Monitoring and Addressing Disproportionality in Disciplinary Outcomes

Unfortunately, a wide and growing body of research shows pervasive disproportionality in the academic and behavioral outcomes in schools.

• African American Students are more likely to:
  • Receive an ODR
  • Receive corporal punishment
  • Be suspended or expelled
• LatinX and Native American Students are more likely to:
  • Be punished
  • Be suspended or expelled
• LGBTQ students are expelled more frequently than are students who identify as heterosexual
• Poor students are more likely to be suspended or expelled than are students from higher SES families
• Boys are more likely than are girls to be:
  • Punished
  • Suspended or Expelled
• Students with disabilities are more likely to be suspended
• African American boys with disabilities are 5 1/2 times more likely to be suspended than all other students!

Furthermore, these relationships persist when controlling for behavior and poverty! In particular:

• African American Students are more likely to be suspended for discretionary/subjectively interpreted offenses
  • disrespect,
  • disruption,
  • defiance,
  • attendance problems, and
  • failure to show for detention
• African American girls are more likely to be suspended for violating white middle class norms of femininity

Monitoring Disproportionality?

Organizations monitor for discipline disproportionality not to hit quotas, but to identify underlying problems. Metrics such as risk indices, risk ratios, and comparisons data to determine whether the allocation of disciplinary outcomes are significantly different. The discovery of disproportional discipline does not indicate why the disproportionality exists. Rather it indicates the need for further exploration. In this way, the team can get at the root cause of the disproportionality and identify action steps that are likely to address this root cause. MO SW-PBS has a Disproportionality Calculator that can be used to monitor disproportionality in discipline.

Causes of Disproportionality and Possible Strategies

According to McIntosh, et al. (2014) there are several causes of disproportionality:

• Inadequate implementation of SW-PBS: SW-PBS is a proactive and preventative framework that includes common operational definitions of behavioral expectations, common operational definitions of unexpected behaviors, consistent responses to expectation following behavior, and consistent instructional response to unexpected behaviors.
• Misunderstanding of behavior expectations: We all view the world through an individual lens. This lens is informed by the cultural milieu in which we were raised. Organizations often establish expectations and rules that are based on an assumption of a common understanding that are actually influenced by this cultural lens. SW-PBS helps get everyone on the same page by defining expectations and rules with the actions or behaviors that demonstrate them. For example, a school may define the expectation of respect with the behavior of “Work silently during seatwork.” Including partner representation in defining expectations and rules can go a long way in making sure that all staff, all students, and all parents define behaviors the same way!
• Academic achievement gap: Students who find an instructional activity to be boring, difficult, or embarrassing often engage in disruptive behavior because they have learned over time that such behavior will allow them to escape from that activity through an ODR, time out, buddy room, or other exclusionary forms of discipline. There are pernicious and pervasive achievement gaps in education affecting different demographic groups and caused for a variety of reasons. The metrics and Disproportionality Calculator described above can be can be used to monitor disproportionality for any student outcome. We want positive outcomes for all our students. Therefore, we urge school leaders to monitor for achievement gaps and take steps to remediate these when found. Implementing ETLPs such as increased Opportunities to Respond, Activity sequencing and choice, and Modifying Task Difficulty are evidence-based strategies to help struggling learners.
• Lack of student engagement: As mentioned above, when students are bored or they feel like the curriculum does not speak to them, they may engage in escape motivated behavior. Schools and districts not only need to ensure that instruction is engaging and includes many opportunities to respond, but schools and districts must ensure that students culture and the history of all demographic groups are included in curriculum and instruction.
• Explicit or systematic bias: Explicit or systematic bias occurs when overt biases and organizational policies disproportionately impact a demographic group. Using the metrics and  Disproportionality Calculator described above, combined with drilling down by Big-5 data (what, when, where, who, and how often) can help schools and districts to identify and address explicit bias in their system. Strong and fair discipline policies, strong and fair hiring policies, strong and fair evaluation policies, use of data, and professional development are effective systems for addressing explicit or systematic bias.
• Implicit bias: Every human has implicit bias! Implicit bias is unconscious bias that affects how we interact with people belonging to different groups. It arises from the social milieu in which we live and were raised. Awareness of our own implicit biases can go a long way to help us avoid our biases manifesting in our actions. However, these biases tend to manifest in situations where there is ambiguity, quick decisions must be made, and in times when we are stressed. We call these situations “Vulnerable Decision Points,” or VDPs. You can identify your own implicit biases by taking the Harvard  Project Implicit test. The metrics and  Disproportionality Calculator described above combined with drilling down of the Big-5 data by individual teacher can help us to identify VDPs. Once we know our VDPs and how they impact our students, we can identify replacement behaviors, or neutralizing routines that we can do instead of acting on our first impulse.