Welcome, everybody, to our session
on using PBIS to ensure racial equity in school discipline.
My name is Kent McIntosh.
I am co-director of the Center on Positive Behavioral
Interventions and Supports, and I have the extreme privilege
to be able to present with Dr. Nikole
Hollins-Sims from the Pennsylvania
Department of Education.
We're going to talk through for our session here
and we hope you get a lot of good information out
of what we share.
So we are just super excited about the chance
to share at this conference.
It's a really important one and a great place for focus
on equity of all sorts.
And particularly we're going to be
talking about racial equity in school discipline.
I want to start with some acknowledgments.
First, although this is a virtual conference,
I am sitting at the University of Oregon
and the University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya llihi, which
is the traditional Indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya
peoples.
Following treaties between 1851 and 1855,
the Kalapuya peoples were dispossessed
of their traditional homeland and forcibly removed
to the Coast reservations in Western Oregon.
Today, members of the Kalapuya are descendants of the Kalapuya,
are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde
and Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians,
and continue to make important contributions to our area,
to the state of Oregon and to the world.
I also want to thank our federal sponsors, including
OSEP and OESE, and as well National
Center for Special Education Research from IES
that I'll be sharing a little bit of information.
And last but not least I want to acknowledge the equity workgroup
of the Center on PBIS.
We have been around for going on eight years now doing this work.
And although the members around the table
have changed a little bit over time,
this group has been really, really important
in increasing the quality and the cultural responsiveness
of the work that we're doing and what we're going
to be able to share with you.
And so as we think about today's session,
we really want to take some time and go over
some important pieces of equity and discipline.
So number 1, we're going to share the effects of PBIS
on disciplinary equity.
And Ken is going to talk about the great things
that PBIS can do for school systems.
But we're also going to think about introduction
to an equity-focused PBIS approach,
to ensure that whatever we are providing from a systems level
lens that with that there's equity embedded
in everything that we do.
And lastly, we want to share some resources
for increasing racial equity in school discipline.
And we know that resources are highly valued in the work
that everyone does.
And so we want to be sure that we leave you
with some tangible things that you can do tomorrow.
And thanks.
So I probably don't need to describe
to you all the long standing, as long as we've
been collecting federal data on inequities in school discipline.
They have been there and they have been persistent.
And I'm going to share with you some federal data, these
come from the Civil Rights Data Collection database.
This is some of the more recent but not fully recent data
looking at Out of School Suspension Risk Index,
which basically just means the percent of students from each
group who have been suspended out of school at least once
during the 2013/14 school year.
And if you look across the bottom
if you start actually on the left side
you can see all students, that left side 5%.
Meaning that 1 in 20 students was suspended out
of school at least once K-12 across US schools.
But you can see that risk is not evenly distributed.
And so you can see if you look right into the middle,
Black or African-American students
are the most exposed to exclusionary discipline
and out-of-school suspensions.
And the next group is students with disabilities.
And of course, when we start talking about and thinking
about intersectionality, the suspension rate
for Black students with disabilities
would go all the way off of this chart
because of that compounding risk that we see.
So many educators, including Dr. Hollins-Sims and I
have been really motivated to try
to make this change on a really broad level.
And a lot of schools are implementing PBIS or Positive
Behavioral Interventions and Supports
to be able to not only make schools more safe, predictable,
and positive, but also more equitable as well.
What you can see here is this is schools implementing
PBIS over the years.
And that one on the right is the 19/20 school year.
So this is our most current data.
We'll get some new numbers in the next little bit.
But what you can see is even in this global health
pandemic that we've had, more schools than ever
are implementing PBIS.
Almost a third of schools in the country supporting
over 15 million students.
And that number has just continues to go up over time.
And one of the reasons for that is
that if schools implement PBIS with fidelity
they are likely to see these really, really
important outcomes.
Reduce problem behavior, reduced use of exclusionary discipline
in schools, including those suspensions
as I was describing before, increased
pro-social behavior, social skills use,
increased social emotional competence, improved
academic achievement, improved perceptions of school safety,
and also improved organizational health.
So also some adult outcomes.
And then I also want to share with you some outcomes
for PBIS in high schools.
So you can see this.
These numbers are-- the research base is a little bit smaller
but it really is emerging you can see over the past few years
reduced use of exclusionary discipline,
reduced alcohol and other drug use, improved
attendance and improved student engagement.
