This qualitative study delves into the perspectives of school leaders in a Canadian province, exploring their views on student suspensions and alternative approaches to school discipline. Amid a provincial advocacy organization's call for a review and reduction of suspensions in that jurisdiction, the study captures both constructive and critical…

The School-to-Prison Pipeline is the concept that exclusionary discipline increases the likelihood of students' incarceration (Kim et al., 2010). Harsh discipline is still widely used today despite resulting in lower academic performance and higher incarceration rates (Musu-Gillette et al., 2018). The factors influencing the School-to-Prison…

Since the early 1990s, American schools adopted exclusionary sanctions such as zero-tolerance policies (ZTP) to reduce student misbehavior as well as to sustain school safety. Due to the punitive nature of ZTP, some schools have sought alternative discipline models, like the restorative practices, to manage student infraction. This mixed methods…

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…

As advocates for children and youth with exceptionalities, the members of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) are committed to ensuring a safe and positive climate in school and community settings. This requires elimination of any inherent biases school leaders, teachers, and other school personnel may hold and investing in policies and…

School shootings are at an all-time high. That's according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has been keeping track of the numbers for about 20 years. What are schools to do? Is there a "profile" of the typical school shooter that could help us identify those who might commit a shooting in the future? Is there some…

Richard O. Welsh takes on the school discipline crisis in "Suspended Futures," delineating the persistent racial disparities in how educators perceive and respond to the behavior of students. Welsh offers a framework for disrupting and dismantling a disciplinary system that disproportionately disadvantages students of Black, Latinx, and…

As school safety has become a growing concern for U.S. schools, school leaders have adopted various approaches to strengthen school security. Some experts argue that this might increase the frequency of interactions with law enforcement and the likelihood of youth ending up in the criminal justice system, and that school security ultimately does…

Concern about harsh and inequitable discipline over the past two decades has galvanized a host of discipline reforms. These reforms have gained renewed attention in recent months as both the COVID-19 pandemic and mass uprisings against anti-Black violence have both bolstered calls to reimagine schools as caring spaces. This moment raises urgent…

Background: School violence is a significant public health concern. Most perpetrators exhibit psychosocial and behavioral warning signals which are often inadequately addressed. While policy and funding typically reinforce politically popular target hardening and threat assessment strategies, these are not most supported by research or requested…

As school leaders continue to look for solutions to ongoing negative student behaviors, many schools have implemented the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports framework. The Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports framework supports educators and students using positive strategies for behavior, academic, social, emotional, and…

The problem investigated is that high discipline referrals in schools serving at-risk high school students often lead to student attrition and lack of academic success. A qualitative methodology with a narrative research design was employed/utilized to investigate the impact of high discipline referring in schools in Alabama, including the…

Because misbehavior in schools is often instigated by a confluence of organizational features, the purpose of this research was to understand what Youth Court reveals about the causes of in-school conflicts and to what extent its processes help to address them. This multi-site qualitative case study collected data in the form of observations,…

Across public and private settings, about 250 preschoolers are suspended or expelled each day, according to a Center for American Progress analysis of the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health (Malik, 2017). The U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection has exposed serious inequities in exclusionary discipline practices.…

This study explores the effects of school climate on the disparities in students' mathematics achievement, drawing on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 for Shanghai, China. The results of a two-level linear model and quantile regression indicate that three dimensions of school climate (student--teacher…