Derek often marveled that his school did as well as it did with student behavior. Oh, they had their problems and issues. But every time an issue arose, the school seemed to handle it well enough that the issue passed, without disrupting school operations or changing the school’s tone or culture. Derek certainly didn’t see the widespread disruption and enormous challenges about which he heard at other schools, not the drugs, gangs, sexual assaults, and harassment, nor even the dropouts, truancy, and failures to advance. Every day, Derek counted his blessings that his school didn’t have the widespread behavioral issues of other schools.
Concerns
Schools focus closely on student behavior. After all, shaping student behavior is one way of construing a school’s mission. Behavioral psychologists define learning as a persistent change in behavior resulting from experience. Schools supply the experience with the goal of refining student behavior around instructional goals and objectives. Schools instruct to influence three kinds of behavior. The first area of concern involves academic progression, advancing students through program levels within a structured curriculum. The second area of concern involves academic conduct, shaping student study practices to consistently meet academic norms while avoiding cheating, dishonesty, and other forms of academic misconduct. The third area of concern involves behavioral conduct, shaping student non-academic behaviors to respect the rights and interests of others while avoiding harm, injury, or offense to others that the school must discipline for safe, secure, and orderly operations. Sound schools closely monitor all three aspects of student conduct.
Progression
Academic progression is a school’s core student concern. Schools aren’t human warehouses. Schools instead expect to positively influence students in their academic development, at a consistent pace through program levels. To meet state benchmarks and federal satisfactory academic progress (SAP) standards, schools must ensure that students progress at the assigned pace or hold students accountable through a system of controls and sanctions. At the higher education level, SAP policies provide for probation. Failure to bring performance back above SAP standards may then lead to the student’s program dismissal or suspension of loan and grant rights, for not meeting minimum grade-point average, percentage of credits attempted, and program duration standards. Federal loan regulations require rigorous SAP policy enforcement. At the elementary and secondary school level, schools hold students back from advancing through grade levels and may deny graduation to students failing to meet benchmarks. They also use truancy laws and absenteeism, tardiness, insubordination, disobedience, and other behavioral policies and related forms of discipline to influence student effort toward academic progression.
Academics
Academic misconduct is a corollary school concern to the school’s primary concern over academic progression. Academic progression and academic misconduct go hand in hand. Students cheat, take shortcuts, and act dishonestly to misrepresent their academic performance as if meeting academic standards. Academic misconduct undermines the integrity of the school’s certification that students have met learning benchmarks. Studies and surveys tend to show widespread cheating among students, a problem recently accelerated through online services and artificial intelligence. Schools must constantly control and monitor for cheating, to discourage, detect, and punish it. A cheating scandal can destroy the involved students’ academic and vocational careers, and harm a school’s reputation for years. Elementary and secondary schools properly tend to treat cheating as a learning opportunity to shape student behavior toward understanding and meeting academic norms, through remedial measures more so than punitive sanctions. Higher-education institutions, and especially graduate and professional schools, properly treat cheating as a character and credentialing issue, with swifter and surer discipline.
Behaviors
Behavioral misconduct is a separate school concern from the above academic progression and academic misconduct issues. Schools must address behavioral misconduct to maintain a safe, secure, and orderly learning environment. Schools must swiftly address student behavior that endangers others, threatens to damage or destroy school property, or disrupts school operations. Fighting and threats of violence, weapons on school grounds, bomb threats, and interfering with fire alarms and fire-suppression equipment are extreme examples. Bullying, harassment, hazing, intimidation, and coercion are other examples. Behavioral misconduct can also include activities that, while not always directly endangering, destructive, or disruptive, nonetheless risk undermining student health and morals. Examples include alcohol, drug, and tobacco use, possession of pornography, gang participation, and sexual misconduct and exploitation. Schools at all levels face student behavioral issues. Schools depend on swift, firm, fair, but sensitive treatment of student behavioral issues. While school suspension and expulsion, and, at the elementary and secondary school level, transfer to an alternative disciplinary program, may be necessary or appropriate, lesser sanctions or even non-punitive remedial measures may accomplish the school’s educational mission while restoring safety, security, and order.
Law
State and federal laws require schools to closely regulate student behavior. State legislatures nationwide have addressed public, parent, and teacher concern over unsafe schools by mandating safe-school programs and student codes of conduct. State legislatures have also mandated that schools prohibit and punish hazing, bullying, cyber-bullying, harassment, and intimidation. States also have specific laws regulating weapons, drugs, alcohol, gang activities, and even tobacco and vaping materials on school grounds or at school activities. Federal Title IX also requires schools to prohibit and punish sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, and domestic and dating violence. Schools failing in their legal obligations can face civil liability to affected students, regulatory sanction, and public condemnation. Schools rightly take seriously their obligations to protect students from harm.
