to the Learning Policy Institute, “A substantial body of research has shown that traditional exclusionary discipline practices like suspensions and expulsions are associated with negative outcomes for students, including missed instructional time, low test scores, high dropout rates, and involvement in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”

Putting a ban in place is one thing, but providing local educational agencies with the resources, funding and tools to make it happen is another. A successful initiative takes a commitment to school culture change, dedication to training and fidelity in implementation. While the California Department of Education provides some cursory resources and information related to implementing the ban, much more is needed to move the needle on student suspensions and disproportionality.

A growing body of research points to the foundation for reducing suspensions — and it begins with a strong, positive school culture focused on belonging and relationship building. Research also identifies tools that can be used to create a school culture shift or continue one already in progress. A focus on using social-emotional learning (SEL), a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) such as Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) and restorative practices work to improve school climate, reduce behavioral incidents and build relationships among students and staff.

Multiple research initiatives in California are looking at how to implement willful defiance bans successfully — meaning that disproportionality is also addressed. Education leaders should be aware going in that there is no quick fix, according to experts.

“If we look at the evidence from implementation science, school implementation, done well, will take four to five years,” said Michael Corral, project director of the Race, Education, and Community Healing (REACH) Network at the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. “And so, the hesitation is that a school system pushes in restorative practices through professional development districtwide, and nothing changes on the concrete suspensions, or changes so minimally that the board loses confidence in it, school leaders lose confidence in it and think: ‘Let’s go back to what we were doing.’”

A school culture shift to one of inclusion begins with a look at an LEA’s discipline and suspension data to identify where negative trends occur. This data can be used to identify where students land in MTSS, which provides strategies and interventions to determine what supports are needed to meet students’ academic and behavioral needs at each tier. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a Tier 1 system is effective when it meets the needs of at least 80 percent of the student population as determined by various data points including grades, attendance, behavior and surveys.

It all begins with social-emotional learning, which is “the process through which children and adults develop and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” according to CASEL.

PBIS and SEL can work hand in hand in a district, though their theoretical frameworks differ. Both focus on creating safe and supportive environments, teaching students new skills and using data to make informed decisions. PBIS, however, seeks to ultimately increase positive behavior, while SEL aims to empower students and promote more equitable outcomes by helping them build skills and competencies that help them navigate the world more effectively.

Sean Darling-Hammond, an education researcher and Berkeley Public Health assistant professor of Health and Social Behavior and Community Health Sciences, said both frameworks interact to prime an environment for the successful implementation of restorative practices.

“Social-emotional learning gives students the tools they need to foster and develop positive relationships, to have the motivation to want to repair them in the first place and the skills to repair them when they want to,” Darling-Hammond said. “It creates a paradigm where teachers feel like they have to show up in their best social and emotional way to teach SEL. I think that’s a really important part of the puzzle. PBIS, on the other hand, creates that culture of inclusion. Now you’re saying, ‘All right, if a student makes a mistake, here are the steps we can take before we even say the word suspension, before we’re even thinking about exclusion — here are all the things we can try.’”

PBIS focuses on promoting positive behavior by teaching and reinforcing appropriate behavior, rather than just punishing negative behavior. PBIS includes the use of specific strategies and interventions, such as establishing clear expectations for behavior, providing positive feedback and reinforcement and using data to monitor and adjust interventions as needed. The aim of the PBIS framework is to identify early warning signs of poor behavioral outcomes in students and provide immediate intervention with a series of approaches. PBIS does not recommend specific curricula, teaching strategies or reinforcement methods. Instead, it is left to local decision-makers to choose evidence-based strategies that meet the needs of their unique student population at each tier.

Modesto City Schools has been working to improve its school climate and suspension rates since 2012. In 2011, the district engaged in a deep analysis of suspension rate data that showed Black and Hispanic/Latino students and students with disabilities were being suspended at much greater rates than their peers.

“We began training on Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports in the 2012 school year, followed by yearly training in restorative practices,” said Mark Herbst, associate superintendent of Student Support Services. “Dr. [Sara] Noguchi was hired as superintendent in June 2018, and the following year, she established an Equity Task Force. The purpose of this task force was to engage with various educational partners to identify recommendations that would guide our equity-related initiatives over the next four years. Over the past five years, the district has employed a multi-pronged approach to address equity-related issues through professional development, student voice, equity audits and site-based strategies. This work has resulted in a better understanding of how inequities affect students and employees.”

Restorative practice is a field within the social sciences that studies how to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as social connections within communities. “You want a school climate where people want to repair their relationships — the relationship has to be there to restore in the first place,” said UCLA’s Corral. “So, that can look like community-building circles to begin the day, that’s social and emotional learning practices so that students have the skills they need to repair relationships if they’ve made mistakes. They also have the ability to introspect and understand their own emotions well enough so that they know when they’ve made a mistake; they can empathize with somebody in a more effective way. Those are all restorative practices that I think are really important, synergistically, with restorative justice.”

Restorative practices are the foundation; restorative justice is enacted when harm has been done by a student to other students or staff and they are brought together to repair the relationships, encouraging accountability for the offending party and making plans going forward to avoid the same mistakes.

The REACH Network, a collaboration between UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools and the UC Berkeley Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity, was created through a series of small grants facilitated by Assemblymember Skinner to support working with school districts to implement restorative practices and identify those that are most effective. The grants are for two years, and the program is currently in its second year of implementation. While the project leaders hope to find more available funding, it isn’t guaranteed.

