Discipline Consequences: Mega Q&A

So I've gotten a lot of questions about consequences in response to my videos about restorative practices and progressive discipline.

So I wanted to answer as many of those as I could very quickly here.

The first question is about suspension.

What if a student says they want to be suspended or what if we suspect that it might be what the student wants to get sent home, then they can play video games and not have to be in school.

I think we just have to not worry about that.

I think if we need to suspend a student, we don't need to worry about whether that is going to bother them.

It's just what needs to happen.

And in a lot of cases, if a kid says something like that, that's just garden variety reverse psychology.

You don't need to worry if the student says, go ahead, suspend me, I don't care.

we're going to suspend them regardless.

It doesn't matter how they feel about it.

As far as it being rewarding, I think what we have to keep in mind is that we don't control what any individual student finds rewarding or aversive at any given time.

That's kind of irrelevant to the idea of consequences.

And what is a relevant consideration is the idea of impunity and audience.

If you have a student who is behaving unsafely or doing something really, really inappropriate to the point that they need to be suspended, by sending them home, they might want to be home, but you are depriving them of power and audience by sending them home.

They don't get to keep doing what they're doing that's disrupting learning by being at home.

And that's kind of the main thing.

Our goal here is not to cause suffering or to cause anguish.

Our goal is to protect the learning environment with a boundary.

And that is the primary thing that suspension does is it puts a boundary in place that says this behavior is not acceptable.

If you do this behavior, you have to not be here for some period of time.

So I think that's kind of the fundamental theory of action for suspension and why it doesn't really matter if a kid says, I want to be suspended.

Just don't worry about it.

Second question I get quite a bit.

is what about in-school suspension?

I think in-school suspension is a pretty good idea.

I think it's typically a less severe consequence to give.

So I think it's a good step to have.

You could also do Saturday school.

You could also do after-school detention.

You could do lunch detention.

I think there are a variety of things.

And probably most middle schools and high schools should have an in-school suspension program or one or more of those other options just to give you some flexibility.

The thing is those cost money.

And I think one of the reasons that suspension is a little out of control in some places is that suspension is free.

It does not cost anything.

You don't have to staff it.

Nobody has to sit there with the students who are suspended.

They're just out of your hair and not your problem for a couple of days.

And that does mean that suspension probably gets overused compared to alternatives that do cost us time and money.

So I do think we have to be willing to spend the money and invest the staff time in those alternatives like detention, in-school suspension, et cetera.

But at the same time, you are occasionally going to have students who are just so defiant that they cannot safely be on campus, right?

If they refuse to go to detention, if they refuse to serve their Saturday school, if they refuse to stay in in-school suspension, or if they're acting just as terribly in in-school suspension as they did in the classroom, well, then you probably have no choice but to suspend them with an out-of-school suspension.

Because I think the situation we have to avoid at all costs is impunity, right?

A student acting with impunity and saying, nobody can tell me what to do.

I run the show.

I'm going to do whatever I want.

I'm going to be unsafe.

I'm going to tell adults whatever I want to tell them.

We can't have that in school.

We have to have safety.

We have to have order and suspension has to be there as a last resort.

Another question I get a lot is, is suspension, isn't suspension like proven not to be effective?

And I don't know where this comes from.

People have been saying this a lot in recent years, that suspension is not effective.

And I think we have to think about what we mean by that.

Like if I suspend a student for doing something in class, well, they're not going to do that in class while they're suspended.

And of course, what people mean is not that part.

They mean, well, the student is likely to just do it again when they come back.

The suspension didn't really change anything.

And of course, we have to have modest expectations for any kind of consequence that, you know, a lot of misbehavior comes from something deeper in a student's life that is not going well or that is not right and that needs some sort of deeper solution.

So I think pinning our hopes on suspension for fixing that kind of issue is just unrealistic.

Suspension is not a tool for fixing individual psychological or family or socioeconomic issues.

Suspension is a tool for protecting the learning environment.

All consequences really are intended to protect the learning environment.

And if that helps the student kind of get their act together, great.

If that provides a motivation or an incentive for the student to act better, great.

But we have to have modest expectations.

Now, what about this idea that suspension just does not work, that it becomes this kind of one-way ticket to bad news when we suspend a student?

I think we have to look at the long-term statistics on recidivism.

when it comes to suspension.

And if you look at criminal recidivism for juveniles, the criminal recidivism rate hovers about 80%.

