Talk:School discipline

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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 08:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Old talk
This article is a piece of advocacy for a specific viewpoint, and needs to be edited to the Wikipedia NPOV style, which avoids advocacy in favour of reportage. -- The Anome 02:21, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * I've added the NPOV tag because the Methods... section is nothing more than advice. This is very unencyclopedic. An article on school discipline should discuss the history of discipline in school, the concept of in loco parentis, current challenges in urban centers, and school discipline in various parts of the world. It should not be a how-to lesson on behavior modification. Fifty to a hundred years ago an article written with this POV would be appalling to us today. --Tysto 18:03, 2005 May 27 (UTC)

"A much-redacted version of the article could possibly be included in one of the many possible articles about contemporary American education. As much space would be given to above-presented point of view as to opposing view. GCW"

I note that an editor has tagged part of this article as being a copyright violation. This text is from a public domain ERIC Digest and is in the public domain. See index/abtERICDig.html for details.

Demerit system
Pensacola Christian College is known for its unusually strict discipline, even among bible colleges. It is based on a demerit system. I'd hoped to link to this or another article for an explanation of a demerit system, but no luck. Is that so universally known that it doens't merit inclusion? If not, can any editors contribute some info? Thanks, -Willmcw 06:27, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)


 * Willmcw, I'm not if you are still around, but I only read your post today and I would like to add information on demerit systems. It is used in a vast majority of schools in Hong Kong, Taiwana nd mainland China, and the Chinese-speaking parts in Southeast Asia, which leads me to wonder if it is a post-Qing Chinese practice, or an early Chinese adaptation of American military school practice?


 * I added the following in the article Education of Hong Kong over the past couple of days:

'':Schools in Hong Kong typically have strict codes of discipline. Practically all school students in Hong Kong wear uniforms, and it is also common to witness severe restrictions on dress codes, student behaviours, and what items not directly related to school studies students can bring to schools and schools are entitled to search a student's belongings without giving out any rationales to students. An overwhelming majority of schools employ demerit systems (Chinese: 記缺點制度) as a formal record of student offences in disciplinary areas, and these statistics will appear in a student's school report each term and his or her testimonial when he or she leaves school. [A typical example of such is at Shatin Tsung Tsin Secondary School http://www.sttss.edu.hk/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=312] Most schools will record demerit points (Chinese: 記缺點) as the most basic unit of offence, and three demerit points accrue a minor offence (Chinese: 記小過) while three minor offences accrue one major offence (Chinese: 記大過). Once a student has accrued three or more major offences, he or she is automatically suspended (if he or she is undergoing compulsory education) or expelled from the school.''

'':There is a large discrepancy as to what behaviours will accrue demerit points between different schools. Some, such as stealing, consistently late for school, serious assault, or joining triad as a member, are universally accepted, while some others, such as harmless school pranks like hiding all chalks in a classroom before a teacher arrives, taking your own mobile telephone to school, leaving some of your own belongings at the school desk at the end of school day, or taking your home's power bills to school (in order to make payments on the way home) and thus technically a "bringing items not related to schoolwork to school", are contentious and many schools do not accept these as valid rationales for accruing demerit points. There are also claims by certain school students that some schoolteachers abuse their powers of giving out demerit points, in incidents such as a student who has accrued a demerit point on a controversial basis and appealing her case to the school's Board of Management has earned additional demerit points on fuzzy grounds as retributions from the teachers concerned [1]) . Because of this, some students and graduates who come from schools with famously strict school rules, such as the Carmel Pak U Secondary School, semi-jokingly refer to graduation as release from the prison (standard Chinese: 出獄; Cantonese slang: 出冊). Currently, the Education and Manpower Bureau is powerless against teachers abusing their powers at individual schools on this area as is not technically an illegal act, however unethical it is.''