And so as we think about the information that Kent just
described looking at high schools for instance,
and the things that can come out of implementing PBIS
with fidelity, we know how important
that is for engagement, for students
to want to remain in school and complete it.
Pedro Noguera, who is one of the, I would say,
premier people in the equity work,
gave the following quote which resonates so much with me,
"If you ran a hospital but you were only known for serving
people who are healthy, well, then you wouldn't be a very good
hospital."
And I think as we consider those outcomes of PBIS
that we know can happen when done with fidelity,
we have to be clear that it's reaching all of the people
that we want it to.
And there are still some groups of students that
are not getting what they need.
And that's why equity in discipline in particular
is so important so those outcomes that we just saw
are available and accessible to those students as well.
And I think one of the things that's really critical with PBIS
is the main focus of it is building this positive school
culture.
And we've got to be really careful when we intentionally
build a positive school culture, whether we're building something
that makes all students welcome and whether we
do something that makes students feel like school is for them.
So this is a little bit of a humorous picture of it,
but it might match unfortunately the status of schools and maybe
even schools using PBIS.
So you see a big sign in the middle that says,
welcome home of the dawgs.
And then if you look below, you see the big sign policy
saying no dogs.
So we've got to be really, really careful when we do this.
And especially for us and me as a co-director of the center,
we are really, really concerned about increasing equity.
And I have heard over the years people
saying anecdotally things like, PBIS only works in the suburbs.
Or it only works for white students.
Or it maybe even increases discipline disparities
between students of color or minoritized student groups
and others.
That PBIS is an agent of white supremacy.
And obviously, that is something that is a huge concern for me
and a huge concern for many of us.
And so one of the things that we did, especially
as I started working more deeply and took on co-director roles,
is to say, let's look, let's look at the data that we have
and see whether things are actually
better with PBIS in terms of equity, whether things are worse
or whether things are about the same.
So if you remember those blue bars
that I showed you before for Out of School Suspension Risk Index
that were national data.
The reason why I showed you those ones that
were from a few years ago is because we
completed an evaluation brief looking at this.
So you can see the blue bar on the left
is all schools in the country.
It's over 95,000 schools.
And if you remember that all students,
that 5% that I was describing are 1 in 20,
if you look at the green columns,
those green columns are schools that are implementing PBIS
with adequate fidelity of implementation
using a validated measure.
And so if you look, if we start on the left side,
you can see, OK, 5% nationally and then 4% for schools
using PBIS.
So that's a 20% reduction in out-of-school suspension.
That's nice.
But as you can see the differences
are not even all the way across.
And so you see that where the green bar is lower,
that means that there are fewer students receiving
out-of-school suspensions.
And so you can see that bar is lower for Black students.
That bar is lower for multiracial students,
and it's lower for Pacific Islander students.
And then that question of, does it only work for white students?
If you look all the way on the right side,
white students are no more or less
likely to be suspended in schools using PBIS than not.
So the decreases that we see nationwide
in out-of-school suspensions are primarily for, as you can see,
Black, multiracial and Pacific Islander students,
not white students.
Now, one of the things that I think is really important
is I look at this picture and this is not
a high five moment for me.
This is not a, yay, we've solved everything.
This is a 2% reduction if you look
for Black students in out-of-school suspension rates.
But what it tells us, or at least tells me,
is that at the very least it's not making a thing--
PBIS is not making things worse.
It's not that PBIS only works for white students,
but yet it's not the outcomes that we want to see.
It's a little bit better, but not nearly as effective
in terms of decreasing that discipline gap than we want.
So some research teams have actually looked and said,
are there parts of PBIS that are more related to racial equity
in school discipline?
And this is particularly between Black students
and all other students or black and white students.
And these two separate research teams
using two separate samples, even separate fidelity
of implementation measures, looked and found a few things
of PBIS, a few critical features were
more related to equity and school discipline.
Number 1, teams that use their data for decision-making
more often were more likely to have
equity in school discipline.
Number 2, teams that implemented PBIS in classrooms, not just
common areas around the school, more likely to see equity
in school discipline.
And also actually more likely to have reduced
use of overall exclusionary discipline
and increased sustainability of implementation too.
So if you are implementing in schools
or supporting schools that are implementing,
it is absolutely critically important
that they're using classroom systems, not just non-classroom.
And then the third one which both research teams found
is that the greater implementation of formal reward
or acknowledgment systems, so we're talking about systems
for recognizing students when they do things
that we want them to do, had greater equity
in school discipline.
That is across multiple states across different samples
in there.
