The consequences of exclusionary discipline on school dropout: Evidence from Chile

Disciplinary sanctions are a commonly available tool in school systems to punish disruptive students. While these tools are aimed at deterring misbehavior, they exclude offenders to restore discipline in the classroom at the potential cost of inflicting a harm on sanctioned students. In this paper, we study the effect of being expelled from school (expulsions are those sanctions in which students are forced to leave their school and look for another one to re-enroll) on the probability of dropping out using longitudinal data from Chile. We find that sanctioned students are 4.8 percentage points more likely to drop out than non- sanctioned students. The consequences of expulsions are particularly harmful for students in public schools, men, retained students, and those meeting the legal working age. Also, immediately expelling a student –as opposed to expelling at the end of the school year– increases the baseline probability of dropout by three times. These costs of exclusionary discipline are not offset by clear gains in academic performance of expelled students’ classmates. Taken together, these results call for alternative methods to improve school discipline and strengthen support policies to minimize the harm of expulsions.