'':It is claimed by some in Hong Kong the presence of demerit points and/or offences on a student's report could jeopardise his or her future career prospects after he or she graduates [2]. Heresay in Hong Kong society mentions bizarre cases, by Western standards, of university bachelor degree graduate applicants to certain Hong Kong government Administrative Officer (AO) positions or major corporations jobs being required to submit their primary and secondary school records dating more than a decade ago [3], and it is rumoured some candidates with university bachelor degrees did not receive job offers, despite extremely qualified otherwise, on the grounds of demerit points accrued during his junior secondary and/or primary school days. In a majority of cases, however, most employers do not bother to look at the demerit points in a tertiary-degree holding applicant's secondary/primary school records because most of these occurred in more distant past relative to his or her university studies and thus of little value. It is interesting to note a number of school teachers themselves did not have entirely clean disciplinary records during their own student days either, and this fact did not prevent them to become the next crop of teachers [4].''


 * Which could be of help to you. --JNZ 05:52, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Revised version
I've removed the most glaring POV material and, though I still think the article needs a good deal more work, I think that it's now a reasonable starting point.

More revision
I have tried to remove the tone of grievance and disenchantment where possible, and to rectify grammatical clumsiness and cases where US English and UK English spelling occur adjacently. I have tried to neutralise some of the ire I encountered too, without making it anodyne and bland. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Trevor H. (talk • contribs) 18:07, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

A merger needed?
There seem to be several pages with similar topics: School discipline, School punishment, School corporal punishment. Does anyone else think that a couple of these pages should be merged? - Ikzing (talk) 11:52, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that School punishment should be incorporated into School discipline. But I suggest we keep a separate page for School corporal punishment, which is one of a group of pages about different kinds of corporal punishment. It is enough to keep a summary of school corporal punishment on the "school discipline" page, with a link to the much more detailed "school corporal punishment" page, as now. -- Alarics (talk) 13:07, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree that a merger is needed. ---Abcooley (talk) 00:08, 09 December 2010 (UTC)

After school detention
I made a new page called "After school detention", but some Wikipedia administrator made it a redirect to here. --TheDeathWikipedian (talk) 16:27, 21 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Noted. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 19:50, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

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Contribution Proposal
Hello fellow wikipedia users. My groups members and I are participating in a project for our class at the University of New Hampshire entitled Human Development & Learning: Educational Psychology. We have been asked to choose a page that lacks the socio-cultural understanding of a topic and make a contribution to the page.

We plan to contribute a socio-cultural understanding of discipline in school to this page within the next month. Our proposed contributions include how discipline can promote positive aspects of a society, that societies use discipline as a way to promote their cultural values, and how this differs across cultural communities. We would like to include aspects that include other cultures' ideas about discipline, other than just the Western-American ideals currently expressed. Let us know if you have any resources that could promote our contribution. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gam2023 (talk • contribs) 18:58, 10 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I've undone the removal of your edits, which I think are valuable. They should be edited to specify that they pertain to the US, as suggested by Alarics. My opinion is that very few statements about school discipline will apply to the whole world. Already the page is replete with erroneous attempts to make universal statements (e.g., the first sentence from the "Importance" section: "Disciplining children is important to create a safe and fun learning environment." By Alarics's approach, most of the page would need to be deleted. A better approach is to specify where findings and patterns do come from. Drewdeecopp (talk) 18:45, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Suggestion: Merge with "Classroom management" page
Hmm... I wonder how the topics of School discipline and Classroom management are different. The terms perhaps refer to the same thing. Some people on this talk page have suggested that the School discipline page has problems with NPOV, so maybe it could be merged with the Classroom management page. Does anyone feel strongly about this either way? Anyone have any thoughts?Daniel Helman (talk) 12:04, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

Recess detention
Sup34cj has begun an edit war to remove mention of "recess detention" from this article, writing in his or her most recent edit summary: "What the hell is recess for detention there is no such thing as recess detention what the hell just stop putting recess detention."