And so what that tells us is we've
spent a bunch of time talking about the discipline gap.
We may very well be seeing an acknowledgment gap
where we're actually not providing
these evidence-based practices of behavior-specific praise,
possibly also opportunities to respond,
things that we know are absolutely critical,
maybe we're not providing those equitably across student groups.
And so when I think about this I go back
to my English teaching days.
And one of the authors who really spoke to me
was Alex Haley, author of Roots and also
the ghost author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
When he was talking about his writing,
and this really resonated with me, he said in my writing
as much as I could I tried to find the good and praise it.
When we look for that behavior that we
want to see and acknowledge it, we're
going to see it more often.
So taking that research that I just shared and our practice
experience and other research over time,
the center has developed-- and you
can go to the pbis.org, the equity topic page,
and see all of our free resources
for increasing equity in school discipline.
And most of these fit under this large approach
of talking about what are the most important things
we can do to increase racial and ethnic equity in school
discipline.
And because this is a complex problem,
there is not going to be any one solution that
is going to fix it all.
Instead, our research and our experience
tells us that there are five best bets for doing that.
And Ken, I'm really excited that you're talking about these five
best bets because in Pennsylvania,
we've been able to work with a lot of school districts
around these five.
And number 1 is to collect, use, and report keyword word,
disaggregated discipline data.
You can look at your aggregate and come up
with some actions and some solutions.
But remember we said we want to know if the hospital is serving
everyone.
The only way for us to do that is
to get that disaggregated data, to drill it down and figure out
which groups are not getting what they need to be
successful in our settings.
And so that's crucial if your systems,
your data systems are able to provide
that, that's a necessary piece.
Number 2 is to implement a behavior framework that
is preventive, multi-tiered, and culturally responsive ala PBIS.
PBIS is that tiered framework.
It creates the lever for equity to live.
Again, in Pennsylvania our definition
really speaks to giving students what
they need at that right moment.
And that right moment is in a tiered structure,
when done again with fidelity and through a culturally
responsive mindset.
So ensuring that there's relevance there
and connection for the people that we're supporting.
Number 3 ties directly into that,
use of engaging academic instruction
to reduce the opportunity gap.
It's really important to think about what Kent just
highlighted, that acknowledgment gap that might also be there.
So those increasing opportunities to respond,
building and priming background knowledge,
using explicit instruction, giving feedback,
those are critical practices that
are so important for that engagement to happen.
And we know that when students are not academically engaged,
behaviors tend to go up because there's boredom
or there's not a relevance for them.
So we want to have that happen.
Number 4, develop policies with accountability
for disciplinary equity.
We know that policy drives practice.
And so we have to have policies that
are very explicit about what it is that we look to do
and what we want to see as it relates to equitable discipline.
It can't simply be a nondiscriminatory statement
that's a statement in and of itself.
We need the action to be very much outlined in those policies
that we develop.
And number 5, I love this one, teach strategies
to neutralize implicit bias.
Whether we agree on this or not, we all have implicit biases.
There are things that we may not even
be aware of, that's why they're implicit.
So as we think about the things that we encounter,
the people that we encounter, automatically we
have associations going on in our brain that tells us
certain messages to think about when we see these actions
or these people in front of us.
We need strategies to help us check that thinking.
And one of those is neutralizing routines.
And they need to be brief if then doable.
And they can be individual, they can be team-based.
So if you're in a grade level team,
you could have your own grade level team neutralizing routine.
And it would say that if this behavior occurs,
these are the steps that we are going
to take to ensure that we don't make quick, irrational decisions
that could ultimately, unfortunately, lead
to disproportionate outcomes for certain groups of students.
So these five points are super critical to this work
and can be easily thought about in your next steps
as you move forward.
And so as we think about what I just highlighted and now
putting it all together, we joke that this is the refrigerator
magnet of PBIS.
So we all have it tattooed somewhere
to remind us of how important it is
to keep all of these pieces connected and intersecting.
Equity as you can see lives directly in the center.
It has to, it has to drive everything that we do.
The outcomes that we hope to achieve
are high expectations for each student.
But we have to get there through some guideposts,
through a journey.
So in order to do that, we have to begin with that data.
What was number 1 in our 5 points?
It was that being able to look at disaggregated data.
So right there is one of those key components.
The next piece is systems, and that's really
focusing on us as adults.
So what can we do at the systems level
to bring about significant shift?
And that typically begins with professional learning.
And that's for any educator.
