Almost seven years ago, the School District of Philadelphia revised its student discipline policy, instructing schools not to suspend students for certain types of nonviolent behavior such as failing to follow classroom rules or making obscene gestures. To examine what happened after the policy changed, Mathematica’s Johanna Lacoe teamed up with Matthew Steinberg, an education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. What they found provides the strongest evidence to date that when students are suspended, their academic performance declines after the suspension. They also found that Philadelphia schools varied in how much they complied with the district’s change in policy, and that the variation matters because it might negatively affect the suspended students’ peers, too. One major takeaway from the research is that if schools opt to implement the sort of discipline reform being tried in Philadelphia, they need support from the district to do it well.
On this episode of On the Evidence, I spoke with Lacoe about school suspension research in Philadelphia and what it might mean for the future of school discipline. Click here to listen to the full interview. You can also read an edited excerpt of the interview in the following transcript.
How many papers have you and Matthew Steinberg published about suspensions in Philadelphia so far and what were they about?
[For more on this story by J.B. Wogan, go to https://www.mathematica-mpr.co...ect-student-outcomes]
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