Browsing by Subject "School discipline"
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Item Administrative aspects of discipline in the Texas public schools(1947) Ransom, Crisler Brian, 1904-; Ayer, Fred C. (Fred Carleton), 1880-Item Disciplinary experiences, math coursework, and racial/ethnic and gender inequality(2022-07-29) Snidal, Matthew James; Crosnoe, Robert; Kirk, David; Muller, Chandra; Pettit, BeckyIn the U.S., school discipline can have reverberating consequences for students. For example, students who receive out-of-school suspension tend to be less engaged in academic subjects, particularly the core subject of mathematics. Importantly, this process is stratified along the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender, with Black students more likely to be suspended than other groups of students and Black girls experiencing particularly large disparities in suspension relative to girls from other racial/ethnic backgrounds. To understand such disparities, scholars have employed labeling and life course theories to the experience of suspension, but have used narrow conceptualizations of suspension, most commonly whether a student was suspended in a time-period. This narrow conceptualization—and the simple binary operationalization that follows it—likely obscures important insights about the gendered and racialized implications of school suspension that could be better investigated through conceptualizing school suspension more dynamically. This dynamic conceptualization can be operationalized in three ways with student records from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) on out-of-school suspension during 9th grade: 1) the frequency dimension; 2) the duration dimension; and 3) the timing dimension. Drawing on a theoretical foundation integrating life course and labeling theories, this dissertation attempts to build on a broad base of empirical evidence by considering how disparities in suspension are dynamic, intersectional, cross-domain, and contextualized. In Chapter 1, I introduce the topics of school suspension and math course taking and present a conceptual model for the dissertation. In Chapter 2, I extend the dynamic perspective of suspension with an intersectional lens that captures how conceptualizations of suspension can portray disparities in different ways. In Chapter 3, I consider how dynamic suspension shapes outcomes math and how this connection varies across intersectional groups of students. In Chapter 4, the role of peer contexts is used to evaluate if the penalties of dynamic suspension vary according to whether the experience of suspension was more or less normative in the school. In Chapter 5, I present the theoretical and policy implications from the dissertation.Item Discipline without derailing : an investigation of exclusionary discipline practices in schools(2013-12) Cohen, Rebecca Weil; Vasquez Heilig, JulianMaintaining a safe and orderly learning environment in schools is fundamental to the greater goals of education, but determining optimal disciplinary responses to student misbehavior is often complicated. While there is an abundance of research that speaks to the negative impact of exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspension, expulsion or any other disciplinary response that removes a student from the traditional classroom setting) on student behavioral and academic outcomes, there is an absence of work that examines if, when, and to what extent a student is actually better off receiving non-exclusionary dispositions. Using multivariate regression analysis on a unique dataset from an urban Texas school district, this study directly compares the impact of exclusionary vs. non-exclusionary discipline on student outcomes (controlling for student characteristics, school characteristics, and offense type). Additionally, the study examines the extent to which offense type influences the relationship between disposition and student outcomes. The study’s findings suggest that a student is generally worse off in terms of academic progress and risk of future offenses when she/he receives an exclusionary disposition for any disciplinary infraction. The impact of exclusion, however, was shown to vary by student offense.Item Essays on determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes(2022-04-12) Verma, Anjali Priya; Trejo, Stephen J., 1959-; Murphy, Richard J., Ph. D.; Geruso, Mike; Vogl, TomThis dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories.Item Exploring the relationship between implicit bias, cultural competency, and racial disproportionality in school discipline(2020-05-08) Smith, Shontell; Klingbeil, David A.Research highlights the pervasiveness of racial disproportionality in school disciplinary practices. Moreover, researchers have theorized that racial implicit bias plays a role in this disparate treatment; yet, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this relationship. Even still, schools and researchers have suggested cultural competency training as a way of addressing implicit bias to reduce disproportionality in discipline rates. This proposed study seeks to, first, quantify the relationship between racial implicit bias and the disciplinary actions take by teachers, and second examine whether teachers’ self-reported multicultural competency moderates this expected relationship. Analyses will be conducted using linear regression.Item Falling through the cracks : community based programs fill in the gaps that school discipline leaves behind(2014-05) Asase, Dagny Adjoa; Dahlby, Tracy; Minutaglio, BillThe purpose of this report is to focus on the school-to-prison pipeline and the need to intervene with school discipline that pushes students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. It showcases services and programs in Austin, Texas, including Southwest Keys, Webb Youth Court, and Council on At-Risk Youth as examples for solutions. The report also incorporates research and expert advice on the safety and wellbeing of students while advocating a need to change the policies and culture surrounding schools.Item Juvenile justice in the shadows : Texas' municipal courts and the punishment of school misbehavior(2010-05) Aseltine, Elyshia Danae; Ekland-Olson, Sheldon, 1944-; Sjoberg, Gideo; Stafford, Mark; Auyero, Javier; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Foster, KevinOver the last several decades, punishment in school has become increasingly harsh. Students are suspended and expelled for minor infractions or are being referred to the