Poster #25 - The Impact of Integrated Student Support on School Discipline

• In Event: Poster Session 12

Abstract

School discipline is commonly used to respond to disruptive and antisocial behaviors (Osher et al.,2010). Yet, school suspensions are linked to lower educational attainment and future involvement with the criminal justice system, and Black students, in particular, are disproportionately likely to be disciplined (Anderson et al., 2019). Additionally, students with low achievement are more likely to be disciplined (Welsh and Little, 2018). The cultural mismatch between teacher and student ethnicity activates teachers’ implicit racial bias leading to further discipline disparity (Staats, 2014). The overuse of suspension may exacerbate observed racial disparities in student outcomes(Gopalan & Nelson, 2019). Accordingly, policymakers have looked to alternative approaches aimed at improving student behavior and reducing disruptions. This study sought to explore whether one program - City Connects - was particularly effective in reducing school suspensions.

Embedded in the ideology of supporting whole child development, City Connects delivers systemic individual tailored student support interventions to address out-of-school factors expected to impact student academic achievement and thriving positively (Walsch et al., 2014). City Connects places coordinators in schools to support teachers and students by student strengths and needs in academic, social/emotional, family, and physical well-being domains. Coordinators support teachers and students by targeting not only academic but social-emotional challenges with individualized tailored plans on the basis of students' needs and strengths. Examples of support include preventive services, early intervention services or more intensive services, or crisis interventions, all of which are delivered through community partners. Through the intervention, the program helps develop a safe school environment for teachers to emphasize more on teaching, developing awareness of racial equity, and for children to thrive. We hypothesize that City Connects has a positive impact on reducing school discipline by eliminating students’ misbehaviors and cultivating racial equity to alleviate discipline disparity.

The current study investigates how school suspension rates changed in a small, urban, and racially and socioeconomically diverse school district in a Northeast state. The district has 1 middle school and 1 elementary/middle school that began implementing City Connects in the 2017/18 school year. We sought to measure how the number of school discipline incidents (i.e., in-school and out-of-school suspensions) changed following the first two years of implementation relative to similar schools outside the district that did not implement City Connects. The sample consists of all middle and elementary/middle schools in the state where the intervention took place, compiled using publicly available data from the state department of education website, and includes school identification, school year, treated status, and demographic characteristics.

Our analytic approach uses the synthetic control method to measure how school discipline counts changed in the district following the first two years of implementation. Pretreatment discipline and auxiliary covariates including percentage of English language learners, students with disabilities, low-income students, African American students, Hispanic students, and White students, school total enrollment, average class size, student-teacher ratio are used to create the synthetic unit for analysis. The results are not available and will be ready to share by the conference date.

Authors

• Xiaohan Qian, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Noman Khanani, Boston College

• Mary E. Walsh, Boston College