Good intentions preclude course corrections

Still probably too soon to tell, but at some point you have to make a call, do we continue with a reform that was well intentioned but is failing or do we pull the plug because of negative consequences. From Suspension Reform Is Tormenting Schools by Max Eden.

Under an Obama-era directive and the threat of federal civil rights investigation, thousands of American schools changed their discipline policies in an attempt to reduce out-of-school suspensions. Last year, education-policy researchers Matthew Steinberg and Joanna Lacoe reviewed the arguments for and against discipline reform in Education Next, concluding that little was known about the effects of the recent changes. But this year, the picture is becoming clearer: discipline reform has caused a school-climate catastrophe.

No doubt the reform was well-intentioned. The evidence that punishment of non-conforming behavior might not be effective was scanty but the evidence for abandoning punishments as a policy was also weak. Weak, but plausible.

The weakness of the evidence made poor grounds for dramatic policy change, but that was what was done.

To what effect? Eden reports:

Philadelphia is the latest city to fall into crisis, according to a new study conducted by Lacoe and Steinberg. The Philly school district serves 134,000 students, about 70 percent of whom are black or Latino. In the 2012–13 school year, Philadelphia banned suspensions for non-violent classroom misbehavior. Steinberg and Lacoe estimate that, compared with other districts, discipline reform reduced academic achievement by 3 percent in math and nearly 7 percent in reading by 2016. The authors do report that, among students with previous suspensions, achievement increased by 0.2 percent. But this only demonstrates that well-behaved students bore the brunt of the academic damage.

Lacoe and Steinberg report another small improvement among previously suspended students: their attendance rose by 1.43 days a year. But again, this development was more than offset by the negative trend in the broader student body. Truancy in Philadelphia schools had been declining steadily before the reform, but then rose at an astonishing rate afterward, from about 25 percent to over 40 percent.

Perhaps students were staying at home because they were scared to be at school. Suspensions for non-violent classroom misbehavior dropped after the ban, but suspensions for “serious incidents” rose substantially. The effort to reduce the racial suspension gap actually increased it; African-American kids spent an extra .15 days out of school.

Tiny improvements in outcomes for that tiny percentage of the student body who had bad behavior issues. But that small improvement for a small population came at the expense of large costs in learning effectiveness to the large majority of students.

Pull the plug now is the first instinct. But there are counter-arguments - "we have to improve implementation," "we need to give it a longer trial," "we need to improve school support for the initiative," etc. Yes, that is possible. It seems like the answer should be to pull the plug, reverse course, and reconsider what alternative strategies might work to reduce the costs of student discipline. But it seems likely that that is not what will happen. It is very hard to kill an ineffective program which has good intentions.