Bad behavior in the classroom may hurt even the best students

Disruptive students have always been a challenge for teachers making sure their classroom successfully completes their curriculum, but suspensions and other traditional forms of punishment might be hurting your grade A, overachieving student as well; schools are taking note.

This issue of bad behavior was the target of a recent study by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which for the first time attempts to quantify the extent to which disruptive students are hindering reading and math achievement in many classrooms.

SEE ALSO: The school to prison pipeline

“From a public policy standpoint, we know that disruptive students are not just hurting district-level test scores because the individual disruptive student isn’t learning, but they’re lowering district-level achievement grades because there’s a spillover effect,” Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Research Director Mike Ford told VOXXI.

“This is where students that are chronically disruptive are actually taking time and attention away from students who are not disruptive. That’s hurting their level of education.”

The study looked at the more than 48,000 students that were suspended from Wisconsin public schools in 2011. Some of the students had multiple suspensions. While more than half of Wisconsin’s schools have a low 1.7 suspension rate, the troubled school districts with suspension rates as high as 12 percent caught his attention.

“We looked at districts that had higher than average percentages of students that were suspended annually, and we started to see reading and math scores decrease at a non-linear rate,” Ford said. “So in other words, the higher the disruption – or the level of disruption – the lower level of academic achievement, and they’d grow over time.”

SEE ALSO: Report -Hispanic students face harsher punishment

He added that lowering the suspension rate by just 5 percent in those schools would increase student reading proficiency scores by 3.5 percent and math proficiency scores by nearly 5 percent. As for districts with a low suspension rate, Ford said there really wasn’t a spillover effect. One area the study didn’t tackle was identifying underlying factors leading to suspension behavior, which in Wisconsin include violating rules of conduct, threats against school property, possession of a firearm and behavior that threatens the property, health, or safety of others.  Considering such student behaviors are accepted nationally as suspension activity, Ford believes the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute results aren’t limited to his state.

“It’s pretty indicative, and I base this on past experience talking to teachers in different areas of the country,” Ford said. “A pretty common theme of teachers dealing with chronically disruptive students is they feel their time is being sucked away by students who are chronically disruptive students.

Poorly behaved students can affect the performance of others in the classroom, and sometimes putting them in another instructional setting is best for all parties involved. (Shutterstock)

“Wisconsin, like most states, does have procedure in place where teachers can remove a student that is disruptive from the classroom. We talked to teachers. There’s a hesitancy to use those procedures, and many times they’re short-term. Evidence of that is the fact there are number of multiple suspensions.”

As for study recommendations, Ford said he believes school districts need to make an effort to get disruptive students into a different program where their needs are being met, and thus the needs of non-disruptive students are not being ignored.

“Wisconsin has a pretty robust virtual educational sector,” Ford said. “So these are public schools around the state offering online virtual programming. There are means for open enrollment from public schools where students can enroll. We saw that as possibly a solution to keep students within the public education system but also isolate them from the environment that was causing them to be disruptive.”

He added, “Basically, there needs to be a better way to take chronically disruptive students out of the classroom.”

SEE ALSO: Start acting on aggressive behavior in children