Survey
What Purpose Do Suspensions Serve? Principals Don't Seem Quite Sure
Published in: The Brookings Institution website (2023)
Posted on RAND.org on June 20, 2023
Principals and their school leadership teams are often the final arbiters of discipline decisions in schools. When a student is written up for an infraction—in response to incidents ranging from talking back to a teacher to more extreme cases like fighting or bringing a weapon to school—principals typically decide both whether and how severely to punish the student. Disciplinary actions can range from sending a note home to the student's parents to an after-school detention all the way up to a suspension or expulsion.
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