How Schools Teach Bullying

Chapter 5 considers the relationship between school discipline and an important contemporary issue: bullying. This chapter first looks at interviews with parents that illustrate how school officials sometimes bully students, and argues that excessive school punishment can be a form of bullying. It then turns to a quantitative analysis of nationally-representative survey data to show that students in schools where they perceive the rules to be unfair and unevenly enforced are at greater risk of being bullying victims than others.

Financial Costs of School Security and Punishment

Chapter 7 examines the financial impact of school security and punishment practices. Unlike most other governmental efforts, school safety practices seem to have evaded prior scrutiny of their costs. This chapter estimates their direct and indirect costs, including the expense of security infrastructure and disciplinary personnel, as well as the future costs of lost wages and justice system involvement that may result from school punishment. Estimates show that school security and punishment are very costly, despite the fact that prior research shows them to be fairly ineffective and even harmful.

Hurting Families

Chapter 4 looks at how school punishment can dramatically affect entire families. Based on a series of interviews with parents of youth who have been suspended and expelled from their schools, it illustrates the emotional and physical toll that school punishment can have on parents and siblings of punished students. As a result of these struggles with school punishment, some families eventually give up on working with schools and even on seeking an education for their children.

Introduction

This chapter describes the real school safety problem: how we over-police and punish students. It discusses current school practices, public discussions (or lack thereof) about these practices, actual levels of danger students face, and reasons why we have the policies and practices that we do. It then summarizes the contents of the chapters that follow.

Conclusion

Chapter 8 concludes the book by summarizing the argument about the real school safety problem and why this problem is vitally important for the well-being of youth, families, communities, and all of society. It outlines productive next steps for moving forward by discussing a series of principles that should be applied when addressing school security and punishment, and discusses potential obstacles for meaningful reform that must be overcome.

Civic Participation in the Future

This chapter turns to longer-term consequences of school punishment, asking how school suspension socializes young people into future roles as citizens. After discussing the powerful socializing effect of schools, where students are taught about their future roles as members of society, this chapter then presents quantitative analyses of nationally-representative data. The analyses show that students who are suspended in school are less likely to vote and volunteer in their communities years later, even after accounting for many factors known to shape one’s voting and volunteering behavior.

Extending Inequality

Chapter 3 focuses on how current school security and punishment practices actually increase inequality, particularly racial inequality. It describes the body of evidence showing that youth of color, particularly Black youth, are punished more harshly than white youth in schools, even when their behaviors are similar. It also reviews other dimensions of inequality, including social class, sex, special education status, and sexual identity, and how these statuses can intersect to put some youth at particular disadvantage. Finally, the chapter explains why schools increase inequality, and relates this problem to broader social issues.

Effective School Crime Prevention

This chapter summarizes the existing evidence on the subject of school safety practices. It argues that students need firm and clearly communicated rules, but that schools across the U.S. have gone too far in this direction, resulting in harmful over-policing and punishment of students. After describing how excessive punishment harms students, it then discusses the evidence about policing in schools. The chapter concludes by describing policies and practices supported by evidence as more promising strategies for promoting school safety.