A long-term collaborative study between ANU researcher Dr Ashley Craig and Harvard University’s David Martin has looked at the impact of eliminating suspensions for low-level disorderly behaviour and found students across the board benefited from the reform.

“David and I sat down in 2016 and we were very interested in how to improve outcomes for kids who seem to be struggling, whether that’s particularly disadvantaged kids in public schools and so on,” Craig tells EducationHQ.

The pair thought about questions we don’t know the answer to, and one of them was (around) school discipline.

“There’d been an enormous amount of research that really thoroughly documented that there’s an association between being suspended and being punished at school and behaving badly in school, and all kinds of longer outcomes, ranging from low test scores, but then lower chance of finishing school and crime in the future and lower income.

“And to the extent that any of that is reflecting the impact of discipline, then that seems really important. But it’s also possible that actually it’s not that the discipline is causing it. In fact, that might even be helping. It’s other things.

“And so if you remove the punishments and so on in schools, that actually behaviour would deteriorate and test scores would get worse and then they could be even worse off. And that just wasn’t well answered, we thought, by the existing body of research.”

Craig and Martin focussed in on the New York public school system, which has a particularly good, long-standing data set, with “really detailed data” about numerous aspects of students and teachers and schools, with powerful survey information that tracks how students, teachers and parents experience school.

In 2012 the city was in the midst of major reform where just at the peak of zero tolerance approaches to school discipline, the system relaxed it, which provided an opportunity for the researchers to compare two sets of schools and how they evolved over time. 

“Teachers and administrators and other stakeholders in the New York City school system told us ‘this is going to change how our students and teachers interact with each other and classroom dynamics’,” Craig shares.

“Teachers are going to have more time to actually teach and build relationships with their students, rather than dealing with escorting students down the hall to the principal’s office and that kind of stuff – and so it’s going to change those types of soft interactions.”

Our results suggest that instituting a very strict discipline code on its own can actually be harmful to students, and not just those who misbehave, Dr Ashley Craig says.

The results showed improvements in test scores when the suspensions were banned.

“We saw a rise in both math and reading scores, particularly in schools that previously had an above-average suspension rate for disorderly behaviour,” Craig shares.

“And it didn’t just benefit the kids who would have been suspended themselves, because we can predict that quite well – it seemed to benefit other kids too, like everyone,” Craig says.

Something was happening to the classroom dynamic, he says, and the change in approach to discipline also contributed to an improvement in school culture more generally.

“We found that things like student/teacher respect actually really remarkably improved at the same time in the same schools as an effect of this reform,” Craig shares.

“[We found] students and teachers are likely to work harder and learn more when they feel supported and respected.”

The researchers suggest that students might be more engaged if they feel that teachers and administrators are less biased and more reasonable.

“So potentially if you then get rid of those punishments for low-level types of behaviours and marginal things, and really now only get suspended for things like fighting, which is not very controversial, then the whole disciplining environment becomes a little bit more legitimate or perceived as more legitimate,” Craig says.

The academic acknowledges there are numerous differences between the Australian and US school systems, and disciplinary methods and measures vary significantly between the countries. Yet while we should always be careful in trying to import information from other settings and apply it to our own, we should also not dismiss it out of hand, he says. 

“If you look at the debate around Direct Instruction and teaching phonetics and so on, a great deal of that evidence was really compelling for a long time overseas, and people said, ‘oh, no, no, Australia is different. Let’s ignore it.’

“Just ignoring it is obviously wrong, it’s more about listening to it and thinking about how things might be different, and ultimately doing our own Australian studies.

“I would love to do that if anyone would like to cooperate with me to do a study here,” Craig says.

We clearly need more research in this area in Australia, he says, and we have much to learn from the more open approaches of some countries.

“… if you think about it, the best understood society and education systems are all in Scandinavia, and there’s a reason for that – those countries have made their data available to the world’s researchers and now we such an in-depth understanding of those systems, policymakers can make really informed decisions, etc.

“The more we can push in that direction, obviously being very careful of data safety and all kinds of ethical issues, but fostering that production of evidence in Australia, the more we’ll be able to trust it will improve things, and so in lots of little ways we can help that happen.”

To view the study ‘Discipline Reform, School Culture, and Student Achievement’​, click here.