Discipline Reform Through the Eyes of Teachers

The debate over school discipline reform is one of the most polarized in all of education. Advocates for reform believe that suspensions are racially biased and put students in a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Opponents worry that softer discipline approaches will make classrooms unruly, impeding efforts to help all students learn and narrow achievement gaps.

To determine how practitioners see this complex issue, Fordham Institute partnered with the RAND Corporation to survey a nationally representative sample of more than 1,200 teachers in grades three through twelve. And because racial and socioeconomic equity is a key consideration in the discipline debate, they oversampled African American teachers and teachers in high-poverty schools to ensure that their views were represented—something not attempted in any prior discipline survey.