What are school disciplinary actions? 

As noted by the U.S. Department of Education (ED), creating a supportive school climate requires close attention to the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of all students. An action taken by a teacher or school administrator in response to a specific student offense is often referred to as a school disciplinary action. School disciplinary actions can be preventive, supportive, or corrective. 

• Preventive discipline is about establishing expectations, guidelines, and classroom rules for behavior to proactively promote positive student behavior and prevent classroom disruptions. Examples of preventive disciplinary actions that teachers use in the classroom include posting classroom rules in a visible location, verbalizing the consequences of negative or disruptive behavior, and providing positive reinforcement for following the rules. Use of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) framework would also constitute an example of preventive discipline. 

• Supportive discipline, on the other hand, occurs in the case of misbehavior or transgression. Examples of supportive disciplinary actions include verbal warnings, non-verbal warnings, and suggestions for the correction of behavior. 

Corrective discipline is used when a student fails to make a behavioral change after repeated attempts at supportive discipline. It mostly refers to the consequences delivered following an infraction and includes the domains referred to later in this profile in the subsection titled, “What domains can be used to assess school disciplinary actions?”

Exclusionary disciplinary actions, such as out-of-school suspension and expulsion, increase the risk of dropping out of school. Educational attainment is the social factor that is the single greatest predictor of a person’s health and well-being across the lifespan. Compared to high school and college graduates, adults who do not complete high school have poorer health and are more likely to die prematurely from preventable conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and lung disease. According to the authors of a study conducted in 2017, if high school dropout rates were cut in half nationally, the U.S. would save an estimated $7.3 billion annually in Medicaid spending, as well as $12 billion on spending related to heart disease, $11.9 billion on spending related to obesity, $8.9 billion in smoking-related costs, and $6.4 billion for alcoholism-related costs.7

Dropping out of school is also associated with adverse outcomes:

• Decreased self-esteem and psychological well-being.

• Lower rates of employment and lifetime earnings. 

• Increased risk of being incarcerated during their lifetime.

What domains can be used to assess school disciplinary actions?

The ED has categorized school disciplinary actions as exclusionary or inclusionary. Whereas exclusionary disciplinary actions remove students from their normal learning environment, inclusionary actions do not. 

• Exclusionary domains 

• • Expulsion. A type of discipline that removes a student from his or her normal learning setting for the remainder of the school year or longer, depending on the policy of the local education agency (LEA). The student’s educational services could continue (for example, at an alternative school) or cease during this time.

• • Out-of-school suspension. A type of discipline that excludes a student from school for one school day or longer.

• Inclusionary domains

• • In-school suspension. A disciplinary action that temporarily removes a student from his or her classroom or classrooms for at least half a day and keeps him or her under the supervision of school employees. Not all in-school suspension is inclusionary because it may result in loss of instruction time.

• • After school detention. A disciplinary action that does not remove a student from his or her normal learning setting and results in no loss of instruction time.

Who collects data on school disciplinary actions and for what purpose?

All public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. collect data on disciplinary actions and report the data to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) program. The ED initiated the CRDC program in 1968 to collect data on key education and civil rights issues in our nation’s public primary and secondary schools. The CRDC collects a variety of information including school disciplinary actions administered to students, most of which is disaggregated by student race, ethnicity, sex, limited English proficiency, and disability status. In 2020, the ED Office of Civil Rights (OCR) received approval from the Office of Management and Budget to require all LEAs in the country—including every public school district, charter schools, juvenile justice facilities, alternative schools, and schools serving only students with disabilities—to respond to the CRDC for the 2020-21 school year. 

The CRDC is a longstanding and important aspect of the ED OCR’s overall strategy for administering and enforcing the civil rights statutes that prohibit discrimination in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance from ED (e.g., Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act). OCR uses the data to identify nationwide trends in civil rights compliance and detect emerging issues of concern. Once the data are reviewed and analyzed, they are provided to the public as aggregated and de-identified data in three main formats: published reports, the OCR reporting website, and a data file. Other ED offices as well as policymakers and researchers outside of ED who work on issues related to civil rights use information the CRDC collects.

Schools that implement the PBIS framework also collect data on disciplinary actions. Such data are commonly used to assess the overall number of discipline incidents in schools that implement the framework with fidelity. The Center on PBIS has developed technical guidance for the use of classroom data to support implementation of positive classroom behavior support practices and systems.

Schools and school districts collect and report school disciplinary action data to monitor discipline incidents and collect data on key education and civil rights issues in schools. However, health departments can also use population-level data to identify schools, school districts, or subpopulations that are experiencing high rates of disciplinary actions and assess changes in the trend over time. School disciplinary action data not only influence future mental health, but could also serve as a population-level indicator of current mental health among children and adolescents—both especially useful to public health.