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New paper alert! “The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime” with @abacherhicks and @billingsecon nber.org/papers/w26257 1/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon School discipline policy involves tradeoffs. Stricter discipline through increased use of suspensions can act as a deterrent and also keep misbehavior out of the classroom. On the other hand, suspensions can stigmatize students and expose them to the criminal justice system 2/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon We estimate “school effects” on suspensions, and then ask whether stricter middle schools (defined as schools that suspend more students than you’d guess based on their demographics and test scores) have positive or negative NET impacts on kids 3/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon How do we know that strictness is due to school policy? Our data is from Charlotte-Mecklenburg in the early 2000s. CMS was under a desegregation court order until 2002, when the district was rezoned completely. Half of students received a new school assignment. 4/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon We find that school strictness is almost exactly the same across years, even when the demographics of a school change dramatically. We also use data from principle switches and find that a good share of the “strictness” estimate follows principals when they transfer schools. 5/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon This makes sense, because official CMS policy was to give administrators discretion on suspensions except in really serious cases with long suspensions or potential expulsion 6/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon We also use the boundary change to get as-good-as-random variation in school attendance (similar to what we did in this paper academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…). 7/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon The thought experiment – two kids live on the opposite side of the same street. In 2001 they went to the same school, then in 2002 the street becomes the new boundary and they get randomly assigned to 2 different schools. What happens to kids on the stricter side? 8/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon Students who attend stricter schools are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults (this is adult crime data, years after middle school, so it’s not a cops in schools thing.) The impact of strictness on crime is largest for African-American boys. 9/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon There is no evidence that strictness reduces crime by acting as a deterrent. We do find some positive impacts on achievement for white boys, but they are small and short-lived. 10/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon Overall, suspending middle schoolers at a higher-than-normal rate appears to harm kids substantially, especially African-American boys. So this evidence supports recent calls to limit discipline in schools, such as the law just passed in California (SB 419) 11/X
@abacherhicks @BillingsEcon Last thing – @abacherhicks deserves most of the credit here, and was the driving force for this project from start to finish. If you like what you see, hire him! He is an HKS PhD student on the job market this year…. 12/12