Codes
Schools regulate student academic and behavioral misconduct through student codes of conduct. The academic misconduct code may take the form of an honor code or oath, academic integrity policy, academic honesty policy, or similar policy. Schools tend to give individual teachers, faculty committees, and even student committees greater roles in enforcing academic honor codes. Severe sanctions such as school suspension or expulsion typically require administrative involvement. The behavioral misconduct code may be a separate and much more elaborate student code of conduct, enforced not by instructors or academic officials but by non-academic administrators, sometimes with the help of campus security or law enforcement. Read your school’s codes closely. Student codes of conduct tend to list many, even dozens of, separate violations like those already mentioned above. But they also tend to include catch-all categories like disorderly or disruptive conduct, endangering behavior, and insubordinate or disobedient conduct that disciplinarians can construe to catch all manner of anomalous behaviors. School disciplinary officials must exercise their discretion wisely and judiciously in order to achieve the school’s mission.
Sanctions
School student codes of conduct typically authorize a wide range of progressive disciplinary sanctions. Sanctions may be nominal, like a correction, caution, or warning. Sanctions may be mild, such as having to repeat an assignment or exam, having the score on an assignment or exam reduced, having to do extra coursework, or receiving an oral or written reprimand. Sanctions may be moderate, such as a reduced grade in a course, loss of credit for a course that the student must then repeat, class removal with in-school suspension, and probation with or without conditions. And sanctions may be severe, such as short-term or long-term out-of-school suspension, school expulsion, and, in the case of elementary and secondary school, transfer to an alternative disciplinary program, otherwise known as boot camp or reform school. School disciplinary officials must act wisely with respect to imposing sanctions, to maintain program safety, security, and integrity, while pursuing educational objectives.
Discipline
School discipline is a serious concern for students. School suspension or expulsion obviously interrupts the education entirely, delaying or outright preventing advancement and graduation. The statistics for students shunted to alternative disciplinary programs are generally poor, and not just as to academic performance, retention, and graduation but also as to mental health, vocational achievement, social and family relations, and even criminal record. But even minor discipline can affect a student’s honors, peer and mentor relationships, school admissions, and access to scholarships, grants, loans, and other benefits and privileges. Schools need to act judiciously in imposing discipline so as not to unduly harm students whom they are supposed instead to educate. Schools should generally prefer remedial measures like additional education, training, school service, monitoring, coaching, and mentoring, over punitive sanctions, where schools are able to ensure reasonable safety and security, and continuous uninterrupted operations.
Procedures
Schools must generally offer due process to students facing discipline that may interrupt their education for more than a brief period under ten days. Due process means that school disciplinary officials must give the student, and in the case of a minor student also the student’s parents, reasonable notice of the nature of the disciplinary charges and a reasonable opportunity for the student to tell the student’s side of the story. At the elementary and secondary school levels, hearings involving potential long-term school suspension or expulsion typically take place at the district level before the district superintendent, board, or a designated district committee or official. In higher education, colleges and university disciplinary procedures typically provide for a school disciplinary official or committee to conduct the hearing. Administrative hearings do not generally follow formal evidentiary rules and court-like procedures but may instead be relatively informal in their presentations and procedures. Schools may offer administrative appeals to the student suffering an adverse disciplinary decision.
Accommodations
Disability accommodations can complicate disciplinary proceedings. Some behavioral issues can relate to student disabilities qualifying for protection under the ADA, IDEA law, or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At the elementary and secondary school level, the IDEA law requires schools to conduct a manifestation determination review before imposing discipline on any student under an IEP, when the discipline would alter the IEP’s terms and conditions for the student’s education. The review evaluates whether the student’s misconduct was the result of a failure in disability accommodations and services. In other words, some student misconduct may be on the school, not the student. Students who suffer unlawful school bullying, harassment, and intimidation may likewise act out in ways that lead to disciplinary charges against them. Schools must find the balance between holding students accountable while neither unduly medicalizing nor problematizing their behavior. Student behavior and school discipline is a sensitive subject demanding wise treatment and close monitoring.
Reflection
Does your school rigorously enforce its satisfactory academic progress standards? Does your school publicize and enforce its academic honesty or academic integrity policy? Is cheating an issue at your school? Can you readily locate your school’s student code of conduct? Does your school have well-defined procedures that it follows for enforcing its student code of conduct? Does your school’s student code of conduct reflect the norms and culture your school community expects to maintain? Who imposes discipline at your school? Do you have confidence in the judgment of your school’s disciplinary officials to adjust the discipline to the needs of the student and interests of the school?
Key Points
Schools rightly concern themselves with regulating student behavior.
Students must meet school satisfactory academic progress standards.
Students must meet school academic honesty and integrity standards.
Students must also satisfy the standards of behavioral conduct codes.
State and federal laws require schools to enforce behavioral codes.
Student codes of conduct cover a wide range of misconduct forms.
Schools can impose a wide range of progressive misconduct sanctions.
Discipline can severely impact a student’s education and future.
Schools must offer due process before imposing serious discipline.
Student disabilities can complicate discipline for student misbehavior.