Photo by Max Fischer
Brookings: 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.
How do principals make decisions about how to address student misconduct? Sometimes their hands are tied: six in ten schools have zero-tolerance policies that dictate how principals should respond to certain infractions. However, these policies generally apply only to serious offenses like bringing a gun to school. For low-level offenses—which represent most disciplinary incidents in U.S. public schools—principals typically have a lot of autonomy to discipline students as they see fit. Unsurprisingly given this autonomy, research shows that principals vary significantly in how punitive they are and how much racial bias they exhibit in disciplining students.