About this poster

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Panel information
Panel 3. Schooling and Education

Abstract

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Exclusionary discipline is associated with negative outcomes for children across a host of domains, including academic achievement, grade retention, and graduation, and is disproportionately applied to Black children, particularly boys. Over the last two decades a host of state-level policies have been passed on exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspension and expulsion), but the implications of these policies for the rate of exclusionary discipline and the racial disparities within these rates, most commonly the overrepresentation of Black children and key differences by gender, have yet to be examined. In this exploratory study, we use policy data and the recently released Civil Rights Data Collection 2020-21 exclusionary discipline data to examine two key research questions.
Are state exclusionary discipline policies (i.e., limiting the length of expulsion and suspension, barring exclusion as a consequence for specific behaviors, or alternatives to discipline) associated with total suspensions for boys and girls?
Are state exclusionary discipline policies (i.e., limiting the length of expulsion and suspension, barring exclusion as a consequence for specific behaviors, or alternatives to discipline) associated with suspensions for Black boys and girls?
Policy data was collected from two aggregations of state discipline policies: The Education Commission of the States’ aggregation of policies in 2018 and 2021 and the U.S. Department of Education Compendium of School Discipline Laws and Regulations aggregated by Child Trends in 2021 and 2022. There were four key areas of state discipline policy including limits on the age/grade of the child being excluded, limits on the length of the exclusion, policies baring exclusion as a consequence for specific behaviors, and policies promoting alternatives to exclusionary discipline. Policy indicators were coded as binary (0 = no policy; 1 = presence of a policy). The CRDC 2020-21 data is a national dataset collected by the Office of Civil Rights. It includes data collected from all public schools pre-k to 12th grade (only schools serving K-12 grade students were included in this study) and reports the number of suspensions by race/ethnicity and gender. Suspensions for Black boys and girls and total suspensions for boys and girls were used for this analysis. Regression analyses were conducted in Mplus 7 using TYPE=COMPLEX to account for the nested nature of the data and an MLR estimator to account for nonnormality in the suspension outcome. We found that age limit policies were associated with fewer suspensions for the total sample of boys and girls, but this relation was not significant for Black boys and girls (see Table 1). Policies limiting the length of exclusion were significantly associated with fewer suspensions for Black boys and girls as well as the total sample of boys and girls. However, policies limiting suspension as a consequence of specific behaviors or requiring alternatives to discipline policies were not significantly associated with suspension for any group.

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