Exclusionary School Discipline

BY STEVE NUZUM

About a decade ago, I worked for a few months as a certified long-term substitute teacher at what was then called the Alternative Academy for Success. 

The school was located in a large, demographically-diverse district. Classrooms for high school students were housed in an old elementary school building with what appeared to be ‘90s-era elementary school murals still on the walls. Old insulation drooped from the ceilings. A steel prison-style door with a wire mesh window greeted staff and students at the entrance; we had to hold our IDs up to a camera to be buzzed in.

Alternative academies, sometimes called “success centers” or “success academies,” are one common institutional response to real and perceived student behavior problems, with the general feeling being that housing students who have been expelled from their home schools together on an alternative campus is a way to address serious discipline problems. Sometimes these are pitched as places where students can get special assistance with emotional issues, and in theory that sounds pretty good. 

In practice, many of the students at the Academy for Success told me they had committed single nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession on campus. Others appeared to have significant undiagnosed emotional problems. Outbursts over seemingly minor issues during class were common. Fights always seemed to be on the verge of breaking out. 

I am not aware of any staff who were trained specifically in dealing with the complex psychological and social issues that drove the behavior of many of the students. While the administrative staff of the school was extremely small, many disciplinary issues were handled directly by police officers (SROs) without training for working in an academic setting or with students with emotional or cognitive disabilities.

And, in a state like South Carolina, in which a large percentage of our schools are still heavily racially segregated, it bears pointing out that while the district was racially diverse, the Academy’s student population appeared to be disproportionately African American, a trend that, as we’ll see below, tracks with research on school discipline. In the large classes I taught, most students were Black; according to state enrollment data, more the majority of students in the district were White, and there were more than twice as many White students as Black students. (Research suggests that school districts generally transfer minority students to alternative schools at a greater rate than their peers.) 

South Carolina continues to struggle with how to serve all students, including those with behavior problems which are often caused or exacerbated by undiagnosed or unserved emotional or cognitive issues. 

The data on exclusionary discipline

My experience is somewhat reflected in the research. The Cato Institute, for example, has reported that students who attend alternative academies seem to experience less academic success than their peers in traditional schools, and that even behavior outcomes are mixed. 

Suspending and expelling students has long been a significant issue in the state. Federal data in 2024 showed that South Carolina suspended more preschool students than any other state. And according to attorney Jennifer Rainville from South Carolina’s Appleseed Legal Justice Center, “We as a state suspend more kids with a disability than any other state in the country.”

According to a recent analysis by The 74, “No state removes students with disabilities from school for 10 days or fewer at a higher rate than South Carolina. There, some 15% of special education students faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-23 school year — nearly twice the national average”. 

Suspension and expulsion are examples of what experts call “exclusionary discipline”. According to the Learning Policy Institute, “research shows that exclusionary discipline is ineffective at improving school safety and deterring infractions”. Furthermore, “suspended students are more likely to suffer academically, repeat a grade, and drop out of school. Students who receive suspensions are also less likely to graduate from high school and college and are more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system.” 

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that students of color were far more likely to be subject to exclusionary discipline than White students, that the amount of exclusionary discipline was associated with a decrease in grade point average, and that such disciplinary actions could be considered an “adverse childhood experience”. Adverse childhood experiences are closely associated with chronic stress and other issues that follow students into adulthood. 

Of course, many educators will point out that it’s hard to say how many students are actually subject to exclusionary discipline, because school discipline data is part of the high-stakes School Report Card system required by ESSA (the Every Student Succeeds Act, a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind). Schools are incentivized to report less suspensions and expulsions. With that said, it’s likely that problem student behaviors and disciplinary actions for those behaviors are both higher than the report card data suggests.

Student behavior issues are also a real concern, and a threat to retaining teachers

When I was a teacher and actively trying to organize teachers, I heard from teachers and collected data from teachers that reflected a fraught situation around classroom behavior. One teacher described how an elementary school student regularly fell into uncontrollable rages, physically endangering other students, throwing chairs and objects, breaking classroom materials, and attacking the teachers to the point that they were left with bruises and marks. 

The school district’s response to these outbursts, according to the teacher, was to remove all students from the classroom and wait for the outburst to pass.

