UC San Diego

This study explored the importance of school factors in school administrators’ decisions to utilize exclusionary discipline practices. By drawing on the lenses of Critical Race Theory and Self Determination Theory, this exploratory study provided insight into the school factors that make educational leaders predisposed to use detrimental educational discipline practices and contribute to the school to prison pipeline. Exclusionary discipline is defined in this study as any consequence administered by the classroom teacher or site administrator that causes a student to be excluded from classroom instruction for disciplinary purposes. The term exclusionary discipline is defined as the use of an office disciplinary referral (ODR), an in-school suspension (ISS), out-of-school suspension (OSS), and expulsion. There is a growing body of research indicating these types of disciplinary practices are detrimental to positive student outcomes because the student loses valuable instructional time and is pushed out of the school community. Although these discipline policies significantly impact students of color, they are created and implemented by the White educational power structure and specifically lack student input (Weinstein et al., 2004). Administrators are in the challenging position to ensure student safety, as well as increase academic achievement, yet they are left with a limited number of evidence-based strategies outside of exclusionary discipline (Fenning et al., 2018; Welsh and Little, 2018). This exploratory qualitative case study explored the school factors, beliefs and actions that influence administrators to use exclusionary discipline. Using a qualitative approach, veteran school administrators participated in interview sessions, and the data was analyzed to explore the school factors that inform administrators’ use of exclusionary discipline, as well as how their beliefs and leadership behaviors influence their implementation of discipline policies.The results of this qualitative case study showed that school administrators face a range of internal and external pressures to ensure their school provides campus-wide safety and an orderly learning environment. There are a number of school conditions that contribute to the reduction of the use of exclusionary discipline including: a culture of predictability, maintaining the trust of teachers, partnering with parents and meeting the unique needs of students. Results also indicate that there are exacerbating conditions that contribute to a higher rate of suspension and expulsion, including public perception and embedded barriers to equity within the school system.