The first year was “really exploring how we gain and understand progress around adult mind shifts, around systemic change, around how adults are looking at things differently with the relationships they build with young people, with their level of empathy, with their level of cultural competency,” explained Corral. “We know those things will lead to stronger academic outcomes and social outcomes, but we’re really trying to be creative and think about how we can intermittently show, in a concrete way, progress that doesn’t immediately lead to those dashboard numbers that will be published at the end of the year.”

La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, a TK-8 district in east San Diego County, is a participant in the REACH Network. The Student Support Services team had already been working on ways to address suspension disproportionality with its Black students, foster youth and youth experiencing homelessness, and students with disabilities. While the district already had several programs in place to help mitigate suspensions and disparities, staff saw a clear alignment with the goals of the network.

“Prior to joining this network, we’ve made pretty large strides in addressing the inequities in response to student behaviors,” said Jennifer Coronel, director of Student Support Services. “I think the most notable is that we started our own in-house alternative-to-suspension program. We call it our diversion program and it runs five days a week. A student at the middle school level who commits a suspendible offense has the opportunity to participate the next day in a day of diversion where they learn about brain function, they talk about the incident that led to their participation in the program, they talk about alternative coping mechanisms. They create a plan for what they could do in the event something like that happens again.” That is followed by a “welcome back” meeting the following day where the child has an opportunity to make amends and let staff know how they can be best supported going forward.

With this foundational commitment from the district, along with trauma-informed professional development for all staff and full-time social workers at each site, the La Mesa-Spring Valley team spent the first year of the network identifying what would help most with addressing suspension disproportionality. To narrow scope, they decided to focus on one of their four middle schools, while the other three would serve as control groups.

“Our biggest takeaway from year one was the importance of relationships between our students, our families and our staff,” Coronel said. “Conducting empathy interviews really helped us to understand and to be able to share that information with teachers that we acknowledge that it can be really difficult to change mindsets. But through this work, we were hoping that we would give teachers and parents an opportunity to meet, build relationships so that teachers could really understand what parents want for their kids, what their hopes and dreams are.”

A main goal set by the district is to implement visits by the Student Support Services team that can be at the student’s home or a neutral space, like a coffee shop. The district is now gearing up for professional development on home visits, making sure they are aware of cultural contexts and best practices.

UCLA’s Corral said the biggest challenge so far has been with data. He said the 10 districts in the network all collect data using various methods, but “even in the very controlled environment that we have with the REACH Network, it’s so hard for them to pull the data, have access to it, clean the data, understand the student information system, understand how much data they do and don’t have — it’s one of those areas where I think it’s so important to show progress, to show understanding, to show evidence, especially for groups like school boards or the community that are voting on different funding.”

While restorative practices focus on school culture and community building, research shows that it is often the biases, known or unknown, of teachers that lead to disproportionality. While anti-bias training is available and often used, research has not proven its effectiveness in mitigating bias. A new approach with promising results is what education researcher and social psychologist in the department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University Jason Okonofua calls “sidelining bias.”

“Sidelining bias is basically taking the focus off of the bias itself and rather focusing on the consequences of the bias,” he said. “For example, the actual outcome of interest here is suspension rates or expulsions or referrals to law enforcement as well as the disparities in them. So, one part is to focus on that instead of making a whole conversation or approach about bias. And then the other component is to elevate someone’s professional goals in a way that would render bias not functional.”

He said reminding teachers why they wanted to be an educator in the first place is part of the strategy. “I’ve interviewed hundreds of teachers and their goal has never been that they only want to help certain students, their goal is to help all students become their best possible selves — and that they especially want to do it for the students that may not receive that kind of support elsewhere. It really changes the narrative. And what we found is that by taking that type of approach, it may not necessarily immediately get rid of bias, but it does lead to the mitigation of the disparity, the actual outcome of interest.”

Okonofua created an empathic discipline program, an online training consisting of two modules of 40 minutes each, designed to “be cost efficient and scalable.” The modules are interactive, set up to affirm teachers as the experts in the classroom and tap into their actual experiences “in a way that can make them more likely to see or feel empowered to have more high-quality relationships with their students.”

The training was implemented in 20 schools across 17 cities in the United States through districts’ MTSS. The MTSS specialists served as school facilitators responsible for introducing the program and monitoring participation at each school. The training meaningfully reduced yearlong suspension rates by 2.4 percentage points and mitigated racial disparities in suspensions by 45 percent (reduction of 5.6 percentage points).

Modesto City Schools, which has been working with Okonofua to address its suspension disparities in a variety of ways including the empathic discipline training and restorative practices, is beginning to see results. “We have seen an overall decrease in our suspension rates, particularly at the high school level and similar decrease with our African American and Hispanic student groups,” said Herbst. “It’s important to note that there is more work to do. It isn’t that disparities no longer exist. Our success thus far is that we are addressing disparities and seeing positive movement in the data.”

The district has increased its Tier 2 and 3 supports to include meetings with behavior analysts, student assistant specialists, family support specialists and mental health clinicians to keep the data trending in the right direction.

Darling-Hammond emphasized the importance of buy-in at all levels — from the board and superintendent to principals, teachers and classified staff — for interventions such as restorative practices to be effective. He emphasized it’s not enough to just train a few teachers — it needs to be schoolwide and consistent for students to actually feel supported and that they can be honest and vulnerable. “The school districts that seem to [implement restorative practices] well, based on my own qualitative research, have a cultural orientation to inclusion. They have a radical inclusion paradigm.”