Reimagining Student Discipline in Massachusetts

Zach Ben-Amots and Ilana Gensler

In his first year as the High School Dean of Students at the Academy of the Pacific Rim (APR), Jonathan Diamond inherited an “idea of no excuses and zero tolerance” — a model that he deemed neither sustainable nor humane. “Based on the policies that I inherited, I suspended 46% of the high school student body,” Diamond said. Fifteen years later, through a mix of restorative practices, mediation and new suspension methods, Diamond has brought that rate down to 2–4% annually. “Around 2013 we started to compare data and analyze policies,” Diamond said. “It was a very intentional shift to an audit of our current policies to question what was and wasn’t working and focus more on relationship building.”

When APR shifted its disciplinary philosophy, it was mirroring Massachusetts policy changes to address discipline on a state level. After the passage of Chapter 222 in 2012, the state enforced mandatory changes to school disciplinary rules and new requirements for data reporting. That act also signalled a shift toward a data-driven conversation. Administrators at every level were asked to improve their data collecting methods to better understand the trends in student discipline.

According to a database from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), between 2012–16, students throughout the state were more likely to be suspended if they were black, hispanic or latino, economically disadvantaged, and/or disabled. These data helped the state recognize that student discipline was not only an issue of volume, but also an issue of imbalance. Educators actually refer to it as “disproportionality data.”

After four years of data collection, DESE targeted schools that demonstrated the highest and most disproportionate rates of student discipline. “This was very much a learning year,” said Stacy Diaz Cabral, the program manager for DESE’s Rethinking School Discipline Professional Development Network. Cabral’s work over the past year reinforced a “clear need in learning how to have data conversations.” Through a series of counseling sessions, Cabral guided Deans, Assistant Principals and Assistant Superintendents to consider how to “re-calibrate their systems of support for the students and their staff members.” She would not name any specific schools, but was impressed with the level of innovation they were already applying to curb the volume and disproportion of suspensions.

Though APR is not one of the schools involved in Rethinking School Discipline, Diamond is using educational tools to hold students accountable for infractions while eliminating external suspension. When met with cheating or plagiarism, Diamond has stopped pulling students out of class. Instead, he has instituted a policy of Saturday suspensions, which provide an opportunity for students to articulate their specific needs without losing scheduled instructional time. Diamond strives to develop students into self-advocators when they fall behind, lose motivation or “take a shortcut out of life.” Removal from the classroom during instructional time is only warranted if students become a safety risk to their environment and peers.

Cabral hopes to highlight “exit schools” from the initiative, as a means of sharing best practices. Until that happens, though, student discipline throughout the state remains entirely disproportionate.

The disparity in student discipline between racial groups is especially staggering. Less than five percent of all students are suspended, but close to 10 percent of black and hispanic/latino students are suspended. Over 60 percent of public school students are white, but only about 40 percent of suspended students are white.

Students with disabilities make up less than one-fifth of the total student population in Massachusetts, but they make up over one-third of total suspended students. Less than half of the state’s total students are considered “high needs” — a classification which includes students with disabilities, English language learners, and economically disadvantaged students — but those make up nearly 80 percent of the state’s suspended students.

During the early stages of Diamond’s role, his work revolved around helping students reach established standards of appropriate behavior. Now, Diamond feels his efforts involve “educating people why things are appropriate,” a process that takes more time. For students with behavioral disabilities, for example, teachers need to apply different codes of appropriate conduct. “If a student has a diagnosed disability around self-regulation, then it would make sense that that student is going to have bigger, more frequent outbursts,” Diamond said.

APR is also addressing racial biases that lead to disproportionate suspensions of black and hispanic or latino students. “We currently have a professional development strain where the entire faculty is starting last year and continuing this year to look at diversity equity inclusion, focusing on things like internal bias and institutional bias,” Diamond said. “It’s part of a discussion right now to take a look at this and make sure that we’re doing our very best to be fair, just, and ethical.”

In light of DESE’s initiative, Public schools are now required to track discipline data according to the type of referral, form of disciplinary action, and group classification for the student being disciplined. Those classifications include race, ethnicity, gender, disability, economic disadvantage and language fluency.

As regulators and educators are working to diminish disproportionality, however, they are encountering the challenges of a new and prominent demographic. Within the last five years, Diamond has noted a troubling increase in the number of traumatized students, resulting in a need for additional support staff. When asked about a significant increase in traumatized students, Cabral agreed “110 percent.”

Implementing new philosophies around discipline is a gradual process. Diamond said that APR is aiming to become a model for other schools and has harnessed a student voice in which they feel valued. “We’re striving to be a more inclusive heterogeneous community, which is why things aren’t as neat as they used to be,” Diamond said. APR is dedicated to “keep students that come through our doors and educate every student — not just the ones who comply.”

While considering the data, it is important to bear in mind the potential flaws in districts’ data gathering and reporting, DESE’s presentation of those data, and the journalists’ interpretation.

1. Inclusion of the term “discipline” only refers to internal suspensions, external suspensions and expulsions.
2. Most charter districts have reported district-wide disciplinary data, along with individual school breakdowns. But some only report individual schools, without district-wide totals and averages. The state, in turn, classifies some schools within the same charter districts as separate districts.
3. Since discipline data in the state’s public database only goes back to 2012, it is impossible to identify long-term trends. Other online DESE databases — such as student demographics at each public school district — go back to the 1990s.
4. Between the 2013–14 and 2014–15 academic years, the state abandoned use of the phrase “low income” in favor of “economically disadvantaged.” The two are calculated using different metrics. DESE’s press release announcing this change stated, “It is important for users of this data to understand that […] data for ‘economically disadvantaged’ students cannot be directly compared to ‘low income’ data in prior years.”