Excluded from Opportunity: The Impacts of Punitive Discipline Experience in High School on Post-Secondary Outcomes

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 24. Disruptions and Discipline

Abstract

Zero-tolerance school discipline policies have contributed to the criminalization of low-income young men of color in high schools. Young people who experience suspension or expulsion in high school have averse educational and post-high school outcomes. California, a key site for both the wholesale expansion of punitive discipline policies but also most recently new attempts at reform, as well as critical site of demographic transformation, is a vital space to examine such trends. This paper seeks to provide new data on the effects of increased use of suspension and expulsion by showing how exclusionary high school discipline negatively impacts the lives of young adults in California after secondary education. Data for this paper comes from the California Young Adult Study (CYAS), a statewide mixed-methods study of 2,200 young adults in California, ages 18-to-26. Analysis of the CYAS survey data shows that, controlling for other important factors, young adults who were suspended or expelled from high school were more than 4 times more likely to have an adult criminal record than peers that were not suspended or expelled. Likewise, young adults that were suspended or expelled while in high school were 68% less likely to have attended a 4-year college. Building on the existing but limited data on post-secondary outcomes and suspension/expulsion, we attempt to concretize understandings of the complexities of the “school to prison pipeline” using quantitative data from throughout California, towards assessing the impacts of over two decades of “zero tolerance” in schools and informing change in school discipline models.

Authors

• Robert Chlala, University of Southern California

• Jeffrey Owen Sacha, University of Southern California