No matter who is in front of a child,
whether that's the cafeteria worker, whether that
is the school secretary, whether that
is the teacher, the principal, you name it,
we all need a form of professional learning
to really help us embrace cultural humility.
And culture is very broad when I say that.
So even though our focus is racial equity,
cultural humility says that, I don't know Kent's background,
Kent doesn't know my background, but I'm
willing to learn about Kent, and I'm
humble enough to know that I won't know it all.
That's a form of professional learning
that can be done through coaching as well
as our traditional methods.
And then lastly, when we have those pieces
all together intersecting, we see the practices are informed.
And with that informed practice we're
now adapting those practices based
on what we've learned about the different groups
that we're serving.
And we're meeting the needs and we're also
respecting the values of the people we're serving,
whether that's students and/or staff or communities.
That was great.
Hollin, I wanted to add one thing,
you've probably seen a lot-- this word equity being thrown
around the last 15 months.
And it's really important when somebody does something
like slaps equity in the middle of their refrigerator magnet,
you better be able to ask them, what does that really mean,
and is that really driving what you're doing?
Or was that something that felt good in the moment
to be able to add?
And I think you ought to be a little skeptical of us just
sharing this information without being able to share with you
research.
And so the good news is we have over the past few years
a great deal of new research, primarily case studies showing
how this can be done.
And in early childhood education settings,
so from our colleagues at NCPMI, some
of the work that we've done at the PBIS
Center and some other projects all the way through where we're
really excited that this five-point approach,
this equity-focused approach actually does
seem to be increasing equity more than that little bit
that I was sharing before.
And so I wanted to share with you one particular study
that we've just completed, and this is with research funding
from the National Center for Special Education
Research from IES.
We did a one-year professional development intervention
for all of staff in a school implementing PBIS.
And what you can see is the schools in blue
are the ones who received our intervention.
And then the ones in orange are the ones
who got it a year later.
So we can see before they looked very similar and then
afterwards.
And what you can see is this is the Risk Index.
So this is the risk for office discipline referrals
of being sent out of the classroom for discipline
challenges.
So you can see pretty similar.
But for our schools in the treatment group,
32% of Black students were sent to the office
at least once, and then that dropped by more than half,
whereas it stayed about the same for our waitlist group.
And this was a tightly controlled randomized trial
that was just accepted for publication.
So you might be asking, well, how do we get some of this?
We're implementing PBIS, but are we really doing it
with an equity focus?
How can we get this information?
So of course, anything that we do we share out.
And I want to share with you a few resources
that you can look at on your own and be able to access.
So number 1 is our PBIS Cultural Responsiveness Field Guide.
It's just been reformatted and re-released
with cleaner live links.
And so you can get that, it's a really, really deep dive
into cultural responsiveness and picking up
on those elements of cultural humility
that Dr. Hollins-Sims described.
And then going specifically within that
and then some elaboration on it, we have a tool for school teams
to examine, maybe with students, maybe with families, maybe
with community members, their school-wide expectations
or values, and that school-wide teaching matrix
to be able to examine how well the system fits
the strengths, needs, and values of the people
who it's intending to serve, and maybe
identify some of those hidden biases that were accidentally
baking into our systems.
Also helping with students, making sure that when
we provide that equitable acknowledgment that we're
doing it in a way that's valued by students and students
have some voice in doing that.
So we have this activity called the Praise Preference
Assessment.
And then Dr. Hollins-Sims talked about that neutralizing routine.
What can you do in the moment when your snap decision might
be to send a student out of the classroom,
and it might be more likely to send
Black students, or Black male students,
or Black students with disabilities
out of the classroom?
How can we actually keep that an instructional moment?
So you can look at and access those materials anytime you
like, they're freely available.
And so just to recap as you think
about that tiered framework, and as we said,
one of the key components of those five
was to think about a behavioral tiered framework.
And so we wanted to just give you
some go-to's as you think about next steps
as to what the tiers could look like as you embed equity
into all of your practices.
So when you think about tier 1, that's that core universal,
equity is tier 1 really.
So it really begins at that foundational universal space.
Some of the things we've already said,
however, we just wanted to reinforce them.
We're honoring student strengths.
So being asset-based, focused on what
they bring to the table rather than the deficit.
And honoring their voice.
Students are so in-tune with what they want
and what they need.
And so as we're building these systems,
we have to keep their voice center
so that we're able to know that we're making decisions that
ultimately will impact them in a way that
makes the most sense for them.
