It’s a belief repeated every day by teachers, principals and parents of rule-abiding children: Suspending disruptive students will allow the rest of the class to settle down and learn. But a new, large study calls this rationale into question.
The study is believed to be the first to look closely at the academic performance of individual students who have never been suspended, but who attend schools where others are suspended. After tracking nearly 17,000 students over three years, two Midwestern researchers found that high rates of school suspensions harmed math and reading scores for non-suspended students.
The relationship was inverse: The higher the number of suspensions during the course of a semester, the lower the non-suspended students’ scores on end-of-semester reading and math evaluations, said Brea L. Perry, a sociologist at Indiana University and co-author of the study with Edward W. Morris, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky. The study, which was published in the December issue of the peer-reviewed journal American Sociological Review, involved students in 17 middle schools and high schools in a Kentucky school district.
[For more of this story, written by Jane Meredith Adams, go to http://edsource.org/2015/study...s/72501#.VLMQNCvF-5V]
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