According to data from the 2024 SC Teacher Exit Survey, 42.1% of teachers who left their current job for another education job reported that the “Frequency with which students misbehave” was the largest “job demand” that influenced their decision. 33.9% of teachers who left the profession responded similarly. 

A few years earlier, during the height of the pandemic, I collected survey responses from over 1,500 educators for the education nonprofit SC for ED. In the free response section, some teachers shared that student behavior, and/ or lack of administrative support for dealing with behavior, were major factors in their consideration of whether to keep teaching. 

One respondent wrote, “I am extremely frustrated with the lack of discipline in our high school. We have at least 100 unprocessed referrals and no admin in the hallways. Disrespect and refusal to obey is rampant with fights occurring every day. With everything going on related to COVID, this is my tipping point. I have been actively searching for jobs since the second week of school.”

Another wrote, “I love teaching, but I absolutely hate being a teacher right now. I have also never had the discipline issues I'm having this year and the consequence for disrupting class, profanity, disrespect, and not following directions from the teacher is always lunch detention. It's not working. My administrators don't have a clue how everyone is drowning and burning out even though we tell them every day. I am applying to non-teaching jobs and plan to leave as soon as I can.” 

A teacher with a large number of students with special education needs wrote, “Discipline is a major issue as well as a lot of these students have emotional deficits and should not be in the same class with other students that are disruptive.”

Another wrote, “Behavior has escalated this year. With lack of staff and support it has made the environment unsafe. Fights break out almost daily. Teachers are teaching 2-3 classes in the auditorium, or opening the dividing walls to help cover classes. Lunch duty and car duty has doubled.”

Many teachers reported that there was inadequate staffing or administrative support to deal with the additional emotional and behavioral needs of students who had missed one or more years of school due to COVID.

In my own last two years as a teacher, I was shoved by a student during class and multiple other students in the hallway while on lunch duty. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t have the training, or possibly the temperament, to deal with physical aggression from students my own size. While I was occasionally frustrated and unnerved by student behavior, I also felt like I was part of a system that wasn’t able to address the deeper issues beneath that behavior. 

As Rainville, who has worked extensively with students dealing with the school discipline system in South Carolina, repeatedly reminded me, “Behavior is communication.” And while she was specifically referencing student behavior, we have to remember that adult behavior is communication. If we treat students like prisoners, that sends a message. If we move them out of their home school to a facility for “bad kids” elsewhere in the district, that sends a message. And we should be thoughtful about which messages we really want to send.

On the other hand, teacher self-reports, including mine, represent anecdotal data, they do give some context to the high rate of suspensions and expulsions, as well as the temptation to try to solve student behavior issues-- both perceived and real-- with exclusionary discipline and by “hardening” schools by adding additional police officers, metal detectors, and other elements that have a dubious record of success at making students safer, but which research suggest make students feel more anxious at school, and more disenfranchised from the educational system.

What we’re doing isn’t working.

It seems clear that whatever we are doing to try to serve students and address problematic student behaviors isn’t working for students or for educational staff, and that the major tools at our disposal, especially exclusionary discipline, haven’t addressed many teachers’ perception-- which is frequently more than warranted-- that student misbehavior is out of control. 

And state data suggests that while overall suspensions and expulsions were down during the era of the pandemic when many students were learning remotely, they increased significantly when students were back in school. Of course, these increases coincided with record-high teacher state teacher vacancies and an increase in heated anti-school rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and even harassment and doxxing of educators, from some community members. These adult behaviors aren’t modeling healthy cooperation with educators for students. 

As Rainville told me, “Part of the problem is that there aren’t enough teachers.” She pointed out that exclusionary discipline is often a way of “kicking the can”-- addressing student misbehavior in a superficial way that results in more problems for both students and educators as those students get older and bigger but don’t have their deeper needs addressed. As the SC Teacher data shows, the behavior issue thus becomes a part of a vicious cycle, in which we don’t have enough staff members trained in both academics and student behavior, to deal with current student behavior, which in turn drives more and more educators who could help deal with that behavior out of the system. 

Or, as Rainville puts it, “We have to lower our classroom sizes. We have to get teachers better instruction on how to identify a student with a disability and how to approach behavior as a communication.”