Factors that Contribute to Disciplinary Alternative Education Placements: Lessons Learned from Urban Schools in Texas

Abstract

US public school children lose approximately 18 million days of instruction in one year due to exclusionary discipline (D. Losen et al., 2015). Researchers have found that exclusionary disciplinary policies are ineffective in keeping schools safe or deterrents for further student engagement in misbehaviors.  These exclusionary practices are most frequently found in large urban schools with high rates of student poverty and African American students are disproportionately impacted by these practices. Inequities in how disciplinary consequences are meted out in public schools to students along racial lines have been long documented in the research since the early 1970s.Nationally, 1.2 million Black students were suspended from K-12 public schools in a single academic year – 55% of those suspensions occurred in 13 Southern states. Of all of the southern states identified in this research conducted by Smith and Harper, 2015, the state of the Texas was the state with largest diverse student population with 71% of the student population being non-white. Given the large numbers of students that are suspended from schools in the US, this research explored school level factors that may provide a better understanding of this phenomenon such as concentration of poverty, concentration of African American students, teacher experience, education, and school size in urban schools in Texas.