Years ago, a groundbreaking review of student data from the 2013-2014 school year indicated that Black students were overrepresented among those experiencing punishment in a variety of contexts. In the intervening decade, new data has emerged, schools have implemented policies to reduce racial disparities, researchers have highlighted new methods…

Restorative justice is an increasingly common discipline policy, as schools grapple with historic inequities in traditional exclusionary discipline. This mixed-methods study examines the implementation of restorative justice in 28 intentionally diverse charter schools in five jurisdictions in the U.S. Qualitative findings suggest a range of…

School exclusion reduction in Scotland--and especially in the city of Glasgow--has received substantial media and policy attention in recent years. In London in particular, multiple governmental agencies have explicitly expressed a desire to replicate the exclusion reduction which recently occurred in Glasgow, often citing the connection between…

In the majority of South African schools, maintaining discipline remains a challenge -- a situation which commands the attention of departmental officials both locally and internationally. When negative disciplinary approaches were prohibited in schools in this country, positive disciplinary measures were recommended in the form of a code of…

Corporal punishment (CP), or inflicting pain through spanking, hitting, and paddling, is still legally sanctioned and exercised in U.S. schools. We use critical discourse analysis and draw on state policy documents and data from the Office of Civil Rights to investigate which discourses pervade policy texts and how CP is practiced. These sources…

Over the past decade, numerous reports have indicated pervasively high rates of early childhood expulsion nationwide. In response, state and federal policymakers have enacted various measures to ban or reduce reliance on such exclusionary discipline. Prior evaluations of the implementation of one such legislative ban on expulsion enacted in…

Many urban school districts are adopting restorative practices (RP) as a means to reduce suspensions and resolve racial discipline gaps. In this study, we use a sensemaking framework to examine educators' beliefs about discipline and their perceptions of RP and its implementation. We draw on survey responses (N = 363) administered after educators…

Expulsion is the harshest form of disciplinary action, and behavior policies are the foundation for this decision-making process. The purpose of this study is to uncover how behavior policies used in early childhood settings describe expulsion practices. Among the 111 early childhood programs in Western Massachusetts that met the search criteria…

Very limited research exists regarding the beliefs and practices of student support teams (SSTs), sometimes called child study teams or IEP teams, in settings with non-expulsion policies for young children with severely challenging behaviors. Previous research examined teacher and administrator beliefs and practices and found that they engage in…

The gymnastics' environment has been criticised for producing uncompromising coaching practices, emotional disorders, harassment and abuse. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the young gymnasts can be acute when they live in gymnastics boarding schools, where many aspects of their lives are controlled. Drawing upon a Foucauldian lens, this study…

Purpose: Although California school discipline policy changes over the past decade have resulted in significant drops in suspension rates, scholars have found that racial disproportionality in punitive discipline persists for Black, Indigenous, and at times Latinx students. This study utilizes racial capitalism as an analytical framework to…

Schools in New Zealand (NZ) have a range of disciplinary options when dealing with challenging behaviours, one of which is excluding students by way of stand-downs, suspensions, exclusions or expulsions. Following marginal downward trend from 2006 to 2015, the numbers of stand-downs and suspensions have been on the rise again since 2016 despite…

The purpose of this study was to understand one type of restorative discipline, collaborative conversations, which uses a structured dialogue process between an adult and a student to address disciplinary incidents. This study presents existing literature on restorative discipline and the benefits of a one-on-one model like the one discussed in…

As part of the effort to create safer and more protective learning environments in Ghanaian schools, the Ghana Education Service in 2017 officially banned all forms of corporal punishment and required teachers to adopt a positive discipline toolkit based on a manual prescribed as an alternative to corporal punishment. This study sought to…

Research Findings: Students perceived as struggling to regulate their emotions and behavior are at risk for experiencing classroom and school exclusion beginning in preschool. In this preliminary and exploratory secondary data analysis study, we examined teachers' self-reported use of classroom-based soft exclusionary discipline practices with…