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Much research has been dedicated to the use of school suspensions with middle and high school students; however, little is known about predictors of suspension for students in elementary school. Prior studies have suggested school suspension is an ineffective method for deterring future behavioral problems or promoting academic achievement; yet it continues to be widely used. Because early suspension increases later risk of academic and behavioral problems, we sought to fill in gaps in empirical knowledge about the use of school suspension in elementary school. In our study, we examined the longitudinal predictors of late elementary school suspension present in kindergarten and first grade, and whether these predictors varied by child gender.
Method
Our sample consisted of 3,495 kindergarten and first graders from 348 public schools in a Southern state who had been referred to TASC, a program for students experiencing high rates of truancy. All risk factors were measured by teacher reports in the 2007-08 school year, while student suspensions were measured in the 2008-09 and 2010-11 school years by linking TASC case information to the state’s Department of Education data.
Students were nested within schools, and school factors such as suspension policies and school climate could have a systematic impact on all students enrolled in a particular school. To account for this nesting effect, we used multilevel logistic regression.
Results
Almost one quarter of boys were suspended in 2008-09 and in 2010-11, as opposed to less than 9% of girls in both years. The estimated intraclass correlation coefficient indicated that for boys about 11.3 % of the variance in suspension rates was explained at the school level, while for girls, about 4.8% of the variance in suspension rates was explained at the school level. We found common and unique risk factors for suspension by gender. For both boys and girls, being Black and being rated by teachers as disruptive in the classroom were the factors most predictive of future suspension. For boys, teacher-rated aggression was predictive of future suspension; for girls, lack of parental involvement was significantly associated with a greater likelihood of school suspension. In addition, results showed that the significant risk factors for suspension in 2008-09 were still significant for 2010-11 suspensions for both genders.
Conclusions and Implications
This study contributes to the knowledge base by identifying gender differences in predictors of early school suspension, and provides empirical evidence for supporting suspension prevention efforts that address behavioral issues and parental school involvement. We additionally found a teacher’s assessment of child behaviors in early elementary school to be predictive of suspension in the next school year as well as in later elementary school. This finding suggests that the effects of risk factors on suspension can be long-lasting, and if left unaddressed, could leave children more likely to experience multiple incidences of suspension in later school years. This finding implies that identifying at-risk children in their early school years and monitoring their risk factors longitudinally may be one effective strategy to prevent future school suspension.