Across the United States, suspension bans have become a popular policy response to address excessive and inequitable use of suspension in schools. However, there is little research that examines what strategies school staff employ when suspension is no longer permitted. I examine the effect of New York City's suspension ban on the use of a…

Using data from the 2017-18 and 2020-21 Civil Rights Data Collection, we document dis-parities in exposure to disciplinary staff across US high schools and geographic levels. Black and Hispanic students are exposed to 1.1 and 0.8 more disciplinary personnel than White students, respectively, which is equivalent to roughly twice the total average…

Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior, replacing them with less disruptive interventions. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we exploit the sharp…

School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from a zero-sum perspective: suspend students seen as disruptive and potentially harm them, or avoid suspensions and harm their classmates. Restorative practices (RP) -- focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary justice -- are designed to avoid this trade-off by…

Research demonstrates "student mobility," or students transferring schools, significantly affects student academic outcomes, making it a critical concern for policymakers and practitioners. Within-school-year transfers, in particular, often reflect sudden, unexpected circumstances. However, research on the prevalence, risk factors, and…

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment. There is legitimate concern that this power can have negative consequences, particularly for the students who are excluded. This study uses linked disciplinary, education, and criminal justice…

Using newly available data on all civil rights complaints submitted to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights related to racial discrimination in discipline between 1999 and 2018, I provide the first systematic evidence on how modern federal civil rights enforcement is used to address racial discrimination in discipline. I find…

Despite frequent political and policy debates, the effects of imposing accountability pressures on public school teachers are empirically indeterminate. In this paper, we study the effects of accountability in the context of teacher responses to student behavioral infractions in the aftermath of teacher evaluation reforms. We leverage cross-state…

While a growing body of literature has documented the negative impacts of exclusionary punishments, such as suspensions, on academic outcomes, less is known about how teachers vary in disciplinary behaviors and the attendant impacts on students. We use administrative data from North Carolina elementary schools to examine the extent to which…

This research uses the implementation of a school suspension ban in Maryland to test whether a top-down state-initiated ban on suspensions in early primary grades can influence school behavior regarding school discipline. Beginning in the fall of 2017, the State of Maryland banned the use of out-of-school suspensions for grades PK-2, unless a…

The well-documented racial disparities in school discipline have led many school districts in the U.S. to adopt restorative justice practices. The restorative justice philosophy differs from traditional disciplinary action by placing an emphasis on restitution and improving behavior rather than punishment. While models of restorative justice are…

Teachers affect a wide range of students' educational and social outcomes, but how they contribute to students' involvement in school discipline is less understood. We estimate the impact of teacher demographics and other observed qualifications on students' likelihood of receiving a disciplinary referral. Using data that track all disciplinary…

Well-documented racial disparities in rates of exclusionary discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or bias, in which treatment for the same behavior varies by student race or ethnicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative data that contain rich details on individual…

We documented (1) the use of strategies, beyond suspensions and expulsions, that exclude young students from learning opportunities and (2) how teacher-reported use of these strategies varied according to student racial/ethnic composition. In a sample of 2,053 teachers and 40,771 kindergarten students, teachers reported on their use of five…

In 2012-2013, a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders from around the country met under the auspices of the "Annenberg Institute for School Reform" (AISR) and "Communities for Public Education Reform" (CPER) to explore the impact of rapid charter expansion on parents, students, and communities. The participants,…