DALLAS – Almost 60 percent of Texas public school students received punishments ranging from expulsion to in-school suspensions of a single period at least once between seventh and 12th grades, according to a new study released Tuesday.
The report, from the national nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center, also found that Texas schools with similar student populations are disciplining students at different rates. And students who were disciplined were more likely to do poorly academically and be involved in the juvenile justice system.
“Policymakers should be asking if the school discipline system is getting the outcomes they want it to get,” said Michael Thompson, director of the center, which did the study with Texas A&M University’s Public Policy Research Institute.
The study followed about 1 million public school students who began seventh grade in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Of those studied, nearly 15 percent had contact with the juvenile justice system, ranging from an arrest to a police officer counseling a youth and submitting paperwork to the juvenile probation department.
“What we’ve got to do is be smarter,” said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston. “Tough means turning somebody’s life around and finding out why they’re misbehaving.”
The center said the report doesn’t prove a direct causal relationship between suspension or expulsion and repetition of a grade, dropping out or getting involved in the criminal justice system. But by controlling for variables, “it’s fair to say that school discipline is highly related to these outcomes and strongly predicts these results,” the study found.
Texas was chosen for the one-of-a-kind study because of bipartisan support from state policymakers and the state’s availability of juvenile justice data, Thompson said. He also noted that nearly one in 10 public school children in the U.S. is educated in Texas, and its diversity 49 percent Hispanic, 33 percent white and 14 percent Black represents what is becoming more and more common in the U.S.