The most cursory Google search shows many, many sources attesting that this (detestable) practice does indeed exist. If someone would like explicit sources added to this article to support its inclusion then that's a completely reasonable request that should be made clearly and politely; an edit war to remove the term coupled with assertions that "there is no such thing" is unacceptable and demonstrably false. ElKevbo (talk) 00:30, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

Are the recently added studies WP:UNDUE?
Discussion of two studies ( and ) was recently added to the paragraph on "Disproportionate punishment" and I am concerned that it may give our readers a distorted impression of the mainstream view among social scientists on this topic. The authors of both of these studies claim to show results that undermine the idea that bias or discrimination in schools is responsible for disparities in punishment along racial lines. So do these articles fall within the bounds of mainstream scholarly discourse on the topic?

For an overview, I started with a report from the Brookings Institution by Nora Gordon, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, called "Disproportionality in student discipline: Connecting policy to research" (2018): This report begins with the unambiguous statement that "Major racial disparities in student discipline rates have been documented for decades", and goes on to outline recent research confirming that "more severe disciplinary outcomes for black students are due in part to discriminatory practice". Helpfully, the author also dives into the "Empirical challenges in documenting discrimination in student discipline", explaining why there has been any room for disagreement on this subject at all. Of note is this passage:
 * "One key missing variable is actual student behavior: researchers observe only the infraction as recorded by school personnel, who could exhibit bias in how they map behavior to infractions even if not in how infractions map to punishment. Further complicating matters, the school environment itself influences behavior. So even if researchers with access to exceptionally rich data were to conclude that gaps in discipline were fully explained by gaps in behavior rather than simply recorded infractions, they would not necessarily be able to rule out discrimination causing those gaps in behavior in the first place."

A recent study which Gordon cites to show how researches have forged a more conclusive understanding (despite the above-mentioned empirical challenge) is a 2017 technical report by Nathan Barrett et al. for the Education Research Alliance titled "Disparities in Student Discipline by Race and Family Income": This study found that, even when controlling for income, African-American students were significantly more likely to be suspended from school than white students, a finding which is consistent with similar studies such as  Skiba et al. (2002)  but also went beyond such earlier studies
 * "by limiting the analysis of students involved in the same fight to a sample in which neither student had a previous suspensions –– so the only comparisons involve students with similar disciplinary records. They obtain qualitatively similar results for this sample, suggesting that discrimination rather than unobserved differences in student experience drives the small but statistically significant result."

The author takes care to emphasize that such results do not account for the possibility that "the behavior for which the student was referred [may have been] itself an outgrowth of discrimination", a situation which would only compound the role of discrimination in driving racially differentiated outcomes.

Similarly, Gordon discusses a recent paper by Lindsay and Hart, "Exposure to Same-Race Teachers and Student Disciplinary Outcomes for Black Students in North Carolina" (2017), which found that "black students in North Carolina were less likely to be subject to exclusionary discipline when they had black teachers rather than white teachers, even within the same school", and which suggests according to Gordon that discrimination and bias are at least partly responsible for differences in rates of school discipline along racial lines.

Looking further into this topic only confirmed to me that Gordon's view represents mainstream scholarly understanding. Some recent high-powered studies on this topic have shown quite robust results (e.g. and ). Other high quality studies take the existence of such disparities as axiomatic and focus on bias as the primary vehicle through which these disparities are actuated (e.g. ). Of particular note in both regards is a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Travis Riddle and Stacey Sinclair (both of Princeton) titled "Racial disparities in school-based disciplinary actions are associated with county-level rates of racial bias": From the abstract: "Using federal data covering over 32 million students at nearly 96,000 schools, our research demonstrates that the disciplinary gap between black and white students across five types of disciplinary actions is associated with county-level rates of racial bias." (Emphasis added.) This last one is quite a robust, well-powered result, and represents a voice from the very heart of the American scientific mainstream.

