How Can We Know If Discipline Reform Is Actually Working?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the danger of trusting discipline data at face value and what it actually takes to evaluate whether reform efforts are producing real results.
Key Takeaways
- Discipline data is easily manipulated - Declining suspension numbers don't necessarily mean schools are safer
- Look beyond the numbers - Ask teachers, students, and parents whether the school feels safer, not just whether stats improved
- Be skeptical of dramatic improvements - Sudden drops in discipline data often indicate underreporting, not genuine progress
Transcript
How would we know if discipline reforms are working?
I was very glad to see that Jennifer Gonzalez over at Cult of Pedagogy, a very important blog, has a new article and podcast up called Where Discipline Reform Has Gone Wrong in Some Schools.
And she talks with a couple of consultants about mistakes that schools make and the kind of misconceptions about restorative practices.
And I think there are a lot of fair points in that article.
And I'm certainly glad to see this issue getting the attention that it deserves in terms of this is simply not working in a lot of schools.
But I have to question this premise here that the answer is simply more training.
It's super convenient if you're a consultant for the problem to be inadequate training because you can of course continue to sell more and more training and promise results that are in the future if schools will simply invest in more training and maybe send leaders to the training and not be impatient, not expect fast results.
All of these are very convenient things to say if you are a consultant who is selling training.
Now I say that with the caveat that they can also be true, right?
It can be true that some things are hard, some things require a lot of training, some things take a lot of time, sometimes results are slow to come in, sometimes things get worse before they get better.
All of that can be legitimate.
My question today is, how will we know?
Because when it comes to discipline reform, we have a little bit of a data problem.
Often the only type of data we have is consequence data.
We know how many suspensions we're giving out, but if we decide as a reform to stop giving out suspensions, then our data source disappears.
And it doesn't look like it disappears because we continue to track suspensions and suspensions go down.
But again, if that was the intervention, we're not going to suspend anymore.
Then we can't really conclude that it's working.
We can't trust that data source or use it for the same purpose anymore.
So I think we have to really be thoughtful about our indicators of improvement.
And to me, the bottom line indicator of improvement from discipline reform should be learning-focused behavior.
Teachers and students should recognize, yeah, things are getting better or things are getting worse.
We can't just look at outcomes that are obvious and easy to manipulate like suspensions.
Let me know what you think.