Does Suspension Work?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses whether school suspension is an effective disciplinary measure and what 'working' actually means in the context of school discipline.
Key Takeaways
- Define 'work' clearly - Suspension works to protect the school community by removing a safety threat, even if it doesn't 'fix' the suspended student
- Not every intervention needs to cure the problem - Suspension serves a protective function similar to how a hospital isolates a contagious patient
- The question is often asked in bad faith - Those who ask 'does suspension work?' often mean 'can we justify eliminating it?' rather than genuinely evaluating its purpose
Transcript
Does suspension work?
A lot of people are happy to give up suspension as a school consequence because they've heard and they've repeated for years now that suspension doesn't work.
And certainly, if you look at later outcomes in life, suspension is a very strong predictor.
Suspension itself does not change the trajectory of kids who are on a bad trajectory.
If you look at incarceration, often that was preceded by getting in trouble at school, getting in trouble in a variety of settings, and that's been called the school-to-prison pipeline.
But I think we've got our thinking a little bit wrong about exactly how this works.
So let's look first at some evidence about whether suspension quote unquote works.
What does that mean?
Well, for suspension to work, I think what people mean is that it should reduce the likelihood of future behavior of a similar type, right?
And we don't have really any independent data of behavior like schools don't collect and report data on behavior.
But they do collect and report data on suspension, so that's what researchers rely on.
And research has found that the recidivism rate for suspension is about 50%.
50% of kids who get suspended from school once never ever get suspended again.
It's just a single time.
So the idea that this is kind of a one-way ticket to jail to suspend a kid from school for a couple of days.
It's just false.
Suspension does work in the sense that the recidivism rate is pretty decent.
I'd say 50% never getting suspended again is pretty good.
And if you look at subsequent suspensions, it's similar.
But as you get to more and more suspensions, like if a kid has been suspended 10 times, they're probably going to get suspended an 11th time.
Like, it doesn't hold at 50%.
It gets a little bit worse for the most extreme cases, which is what you would expect.
But it's not just about recidivism.
I think if we're going to ask the question, does suspension work, we also have to consider the alternative.
And the alternative in reality is typically recidivism.
What we're saying here is not just can we magically replace suspension with something else.
What's happening in a lot of schools is that there is no alternative to suspension.
And what's happening is students are doing whatever it is that they're doing that would have gotten them suspended, but now with impunity.
And this is something that I think we just have not really thought through.
What if we actively teach kids that they can be violent to other people?
What if we actively teach kids that they can get away with completely disrupting the environment that they're in and disrespecting everybody around them with no consequences?
Nobody actually set out to test the question of impunity and really investigate what would happen if we created that feeling among students that there are no consequences to your actions.
But we know...
In life, if people act as if there are no consequences to their actions, often that gets them arrested or killed very, very quickly.
And I just think that's the wrong lesson.
We should not even be experimenting with this idea of impunity for violence and really terrible behavior in schools.
So again, let me know what you think about this.
Let me know if those statistics are a surprise.
I would love to know what you think.