Removing students from the classroom through exclusionary school discipline leads to negative long-term outcomes, including academic underachievement, dropout, and incarceration. Moreover, racial inequities in exclusionary discipline (known as the discipline gap) are widespread and long-standing. Decades of research show that Black students receive a disproportionate number of office discipline referrals, even when controlling for alternative explanations such as poverty. Unfortunately, many interventions used in schools to increase equity have yet to prove effective in decreasing the discipline gap.
In an article published in School Psychology, Kent McIntosh and colleagues from the University of Oregon describe the effectiveness of an intervention to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and decrease the discipline gap.