New Look at School Discipline Confronts Wisconsin’s Opportunities Gap

November 16, 2014

Across the nation, from kindergarten through high school, black, Native American and Latino students in public schools are disciplined more frequently and severely for more subjective reasons than their white peers, according to UW-Madison’s Aydin Bal. Punishments often involve trips to the principal’s office and may lead to detention, suspension or even expulsion – all actions that remove the students in question from instructional environments.

Bal, an assistant professor with the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, and a researcher with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said it’s also a fact that white and wealthy students in the U.S. are much more likely to receive a superior education, more social opportunities and better academic outcomes than minority students, a discrepancy known as the “opportunity gap” or “achievement gap.” That gap is exceptionally large in Wisconsin, where white children are six times more likely to be proficient in eighth grade math than black students.

To Bal, who is a specialist in culture, behavioral problems and systemic transformation, it’s clear that school discipline and the achievement gap are related. Bal’s research shows that African American students were seven times more likely to be removed from school than their white counterparts in Wisconsin schools.     

“The bottom line is that exclusionary and punitive disciplinary practices do not work; yet, across the nation, football stadiums of kids are missing instruction time due to exclusionary discipline that takes them out of the classroom, which leads to more of them being placed in special education and feeling like they don’t belong in school,” Bal said.

Disproportionality in school discipline is partially a result of exclusionary and marginalizing school processes and cultures, Bal said. But the complexities and sensitivities of those topics make them difficult for school administrators to discuss. That’s why Bal created Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (CRPBIS), a project that takes an intervention that has been successfully implemented in urban schools and incorporates a stronger emphasis on the valuable life experiences and cultural and linguistic practices that racial minority students and families bring into the school environment. 

In 2008, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) began to roll out the first version of this intervention, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), throughout the state. According to Julia Hartwig, the assistant director of  DPI’s special education team, the agency was “very impressed” with the results PBIS achieved, but was frustrated that although it resulted in an overall drop in discipline rates, the ratio of disciplinary actions stubbornly remained disproportionate.

To address this, Hartwig and others at DPI scoured the education research landscape to find someone with expertise in the subject willing to launch a project to modify the state’s program. In 2010, after an initial meeting with Bal, who had just arrived at UW–Madison from Arizona, they agreed to fund his work on creating CRPBIS.

The key concept in Bal’s CRPBIS is the alteration of the traditional method by which schools craft their discipline policies and decisions. Schools implementing CRPBIS formed Learning Labs, composed of school administrators and teachers, as well as students, parents and leaders of organizations representing communities that have historically been excluded from schools’ problem-solving processes. The Learning Labs are then endowed with the authority to make and alter school policy on discipline.

“There’s no one set model we impose, but there need to be sincere and serious efforts to bring voices of the entire school community into efforts at solving the problem of disproportionality,” Bal said. “The whole idea is finding local solutions with local stakeholders.”

After a year of developing CRPBIS and a year of searching for volunteer pilot schools, Bal first launched the intervention in 2012 in three schools, all located in urban areas and containing high counts of African American and Latino students. Bal worked with school administrators to reach out to the families of those students, offering food and child care during the Learning Labs’ monthly meetings. For the staff perspective, he asked school administrators to recruit schools’ PBIS coaches, teachers and other school staff as volunteers.

The Learning Lab at one high school piloting CRPBIS was composed of 15 teachers, parents, a recent graduate of the school and representatives from local community and civic organizations. Through 10 monthly, two-hour meetings, the Learning Lab systematized the discipline process across all of the school’s grades and principals, and made it mandatory for teachers to contact the parents or guardians of children involved in disciplinary actions.

“Understanding what happened when a discipline incident occurred opened our eyes to lots of major problems with our disciplinary system,” the school’s dean of students and PBIS coordinator said. “The biggest takeaway for me was the need to get parents more involved. They need to know what’s happening in their children’s classrooms, because if they are, they’re more likely to work with you.”

The principal of another school said he agreed to take part in the CPPBIS pilot because, in looking at his school’s data on discipline and academic outcomes, he could clearly see correlations between disproportionality and the opportunity gap.

“We had not built a behavior system that was treating all students objectively,” he said.

The principal said his school’s Learning Lab realized it needed to change the staff’s outlook on discipline, specifically in regard to their expectations for appropriate student behavior. One piece of data he noted as particularly striking was the high recidivism rate for students receiving discipline.

“One analogy that we talked about that really stuck out to me was, if a student doesn’t know how to read, we teach them. But if a student doesn’t know how to behave, we kick them out of the classroom and never give them lessons in learning how to behave,” he said. “By the end of the lab, I really wanted to switch the mindset of the school’s administration so that they teach good behavior rather than having the expectation that all students just should know how to behave.”

Overall, the principal said he initially struggled with the Learning Lab’s pace of progress, but ultimately said it proved invaluable in identifying ways in which his school handled discipline.

“I learned that the process takes time,” he said.  “To get the results we found to be truly meaningful, it was a two-year process. But now that it’s over, I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

To make sure the new school discipline systems at the CRPBIS schools are sustained without the research team, Bal’s team eventually withdrew its direct involvement from the pilot programs. Bal is now focused on conducting interviews and observations with Learning Lab participants and administrators, staff and families at the CRPBIS pilot schools as part of the process of making CRPBIS a scalable model that can be replicated in schools statewide.

“I hope that Learning Labs become a useful tool for schools across the state and country as a way to facilitate a homegrown, equity-oriented systemic transformation to make their disciplinary systems more inclusive, supportive and culturally responsive,” Bal said. “The use of Learning Labs holds promise as a way to give a school’s own population the ability to determine what kind of school they wish to have.”