Overview
Leveraging disciplinary data to advocate for students can help promote fairness, equity, and positive outcomes. Likewise, by utilizing disciplinary data for advocacy, stakeholders can work toward creating an inclusive and supportive environment that fosters the academic and personal growth of all students.
In a southern U.S. school district, community advocates sought to examine potential discrepancies in the use of exclusionary disciplinary practices by carefully analyzing the data. However, during the process, a broader narrative emerged – one of education opportunity.
Because both in-school and out-of-school suspensions result in lost instructional time, and since missing learning directly affects a student’s ability to make academic gains, examining disciplinary data alongside achievement data revealed inequities in terms of disproportionate disciplinary actions and differences in learning progress. Originally, families and community stakeholders intended to advocate for specific policy changes related to exclusionary practices. After examining all of the data, however, a more complex equity challenge emerged. Data can help inform advocacy across the system through:
Essential Supports to meet students’ academic and social-emotional needs – such as professional learning and resources to help teachers implement more responsive and culturally relevant practices.
Enabling Systems and Structures such as policies that do not continue to adversely affect students’ ability to learn. For example, the majority of disciplinary actions in both districts were a result of attendance violations. This policy penalized students for missing school by forcing them to miss even more instruction.
Ongoing Processes to ensure future disciplinary policies are more equitably designed as well as to inform and monitor continuous improvement in both student behavior and academic progress.
Using a framework to identify the data needed to advocate for students’ equitable disciplinary problems can be beneficial for several reasons:
Identifying systemic issues: Analyzing disciplinary data can help uncover patterns and disparities in how disciplinary actions are administered among students. It allows us to identify potential biases or discriminatory practices that may disproportionately affect certain groups of students based on race, gender, grade-level, disability status, or other facets of identity. By shedding light on these issues, advocates can push for reforms and interventions that promote fairness and equity.
Promoting equity and fairness: Data can highlight disparities in disciplinary actions based on factors such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or disability. This information can be used to advocate for policies and practices that ensure equitable treatment among all students.
Developing targeted interventions: Analyzing disciplinary data helps identify specific areas or behaviors that contribute to disciplinary actions. With this information, educators and school administrators can develop targeted interventions and support systems to address the root causes of disciplinary issues. By providing students with the necessary resources, guidance, and interventions, educators can help prevent future disciplinary incidents and promote positive behavior.
Improving student outcomes: By leveraging disciplinary data, educators can gain insights into the impact of disciplinary actions on students' academic achievement, attendance, and overall wellbeing. This data can be used to advocate for alternative disciplinary approaches that focus on restorative practices, social-emotional learning, and positive behavioral supports. By shifting the focus from punitive measures to proactive and supportive strategies, schools can foster a more nurturing and conducive learning environment that ultimately leads to improved student outcomes.
Enhancing accountability and transparency: Utilizing disciplinary data allows for increased accountability and transparency in educational institutions. It enables stakeholders – including parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers – to assess the effectiveness and fairness of disciplinary policies and practices. By advocating for the use of data-driven decision-making processes, individuals can hold schools and districts accountable for their disciplinary actions and push for critical changes when needed.
As you work through a framework to collect needed data for advocacy, it is important that you collect the right data that will enable you to explore the problem you have identified – rather than collecting data to support a preconceived idea or notion. Follow the steps below to take efforts toward collecting the right data:
The need for individual, student-level data: Particularly when looking at the district or school level, it is important to request and analyze data containing some form of student identifier such as a random ID number. This will allow for direct comparisons and helps ensure that the same student is not represented multiple times in a data set. Individual student-level data should also include grade, race, gender, and other demographic information so that trends can be examined across subgroups (e.g., white males in middle school).
Connections between the incident and response data: Particularly with disciplinary data, it is critical to understand the relationship between incidents and the associated actions or responses. When requesting data, the type(s) of infraction should be connected with each individual student and the associated response.
Indication of the severity of the associated action: Stakeholders should be able to observe the type of response associated with each incident and the severity (e.g., length of each suspension in days). For example, data could reveal whether two students received different suspension lengths for the same incident.
Data can be a powerful tool to advocate for equitable disciplinary policies and practices. Critical to student success is the need to avoid lost instructional time so that learning is maximized. Using data to advocate for students can help develop a restorative culture that promotes a sense of belonging and commitment to excellence for all students.