criminal justice system for behaviors that, in the past, were largely dealt with by school administrators. In addition, school districts are hiring their own police and security forces, and surveillance technologies are becoming a permanent part of school budgets and spaces. Three converging social trends have facilitated these changes in school discipline: (1) the steady growth of a pervasive sense of social anxiety coupled with a political and cultural shift away from rehabilitative to more punitive forms of punishment (e.g., imprisonment, the death penalty, etc.); (2) a series of moral panics in the 1980s and 1990s about drugs, gangs, and violence that heightened fear of, and for, the nation’s youth; and, (3) shifts in both policing philosophy and funding towards increased police penetration into community settings. Concerns are mounting that the intertwining of schools and criminal justice has forged a “school-to-prison pipeline” for some students, especially special education students, poor students and students of color. My dissertation focuses on one aspect of the pipeline: issuing citations to students for school misbehavior. There are three questions I seek to address: For what behaviors or activities are students being ticketed? What are the characteristics of students being ticketed? After school- based citations enter the courtroom, how are these students processed? I use quantitative and qualitative data to address these questions. My larger argument is that school discipline processes not only have significant consequences for the life chances of our country’s young people, but they also have very serious consequences for the civil liberties of all public school students and for the socialization of our young people into the principals of democratic citizenship.Item Shaping classrooms, placing students : contextual and intersectional factors in the discipline gap(2017-05) Massey, Kristine Julia; Brown, Keffrelyn D.; Brown, Anthony L; De Lissovoy, Noah; Gooden, Mark A; Palmer, Deborah K; Urrieta, LuisThis multiple case study examined classroom discipline in the context of teachers’ understandings of power, their interactions and relationships with students, and their decision-making about curriculum and pedagogy. This work was grounded within the literature on the discipline gap—or the disproportionate rate at which students of color are punished more frequently and more severely than their White peers. While there is a wealth of quantitative literature discussing the discipline gap, such investigations are limited to an analysis of the disciplinary actions that are assigned to student behaviors after they have already occurred. As such, there are relatively few qualitative investigations that examine the precursors to the very disciplinary actions that quantitative studies are dependent upon. Guided by theoretical examinations of power, intersectionality, and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, this study sought to investigate the discipline gap through the following questions: 1) How do teachers at an urban public high school who work effectively with students of color understand and employ the concept of power in their classroom interactions with students?; and 2) What interpersonal and pedagogical decisions do these teachers make in the context of classroom discipline? This study included classroom observations, artifact analyses, and semi-structured interviews with teachers and students at two diverse, urban public high schools. While the school-sites and classrooms were distinct from each other in several ways, findings showed that teachers’ approaches to discipline, curriculum, and pedagogy, as well as their interactions with students, were dependent upon their conceptualizations of the sociocultural factors of race, culture, socioeconomic status, gender, and language. Furthermore, their understandings of—and resulting practices regarding—the aforementioned sociocultural factors were dependent upon teachers’ own explicit and implicit cultural values and norms. This research contributes to the literature on the discipline gap by offering insight to potential contextual factors that impact student-teacher relationships and disciplinary structures within classrooms.Item Student attachment levels in a disciplinary alternative education program compared with an alternative education program and its correlation towards later-life crime(2007-12) Cordero, Emori Starr, 1978-; Webeck, Mary LeeThis study looked at the link between life-course crime and attachment levels in schools. The correlation between high attachment levels and lower adult criminal activity was first explained. Once this correlation was understood, attachment levels in alternative schools were studied. There are two main types of alternative schools: AEPs (Alternative Education Programs) and DAEPs (Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs). AEPs are often self-selected, meaning that the students have to apply and are usually not assigned; they are often long term. The DAEPs are set up by school districts to serve students who commit specific disciplinary or criminal offenses; the students are usually assigned at the DAEP for a short period of time, ranging from one day to six months. This study looked at whether one type of program yields higher attachment levels than the other. One school of each type was surveyed in the central Texas area. The AEP had 261 participants in the survey; the DAEP had 102. The students ranged from 6th to 12th grade. A teacher focus group at the DAEP was also given a survey, as well as a postsurvey questionnaire. The purpose of the teacher focus group was to see if the teacher perception of student attachment was accurate, and if they felt that anything needed to be changed at their school to yield higher attachment levels. The student and teacher surveys were analyzed using SPSS. The results showed that the AEP is more successful than the DAEP at attaining higher attachment levels. The AEP students are happier with their school and like their teachers more than do the students at the DAEP. The focus group illustrated that the teachers at the DAEP perceived that their students were happier than they really were. The focus group also showed that the teachers enjoyed working at their school and wanted to help the at-risk students, but did not want students to like it at the DAEP because they did not want the students to return. However, the teachers felt that success of their program was based on the rate of recidivism not on attachment levels.