In her building-blocks paper, Stafford-Brizard writes that what children who have been exposed to significant adversity most need in school is “the opportunity to develop skills that may have been affected by their stress responses—meaning the ability to attach and bond, the ability to modulate stress, and most of all the ability to self-regulate.” In reality, though, many schools and school systems look at students who are struggling in those areas and instead think: How do we discipline them? They don’t see a child who hasn’t yet developed a healthy set of self-regulation mechanisms; what they see is simply a kid with behavioral problems.
Our usual intuition when children and adolescents misbehave is to assume that they’re doing so because they have rationally considered the consequences of their actions and calculated that the benefits of misbehavior outweigh the costs. And so our response is usually to try and increase the cost of misbehavior by ratcheting up the punishment they receive. But this only makes sense if a child’s poor behavior is the product of a rational cost-benefit analysis. And, in fact, one of the chief insights that the neurobiological research provides is that the behavior of young people, especially young people who have experienced significant adversity, is often under the sway of emotional and psychological and hormonal forces within them that are far from rational.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior in the classroom. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective over the long term in motivating troubled young people to succeed. And it suggests that school-discipline programs might be more effective if they were to focus less on imposing punishment and more on creating a classroom environment in which students who lack self-regulatory capacities can find the tools and context they need to develop them.
Most American schools today operate according to a philosophy of discipline that has its roots in the 1980s and 1990s, when a belief that schools would be safer and more effective if they allowed for “zero tolerance” of violence, drug use, and other misbehavior led to a sharp rise in school suspensions. This trend has persisted in much of the country. In 2010, more than a tenth of all public high school students nationwide were suspended at least once. And suspension rates are substantially higher among certain demographic groups. Nationally, African-American students are suspended three times as often as white students. In Chicago high schools (which happen to have particularly good and well-analyzed data on suspensions), 27 percent of students who live in the city’s poorest neighborhoods received an out-of-school suspension during the 2013–14 school year, as did 30 percent of students with a reported personal history of abuse or neglect.
Sixty percent of Chicago’s out-of-school suspensions are for infractions that don’t involve violence or even a threat of violence: They are for “defiance of school staff, disruptive behaviors, and school rule violations.” With the building-blocks model in mind, it’s easy to see that kind of behavior—refusing to do what adults tell you to do, basically—as an expression not of a bad attitude or a defiant personality but of a poorly regulated stress-response system. Talking back and acting up in class are, at least in part, symptoms of a child’s inability to control impulses, de-escalate confrontations, and manage anger and other strong feelings—the whole stew of self-regulation issues that can usually be traced to impaired executive-function development in early childhood. Given that neurobiological context, it’s hard to argue that an out-of-school suspension will do much to improve that student’s ability to self-regulate. What it will do, research suggests, is make it more likely that that student will struggle academically. And the students who are most likely to be suspended are already behind; in Chicago, high school students whose grades are in the lowest GPA quartile are four times more likely to be suspended than students whose grades are in the top quartile.
Advocates who make the case for suspensions often portray them as beneficial to the students left behind in the classroom, even if they’re detrimental to the suspended students themselves. Get rid of the chronic trouble-makers, the argument goes, and the classroom will become calmer and more conducive to effective learning. But a 2014 study of nearly 17,000 students in a large urban district in Kentucky found the opposite. In those schools, a greater number of suspensions corresponded to lower end-of-semester math and reading scores for the students who were never suspended—even after correcting for various demographic indicators. Maybe a harsh disciplinary regime created more stress and anxiety for those kids in Kentucky than their disruptive classmates had. Or maybe teachers who didn’t rely on suspensions as a default punishment were able to find other methods of calming down unruly students and restoring order and peace to a chaotic classroom. Whatever the cause, being in a classroom where your peers were likely to be suspended, even if you never got in trouble yourself, created an atmosphere that was less conducive to your academic success.