How Campbell's Law Explains What's Going on with School Discipline
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder uses Campbell's Law to explain why discipline reform based on statistical targets inevitably leads to data manipulation rather than genuine improvement.
Key Takeaways
- Campbell's Law is the key - When a measure becomes a target, people manipulate the measure rather than improving the underlying reality
- Discipline data is being gamed - Schools reduce suspension numbers by ignoring incidents rather than by making schools safer
- Good intentions, bad incentives - Even well-meaning accountability systems produce perverse outcomes when they focus on numbers instead of practices
Transcript
So a very powerful concept that everyone in education should be aware of is Campbell's Law.
Campbell's Law states that anytime we start to use a quantitative metric for accountability, like test scores or, more relevant to my recent concerns, discipline statistics, then the pressure put on improving that measure starts to distort the underlying process that it was intended to improve in the first place.
For example, test scores were the focus of accountability pressure in order to improve learning, right?
But as we saw after No Child Left Behind, one of the unfortunate but now kind of predictable unintended consequences of that was that we started teaching to the test.
We started narrowing the curriculum.
Elementary schools stopped teaching science and social studies for the most part for a very long time.
And we can expect that there are going to be unintended consequences when we focus too much accountability pressure on hitting some sort of quantitative metric.
This has also been seen in policing, that when you try to hold the police accountable for improving crime statistics, what usually happens is that the statistics change, but the crime doesn't.
It gets downgraded, like lots of kind of cheating approaches to hitting your targets come out of the woodwork when we hold people too accountable for hitting a quantitative target.
This is also happening with discipline, where now principals and schools and school districts are being held accountable for their discipline statistics under the mostly mistaken idea that discipline statistics are produced by principle decisions and by kind of things that we make up rather than by underlying behavior.
And we can certainly use accountability pressure to get rid of bias.
We can use accountability pressure to get rid of unnecessary suspensions and unduly harsh consequences for behavior.
But we can't use accountability pressure just at the level of consequences to get rid of behavior problems, right?
Saying suspension is no longer allowed doesn't eliminate the behaviors that were leading to suspension.
It just means we have to deal with those behaviors in some other way.
And we've heard a lot of promises about alternatives to exclusionary discipline.
And I've been talking about a lot of those.
And a lot of people have been leaving comments about some of those alternatives.
And unfortunately, none of them seem to work for actually making school a safe place to be.
And when we've gotten rid of exclusionary discipline in so many schools, especially in the younger grades, then what we found is that, not surprisingly, we get unsafe behaviors in the school environment at much higher levels than before.
We've just gotten thousands and thousands of comments about that.
And it'll be a long time before any formal research comes in, but I'll be collecting some reports from the field.
I'd love to hear from you, so stay tuned for that.
But for now, read up on Campbell's Law and let me know what you think about this.
Is accountability pressure causing your school or your district or your state to make bad decisions about student discipline?
Let me know.