Higher Education & Education Policy

Can We Make School Safe and Supportive for All?

Christopher Cleveland and Jennifer Greif Green explore the impact and equity implications of discipline decisions

While schools need to maintain discipline to function smoothly, many schools err on the side of discipline over inclusion. The result? Students of color and low-income students are disproportionately excluded from the classroom through suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to the juvenile justice system. And once a student has been excluded from the classroom, the likelihood that they will enter the criminal justice system increases dramatically.

School systems are beginning to reexamine these policies, though this progress has been inconsistent and spotty. For this Conversations with the Dean talk, Dean David Chard joined research assistant professor Christopher Cleveland and professor Jennifer Greif Green to discuss the impacts of the school-to-prison pipeline on systematically marginalized students, as well as ways that schools can maintain order in their classrooms without using discriminatory policies or methods.

Highlights from the Conversation

The use of disproportionate discipline

It is often the case that low-income students or students of color are treated differently than higher-income peers or white peers, even when you look at students who might be committing the same type of offense. And that’s been shown in static data about students and the way in which students are written about.

Christopher Cleveland

Ineffective zero-tolerance policies

It’s often the case that stricter discipline does not map onto higher achievement, which reflects that strict discipline is a response to student behavior that may not be a system that’s actually teaching students how to behave better.

Christopher Cleveland

The story told by student behavior

Schools are part of a bigger community. . . . This is a community responsibility to raise our children. If we think about behavior as telling a story, then our job is to figure out, “What are we learning from the students’ behavior?”

Jennifer Greif Green

Conversations with the Dean are a series of webinars hosted by Dean Chard that explore some of the most pressing topics in education. Learn more about Conversations with the Dean.