We also need to think about that professional learning.
And even though it might be difficult sometimes,
self-awareness is a part of that professional learning.
So as we think about those implicit biases, those things
that as Kent said, may accidentally
be misinforming our system, we have to even know
that that's happening.
And that's that process of self-awareness
and its things as simple as, and Kent will attest to this,
looking at the behaviors that you're sending office discipline
referrals for, are they subjective?
So disrespect, defiance, disruption,
the things that are highly ambiguous
tend to lead to some of those disproportionate outcomes.
Being self-aware allows us to be able to drill
down and understand what might be
causing some of those referrals to come to us.
We need to always consider and center the families and students
again when we're looking at the values and the norms
that they hold.
And also the communities that we have around us,
what are the norms there and how can we
start to interface with our community
to help build out school-wide, classroom-wide expectations?
And then back to that acknowledgment
gap, how do we create equitable acknowledgment systems that
again utilize the voice of students and communities
to ensure that what we're providing
is most applicable for them?
At the advanced tiers, I won't take too much time here,
but I just wanted to highlight that at tier 2
it's an access concern.
We want students to have access at that advanced tier
level based on the needs that they're providing.
Remember, we said it has to be at that right moment.
Tier 2 creates that space for students in smaller groups
to get a little bit more than what they're getting at tier 1.
And it's those increased opportunities for feedback
or I'm sorry, increased instructional opportunities,
having more feedback, positive homeschool communication.
Not always calling to say, Johnny did something wrong,
but increasing that positive communication when we catch
him doing something right.
And then at tier 3, it's more individualized, contextualized.
We're really engaging and authentically engaging families
at that table to determine what are the goals we should set,
what makes sense to have consistency from home to school
to community?
Keyword word, trust.
At that intensive level, families, communities,
and students need to be able to trust us.
We need to be able to trust them.
And that is a piece of self-awareness as well.
So all of these things as we said intersect
in some way, that two-way communication,
it can't be us versus them or just us talking at them.
Them being student, family, community.
But how are we talking together and making shared decisions?
And this last one is so critical,
limiting those assumptions about home life and family values
simply because a family doesn't do
what you did when you were a youth,
does not mean that the practices that they have in their home
are not relevant or are important to them.
So it's important that we limit those assumptions
and focus on what we can do together rather than separate
it.
And then as we think about significant disproportionality
and discipline, particularly as it relates to special education,
we hope that we've given you a nice chunk of information
about the importance of focusing on disciplinary equity
because that is the way that we can start to mitigate some
of these significant disproportionate outcomes
that we're seeing in the field.
And so here are a few things to consider as we wrap up,
policy review.
Looking at your discipline policies to really see,
are they explicitly tied to those equitable practices
that we've highlighted previously?
And if not, what can we do to start to ensure that they are?
So again, a nondiscriminatory statement is fine,
but it's just simply not enough.
Those policies have to be explicit and connected
to the practices.
I've talked a little bit about this.
It's important for us to take an overall look
at our disciplinary decisions and say,
are these decisions that tend to be higher
on our radar very subjective or could
be a piece of vulnerable decision points, which
Kent knows all too well?
As we think about vulnerable decision points,
there often as a result of implicit biases
based on ambiguity.
And I'll quote Ken again because I use his quote often,
"Ambiguity is disproportionality's best
friend."
And it can't be more true.
That is so important to remember as we
think about making decisions that are equitable in nature.
I can't say enough that a tiered system of support
needs to reflect the whole child.
So not only academics, which we know we
focus on a lot, but also that behavioral component, which
we've highlighted here, and then social, emotional,
and trauma-informed domains.
All of those create a whole child.
They come to us in that space of all of those things operating
together, we can't silo them out.
And lastly, evaluation of overall school climate
is really important for that space of belonging and dignity.
Kent gave a great example of, we welcome the dawgs,
but the dogs are not welcome here.
We want every space that our educators and that our students
occupy to be a place of belonging and dignity.
That's the goal of equity.
At the core it's about human dignity.
Now, what a great way to wrap up.
I want to highlight that you can get all of our resources
on www.pbis.org.
Come to our site, check out the Equity page,
and look through all of the resources that we have.
It's been an absolute pleasure to get a chance
to work with Dr. Hollins-Sims again.
It's always great.
If you want to get a hold of either of us,
you've got our contact information here.
And then lastly, I just want to thank
the Office of Special Education Programs
for the opportunity to share here.
And thank you all for watching our session.
Have a great day.