IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/edecon/v23y2015i4p376-395.html

Is there an educational penalty for being suspended from school?

Author

Listed:
  • Deborah A. Cobb-Clark
  • Sonja C. Kassenboehmer
  • Trinh Le
  • Duncan McVicar
  • Rong Zhang

Abstract

Suspension from school is a commonly used, yet controversial, school disciplinary measure. This paper uses unique survey data to estimate the impact of suspension on the educational outcomes of those suspended. It finds that while suspension is strongly associated with educational outcomes, the relationship is unlikely to be causal, but rather likely stems from differences in the characteristics of those suspended compared to those not suspended. Moreover, there is no evidence that suspension is associated with larger educational penalties for young people from disadvantaged family backgrounds compared to those from more advantaged family backgrounds. These results hold regardless of whether self-reported suspension or mother-reported suspension is considered. The absence of a clear negative causal impact of suspension on educational outcomes suggests that suspension may continue to play a role in school discipline without harming the educational prospects of those sanctioned.

Suggested Citation

  • Deborah A. Cobb-Clark & Sonja C. Kassenboehmer & Trinh Le & Duncan McVicar & Rong Zhang, 2015. "Is there an educational penalty for being suspended from school?," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(4), pages 376-395, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:edecon:v:23:y:2015:i:4:p:376-395
    DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2014.980398
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2014.980398
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09645292.2014.980398?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Craig, Ashley C & Martin, David, 2023. "Discipline Reform, School Culture, and Student Achievement," IZA Discussion Papers 15906, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Trovato, Daniel & Zimmerman, Gregory M. & Vu, Huy Gia Han, 2025. "Is school discipline decapitalizing America's youth?: Examining the effect of school discipline on family, peer, teacher, and school social capital," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    3. Jessica Sauve‐Syed, 2024. "Lead exposure and student outcomes: A study of Flint schools," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(3), pages 432-448, March.
    4. McLean, Andrew & McVicar, Duncan, 2025. "Does Being Excluded from School Harm Student Achievement? Evidence from Siblings in English Population Data," QBS Working Paper Series 2025/06, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Business School.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:edecon:v:23:y:2015:i:4:p:376-395. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CEDE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.