Missouri Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support (MO SW-PBS), with support from the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), has provided training and support to build local capacity and positively impact student outcomes. Numerous years of descriptive data and a recent peer-reviewed research article both show the effects of…

Deficit narratives about Blackness are embedded in research, discourse, and policies as policymakers and researchers theorize about differences in schooling outcomes between Black students and their peers. We offer a counterstory to prevailing conceptualizations of student absenteeism by arguing that they center racialized and deficit narratives…

I examine the effect of out-of-school suspensions (OSS) on attendance in a large midwestern urban district with high rates of chronic absenteeism. I do so from an ecological perspective and using daily attendance and discipline data. Out-of-school suspension has a modest and persistent negative effect on subsequent attendance, particularly for…

Over sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding Massachusetts program, METCO, buses K-12 students of color from…

This brief is our fourth annual review of how states are and could make a difference in school attendance with new policies and practices. Reversing today's chronic absenteeism requires state leaders to make reducing chronic absence a priority. In our work with states, we see how state leadership, especially from governors and state education…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental study was to explore the association between school success after the tier-one introduction of a three-tiered restorative practices program. To understand school success, student factors were examined using middle school data from a suburban school district located outside of a large metropolitan…

Students in the foster care system tend to have lower educational outcomes than their peers, including more frequent disciplinary events. However, few studies have explored how transitions into and out of foster care placements are associated with educational outcomes. Using longitudinal data from four California school districts, this study…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between academic achievement and attendance. Reading proficiency is foundational to overall academic success. In this study, reading proficiency served as the operational definition for the level of student academic success. Out-of-school suspension is a disciplinary consequence as a result…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among K-12 student attendance rates, English language learners, poverty, suspension rates, and students with disabilities. The setting of this study was 94 school districts from New York State's Nassau and Suffolk counties, a suburban region adjacent to New York City. The results of this…

Many prior studies have documented disparities in school discipline practices across racial, economic, and other student characteristics. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which students affected by intergenerational poverty (IGP) received infractions (incidents) and experienced exclusionary disciplines (suspensions…

Much research has been conducted on teacher retention, student absences, and suspensions. The results of this research have been shaping the education of primary students. Through standardized or achievement tests, instructional leaders determine each student's level of intellectual knowledge. This knowledge is determined through reading, math,…

This study tests the impact of adding Restorative Practices within secondary schools implementing the Diplomas Now turnaround model in 8 large U.S. urban districts on: (a) the severity of disciplinary problems in these schools, (b) the probability that students would be suspended three days or more during the school year, and (c) the chronic…

African American students have been historically targeted for exclusionary discipline practices and as a result have had severely impacted by the amount of missed instruction. Zero tolerance policies have curated the phenomenon known as the School to Prison Pipeline which has disproportionately criminalized student behaviors and funneled them into…

The use of exclusionary discipline practices in schools has continued to increase since the advent of Zero Tolerance discipline policies in the 1990s. Research indicates that these practices are largely ineffective in addressing behavior, and result in detrimental outcomes for students and communities. This study focused on the use of Disciplinary…

Declining student engagement has been an ongoing concern for educators, education researchers, school administration, and policymakers for the last 40 years (Axelson & Flick, 2011), with socioeconomically disadvantaged students being the most susceptible to disengagement (Finn, 1993; Jensen, 2013). The discourse surrounding declining student…