How School Suspensions Affect Students’ Well-Being In School

A Q&A with Jaymes Pyne

In this interview, Jaymes Pyne, our newest research associate, shares insights from his recent paper, Suspended Attitudes: Exclusion and Emotional Disengagement from School.

What gap in the literature do you address in your paper?

My paper addresses open questions about the impacts school suspensions have on students’ well-being in school. I noticed the literature on suspensions largely assumed suspensions were altering students’ relationships with learning and with others in school. There isn’t a very solid empirical basis for that claim though. I had access to data that could do a pretty good job of testing the assumption that suspensions cause students psychological harm. By drawing on theories of deviance and delinquency, I was able to put that common-sense understanding of school suspensions to the test -and it held up through a lot of scrutiny.

When students emotionally engage in school, how does it affect their academic outcomes?

I am fascinated by this question, which is why it is a big part of my dissertation work. I see engaging in school as a necessary precursor for students to take advantage of learning opportunities. It is tough to envision how an unengaged student does as well in school as an engaged student, all else equal. There is a broad research base in the behavioral and social sciences to support that general claim.

In my dissertation, I unpack the process of how students engage in school over the early life course and how that process relates to their later academic, behavioral, and emotional outcomes.

Why did you focus your study on middle school students?

Middle school is when we typically start seeing suspensions skyrocket. Many researchers believe this is due in part to the transition from elementary to middle school. The data I use track students shortly after they make this stressful and jarring transition, meaning many students are just starting to experience out-of-school suspension. Based on the theory I draw from in this paper, this should also be an important time when students are beginning to solidify their beliefs about themselves and their relationship to formal education. This makes it a time when suspensions should matter for emotional engagement.

What, if anything, surprised you as you conducted your research?

I was most surprised by how robust these results were to different checks. It’s reasonable to expect students’ measured attitudes at any given time reflect their accumulated feelings and experiences prior to that time. So it’s likely a student who doesn’t like school at the end of sixth grade didn’t like school much at the beginning of sixth grade or the end of fifth grade, for instance. I came into this project expecting that students’ prior attitudes and disciplinary involvement would account for most of the suspension-attitude association. But for changes in the degree to which suspended students trust in adults and identify with the work of school, those associations were robust no matter what I threw at them. That leads me to believe the suspension itself might be changing students’ attitudes regardless of how those students felt prior to the suspension.

What can educators take away from this research about the effects of exclusionary practices on students?

This study adds a crucial piece of evidence to the question of whether out-of-school suspension policies harm students. I stop short of saying that this study definitively shows suspensions cause students to emotionally disengage from school. As I discuss in the paper, making that claim would necessitate more study using a range of advanced methods in a range of academic contexts. Rather, this study should give educators pause if they are dismissing suspended students’ disengagement as simply part of a longer downward trend in their educational histories. Kids who weren’t getting suspended the year prior have stronger suspension-disengagement associations than those who did have a suspension history.

Taking this study’s findings in tandem with many more in recent years, I would encourage educators to think more broadly. Which aspects of schooling can help students feel welcome and ready to learn? Which can potentially alienate certain groups of students?

These are important questions to address regardless of whether you believe suspensions lead students to disengage from school.

Will what you learned from this study inform your work at the Gardner Center? How so?

Absolutely. In terms of my policy pursuits, I’m most interested in interrogating common-sense understandings of the social world. Many times, there are multiple, conflicting common-sense explanations for social phenomena. Like, do we believe suspensions are more a cause or more a consequence of student disengagement? This study and others I’m working on have taught me to follow the empirics to their logical conclusions, and to acknowledge and challenge my own assumptions of how things are or should be.

What are you looking forward to most about your move to California from Wisconsin?

I feel like I should say the weather or the topography. But what I’m really excited about is being around and learning from new groups of scholars and investigating social and educational policy in new communities and contexts. I’ve been a Midwesterner for life (Michigan and Wisconsin), so it will be good for me to have an intimate understanding of a new part of the country.