Creating More Equitable and Developmentally Attuned Disciplinary Environments for Adolescent Students

Current school policies allow educators discretion in assigning punishments, often leading non-white students to be disproportionately assigned exclusionary punishments. In addition, exclusionary punishments are “developmentally unwise.” In particular, they may not motivate positive behavior because they do not honor adolescents’ high reactivity to perceived injustice and need for peer approval. I propose to examine how three aspects of a high school setting - a police presence, a restorative justice program, and parents’ intervention into school disciplinary matters – co-exist and interact to shape well-being among a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of adolescents. In so doing, I plan to address two broad and interrelated challenges in public education: school disciplinary climates that, on the one hand, promote racial disparities in punishment, and, on the other, expose students (and especially non-white students) to developmentally inappropriate disciplinary practices.