The relationship of punitive and isolating school policies and academic self-efficacy

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between race, suspensions, expulsions, grade retention, and special education placement and students' academic self-efficacy. This study aimed to gain a greater understanding of how punitive and isolating experiences relate to the academic self-efficacy of black and white male students in elementary, middle, and high school. This study examined longitudinal data from the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study (SEELS) database. SEELS was commissioned by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), which is part of the U.S. School of Education. SEELS database consists of a nationally representative sample of 11,512 students who were who were ages 6 through 12 in 1999. All data was collected between the year 2000 and 2006. The sample was stratified to be representative of each disability category, as specified by 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA97) within each single-year age cohort. The SEELS database utilizes sample weights to produce population estimates and to allow the sample to represent the universe of their sampling strata. This study investigated the frequency of use of punitive and isolating school policies (suspensions, expulsions, grade retention, and special education placement) between black and white males. Punitive and isolating school policies were examined as components of a single measurement model (punitive and isolating experiences). This study also investigated how this model predicts students' academic self-efficacy. Specifically this study used multi-group structural equation models (SEM) to investigate whether the suggested model fits black and white students differently. Results indicated that black students are disproportionately exposed to each punitive and isolating school policy and that black students demonstrated high academic self-efficacy scores across each educational level than white students. However, only small effect sizes are found for the majority of differences. The only effect sizes that demonstrate anything beyond a medium effect were differences between suspension rates (in middle school and high school) and grade retention rates (in high school). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that punitive and isolating school policies do create an effective measurement model within middle school and high school but not in elementary school. Results of the SEM and multi-group analysis indicated that the theoretical model fits the data, and that the two groups (black and white students) fit the model differently. This suggests that black and white students' experience of punitive and isolating school policies and the impact of these experiences on their academic self-efficacy are different and are not best understood by a single model.