This all may seem like quite a wall-of-text to inform revisions to a single paragraph in this article, but I would argue that this is an important matter for Wikipedia to get right. To all who have read and thought through what I have to say here, thank you for your time, and I look forward to any discussion that may be necessary to arrive at consensus on the matter. Generalrelative (talk) 00:58, 4 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The first of the recently added articles, published in the Journal of Criminal Justice (JCJ), claims to refute the conclusions of previous studies that racial bias plays a large role in the disparity between the number of African American students and the number of white students who get suspended from school. The editor who added this source did so with clearly POV-pushing language, endorsing the JCJ article in wikivoice. Another editor rewrote the sentence to remove the poor wording. Here I want to summarize the JCJ article and suggest that it has a methodological failure that explains why its conclusion contradicts those of almost every other study.


 * The JCJ article gives an extensive review of the literature as of 2014, acknowledging the numerous studies that found racial disparities in suspensions. It even acknowledges research that shows that the disparities are not removed if one controls for the infraction that leads to the suspension. The authors' main thesis and their claim of originality rely on also controlling for "prior behavior" in the sense of a much earlier history of reported bad behavior. The authors make this point using (A) data regarding suspensions at the 8th grade level and (B) reports on the same students' discipline problems in kindergarten, 1st, and 3rd grades. They assert that racial disparities in (B) (along with racial disparities that had been controlled for by other authors) account fully for the racial disparities in (A). They claim that (as in punishment for crimes) it's a history of bad behavior and not race that increases the likelihood of more severe punishment. In other words, they completely reject the notion that the high suspension rate of African American students is exacerbated by teacher/staff bias.


 * Here's their description of the (B) data: "These scales tap a wide range of behaviors such as controlling one's temper, responding appropriately to pressure from peers, expressing thoughts and feelings appropriately, attentiveness, impulsivity, unnecessary arguing, disturbing ongoing classroom activities, and fighting." Clearly evaluations of these behaviors are highly subjective. Nevertheless, the JCJ authors claim that the measures used in (B) are "comprehensive, valid, and reliable" and cite three sources to back that up. One of them, a 1994 book by Cairns and Cairns titled Lifelines and Risks: Pathways of Youth in Our Times, does not seem to contain anything related to the presence or absence of racial disparities in evaluating behaviors. (I don't have the book, but I searched in Google books and also read two reviews of the book to get a summary of what's in it.) The second source (Demaray, Michelle K., et al. "Social skills assessment: A comparative evaluation of six published rating scales." School Psychology Review 24.4 (1995): 648-671) uses the terms "reliability" and "validity" to mean the following: "With regard to the reviewed instruments' reliabilities, we evaluated internal consistency, test-retest, and interrater reliabilities." But those measures of consistency cannot rule out widespread bias. The third source (Lyon, Mark A., et al. "A validity study of the social skills rating system-teacher version with disabled and nondisabled preschool children." Perceptual and Motor Skills 83.1 (1996): 307-316) states in its abstract: "This study examined the differences among social skills and problem behaviors of disabled (n=22) and nondisabled (n=27) preschoolers on Social Skills Rating System–Teacher Version... correlations with a measure of social competence and S teachers' ratings strongly supported the validity of this measure of social skills for preschool children." Nothing in these sources supports the JCJ authors' assumption that the "prior behavior" reports from grades K,1,3 are free of racial bias. The authors of the JCJ study assert the validity of the prior behavior reports, but without any evidence of the absence of racial bias.


 * I agree that the two added sources are UNDUE, and the last two sentences of the paragraph can be removed. In addition, I think the paragraph on racial disparities belongs in its own section, not in the section "Importance of discipline". NightHeron (talk) 01:13, 4 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Great! I've made a start of this but we can definitely do more to flesh out the new section. Generalrelative (talk) 06:43, 4 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Looks very good now! Thanks for doing all that. NightHeron (talk) 11:40, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Okay to remove template at head of article?
The complaints in the template from 2015 and 2019 don't seem to be applicable any more. Would it be okay to remove the template? NightHeron (talk) 19:13, 18 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm down. The article is far from perfect at this point, but I don't think it rises to the level of requiring these tags. Generalrelative (talk) 16:51, 19 February 2021 (UTC)