Discipline Disparities and the Need for Data in the Discussion in Minnesota (and all) Schools

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Ensuring equity of opportunity has always been an integral part of the work that school districts aspire to achieve for their students. Academic equity is a central goal for most districts across the state and one need look no further than a district’s strategic plan to find a deliberate and focused effort to “close achievement gaps” or “ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes for all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or beliefs.” To measure success, districts generally compare performance across subgroups on common assessments and high stakes tests such as the MCA in the form of percentile rank and growth. While results are often mixed, there is little question that both the desire and commitment to ensure academic equity in the classroom for all students is strong.

Many districts in the state and across the country have shifted their focus from purely academic outcomes to those rooted in a more holistic view of supporting the “whole child” that incorporates an emphasis on social-emotional learning (SEL). In order for an educator to view the student with this lens, he/she requires an understanding of how behavior and responses play a role in preparing and supporting students. Thus, there has been a renewed emphasis on discipline practices and districts have began to adhere to or adopt concepts and frameworks such as Positive Behavioral Supports, first mentioned in law as part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) amendment in 1997 and as part of a multi-tiered systems of support model alluded to in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

In Minnesota, the issue of disproportionality has become a hot button issue as in 2018, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights warned 43 school districts and charters about discipline disparities after a comprehensive review of their student discipline data (1).

A recent article by the MinnPost noted that the state began “digging into discipline data” in the Discipline Incident Reporting System (DIRS) across a five-year period from 2011-2016 and found disparities in subjective exclusionary discipline practices across subgroups, specifically African American and Native American students. Rebecca Lucero, the department’s new commissioner, stated,

“Once we went in, we were able to peel back again and dig into the data even more… even more problems have come to light.”

Upon completing their investigations, Lucero expects these districts and charters to enter in an agreement with the state to be accountable for and committed to making eliminating these discipline disparities while providing the district with a level of autonomy to develop their own action plans. Some school districts, are pushing back citing the ambiguity of the ‘agreement’ and concerns over the value that the state would actually provide in suggesting better practices than what the district already has put in place.

All this points to the need for all teachers, leaders, and teams across the districts to have a firm understanding of their behavior data so that they can identify issues and opportunities proactively. Dr. Howie Knoff, a well-known School Improvement Consultant and founder of Project ACHIEVE, notes that it’s important to analyze your school discipline data early and often so that you can make strategic plans and organizational decisions. He encourages districts to consider 5 reports to ask and answer several questions to guide your school discipline plan.

The five data analysis points are as follows (see next page for example images):

1. Discipline offenses by grade, students, and place of infraction (divided by the number of school days in the month)

2. Discipline offenses by grade, gender, race, free lunch, and disability status

3. Discipline offenses by grade, students, infraction, place of infraction

4. Discipline reports mentioned above by the day of the week and time of day

5. Discipline reports mentioned above by the staff person making the referral

Once your teams have access to the right data, it’s important to ask questions

Having this data will help you with the next steps - identifying the problem and putting a measurable plan in place. The PBIS Team Handbook (4) suggests using Precision Statements rather than Primary Statements to help clarify and guide your strategic planning around discipline and behavior. Precision statements move beyond generalizations such as, “We have too many suspensions” to something far more specific that answers the classic “5W’s”.

We can modify the statement above to make it a Precision Statement by stringing together the answers to the following questions :

What? Fighting

Where? On the playground

When? Before school

Who? By 5th grader male students

Why? To gain peer attention

The sentence would look like this: “The most frequent cause for suspensions last year was due to fighting on the playground before school by 5th grade male students to gain peer attention." Once you have this statement, you can target your actions and resources to drive change. Additionally, once you’ve put your plan into practice, you can now run a comparative search over the same time period to report on the change in behaviors.

For districts in Minnesota and across the country, the debate regarding equity and disproportionality will continue. Now more than ever, it's critical that the right stakeholders are empowered with the data and tools to identify issues and opportunities, take action, and support the decisions and strategies put into practice so that they can support all students.

Respectfully,

-Mike