary discipline-removing students from
classes for misbehavior via suspensions and expulsions-can
backfire for educators hoping to improve student learning and
get at-risk kids back on track.
A team led by Christina LiCalsi, a principal researcher at AIR,
and Osher analyzed data for middle and high school students in
the Big Apple from 2009 to 2018, including discipline actions,
academic performance, school climate and safety, and ultimate
graduation rates. They compared the outcomes of similar
students who had in- and out-of-school suspensions. They also
looked at outcomes for students with suspensions of varying
lengths, from one to three days in school and one to 20 days out
of school.
Their results, and those of other recent studies, highlight
common myths and misunderstandings about how
exclusionary discipline affects students.
Myth: Suspensions improve student behavior
Middle school students in the AIR study became more likely
to misbehave in the future when they were suspended out of
school rather than in school, and when they were suspended for
longer periods of time.
" In out-of-school suspension, you are removing kids from
the socialization of the school and ... you're placing them
potentially in a different environment at home alone or even
out on the street with their friends, " Osher said.
Myth: Suspensions help get at-risk students 'back on
track'
Both AIR's study and a separate recent study by the Civil
Rights Project find time out of class for suspensions caused
damage to students' academic progress similar to any other
absences from class.
For students with multiple and long suspensions, Osher
noted, " they could end up having chronic absenteeism, just
from the suspensions, even if they don't miss any other days of
school. "
AIR researchers found high school students who were
suspended out of school were 3 percentage points less likely
to earn academic credit in math and English/language arts
the following year, compared to similar students who were
disciplined in school. The longer the suspension, the worse its
effect on students' long-term academic prospects. Students
over the length of the study who were suspended 21 days or
more were 20 percent less likely to graduate high school in four
years.
Myth: Excluding a troublemaker from class improves
learning for the rest of the students
" That's the argument that you hear, right: that it might be bad
for the student in question [to be suspended], but what about all
of the other students in the class? That's removing the bad apple
from the bunch ... But that's not what we found, " LiCalsi said.
The study found that the number and severity of students'
suspensions had no effects on the behavior or academic
performance of their peers in high school. In middle school,
more and longer student suspensions were actually associated
with more absenteeism and lower math and reading
standardized test scores for their peers.
" When students feel that discipline is inconsistent or unfair, it
gives them a more negative view of the schooling environment
overall, " LiCalsi said. " That's the case, I think, for middle
schoolers, especially. In high school, you're more likely to see
students disengage or drop out ... but in middle school, they
don't have the option to drop out so it plays out differently. It's
having a negative effect on their feelings of connection and
belonging, fairness and justice within their school that might be
having some negative impacts on their behavior. "
Myth: The severity of a student's behavior drives
suspensions
In 2017-18, the most recent year of federal data, more than 2.6
million students nationwide received at least one suspension in
school, and another 2.5 million served at least one suspension
out of school.
Suspensions continue to disproportionately affect students
of color and those with disabilities or trauma, even when they
engage in the same misbehaviors as their peers.
AIR's study, like others, finds that exclusionary discipline
hurt academic and behavior outcomes for students of all races,
including those with and without disabilities. But students of
color, particularly Black students, were significantly more likely
to have more and longer suspensions than white students.
Moreover, a history of trauma can significantly increase a
student's likelihood of being suspended. A separate decadelong
discipline study found that students who'd had multiple
adverse childhood experiences-severe traumas including
neglect and abuse or a parent's death, incarceration, mental
illness, or substance abuse-were nearly four times as likely to
be suspended or expelled as students of similar backgrounds
who did not have a history of trauma.
Administrators going into the third school year of the
pandemic may face significantly more behavior problems
related to children coping with trauma, but exclusionary
discipline may also create difficult legal and academic issues.
One recent analysis of discipline in Louisiana school districts
found that several schools' decisions to suspend students from
virtual school based on behavior during videoconferences or
items seen in the students' homes during class have sparked
lawsuits.
New Orleans civil rights attorney Victor Jones argued that
as hybrid and remote learning continue to be used this year,
school district leaders need to develop separate discipline
policies for virtual classrooms, both to protect students' privacy
and to limit the amount of class time they miss during a period
where instructional time is already limited.
ONLINE: Interactive data appeared with this
story on edweek.org.
From remote learning for young children to playground infection risks, schooling under the pandemic is raising a lot of questions for teachers and
education leaders. This new research column aims to help readers understand what the research says-and doesn't say-about our new context for
learning. If you have a question, please send it to ssparks@educationweek.org.
EDUCATION WEEK | September 8, 2021 | www.edweek.org | 7

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Education Week - September 8, 2021

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