Banning Math Progress: The Academic Impact of California's Suspension Bans

Abstract

In this article, we examine the academic impact of banning suspensions for “willful defiance” – a subjective category that includes offenses such as refusing to remove a hat. Using grade-level data at the district and school level, we exploit the exogenous introduction of bans to the California policy landscape to compare growth before (2007-2013) and after (2016-2018) Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Pasadena adopted bans. We find a negative but sometimes non-significant impact on reading performance in grades four through eight as well as a consistently significant, negative impact on math performance in grades four through seven. The impact occurred each of the three years after adopting a ban, and was equivalent to a decline from 50th percentile before a ban to the 39th percentile three years later. While the literature generally expects bans to improve academics, this paper complements and extends new studies that find unintended negative consequences for bans and other discipline reforms. Education leaders should strive to reduce suspension rates, but they should work with researchers to pursue strategies that avoid academic harm.