If a student gets arrested and goes to juvie, commits some sort of crime, the recidivism rate is about 80%.

For suspension, we're not talking about the same level of severity.

We're not talking about the same level of crisis in a young person's life.

We're talking about acting up in school.

And I think we have to not exaggerate the seriousness of that or the seriousness of suspension too much.

So if a student is suspended from school, what is the probability that that will happen again?

It is about 50%.

And that might sound high, but it's a lot lower than the 80% for juvenile justice.

And it means that 50% of the students who do something that they get in trouble for and get suspended for never get suspended again.

So this idea that that's not a significant deterrent, I think, doesn't really hold up.

And that pattern holds up throughout multiple suspensions.

Schallenberger has some long-term data showing that if you get suspended in one school year, you have about a 50% chance of getting suspended never again and about a 50% chance of getting suspended in a second school year.

If you get suspended in two school years, you have a 50% chance of never getting suspended again and about a 50% chance of getting suspended in an additional school year.

And the same pattern holds if we look at the number of days of suspension.

So if we keep 50% of people from ever doing it again by having a consequence, that to me is pretty good.

And the other 50%, you know, again, we just have to have modest expectations.

Like this is not a cure-all.

This is not a mental health solution.

This is not a solution to family dysfunction, you know, whatever's contributing to that behavior.

So it's not going to be a magic wand, but it is going to allow us to keep the school environment safe and to have a boundary.

If you have other questions about consequences, feel free to leave a comment, let me know, and I'll try to answer them.

People are asking, one more thing people are asking is what consequences are appropriate for elementary?

You know, save suspension for the very most severe things, but often more and more things are getting taken off the table as consequences.

And certainly corporal punishment is off the table in a lot of places, in most places and should be.

So I don't think that's an appropriate consequence at all in a school setting.

But I think we still have a lot of options.

Again, a lot of them are not free.

They do require some staff time and maybe some money.

But at the elementary level, A tough one is recess because in a lot of cases you can't take away a recess and you probably shouldn't take away a student's opportunity to get some exercise, to get some movement during the day.

I mean, kids just developmentally need that.

So you can always do something that is a little bit structured or a little bit restricted for recess.

Like maybe you don't get to just do whatever you want at recess.

Maybe you have to walk laps.

In some cases that's prohibited.

So maybe you get to have recess, but it's at a different time than everybody else in your grade.

Or maybe you get to go out to recess but it's with a staff member who keeps an eye on you.

Or maybe you get to go out to recess but you have to stay on the boring side of the playground where none of your friends are.

I mean, there are ways we can modify this to make it a consequence that...

you know, is actually significant without breaking the law or taking away a physical break that the kids really need.

Again, I don't think it matters that much what the specific consequences are.

I think it matters that we have the ability to put boundaries in place, that even if, you know, a student says they don't care about a consequence, we have a consequence that is real, that is visible, that creates a sense of safety for people who are on the other side of whatever that behavior is.

and that for the kid who is thinking about their behavior is going to make them at least think twice and maybe actually not do it, or at least know that when they do do it, there is gonna be a consequence.

I think that functioning is pretty straightforward and we need to not mess with it.

And I've just had thousands and thousands of comments from people who work in schools that have started to feel guilty about consequences and have started to say things that are not true, like consequences don't work, consequences aren't a deterrent.

you go straight to prison if you get in trouble at school and like all that stuff is not true.

So like one last thing about the school to prison pipeline, and then I'll wrap it up here.

The school to prison pipeline idea is an observation that kids who tend to get in trouble in school a lot, tend to get in trouble outside of school a lot.

And people have taken that correlation and badly misinterpreted it and said it is the suspension from school that is causing incarceration or failure to graduate or other negative outcomes.

And there have been a lot of attempts in the research literature to prove that that correlation is not just a correlation, but it is actually causal.

And some of the papers that I've reviewed at principalcenter.com slash PD for progressive discipline actually have it in their title that it is a causal relationship.

And then if you actually read the paper, It's clear that that is not what they showed at all.

So I think we need to not worry too much about the consequences of suspension on students.

This is a very small portion of their life, a very small portion of their school career, and we just need to relax a little bit about that.

Put it in place so that it is a boundary that can keep schools safe and that can provide an incentive for behavior.

Let me know what you think and learn more at principalcenter.com slash suspension where I have an article.