IES Blog

By Lauren Musu-Gillette

Suspensions and expulsions from school are often associated with negative academic outcomes, such as lower levels of achievement and higher dropout rates.[i] Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:2009), NCES recently published a new spotlight feature in Indicators of School Crime and Safety that shows that a greater percentage of students who are suspended or expelled have low engagement in school and are less academically successful.  

While there is a large body of research on this topic, this is the first time that the nationally representative HSLS study has been used to examine outcomes for and characteristics of suspended and expelled youth. The comparisons presented here cannot be used to establish a cause-and-effect relationship, but the longitudinal nature of the dataset could provide researchers an analytical path to understanding how these relationships have unfolded over time.

Research shows that students’ attitudes toward school are associated with their academic outcomes, and that schools with a supportive climate have lower rates of delinquency, including suspensions and expulsions.[ii] As part of the HSLS:2009 data collection, students reported on their school engagement[iii] and sense of school belonging[iv] in the fall of their ninth-grade year (2009). A greater percentage of students who were suspended or expelled between 2009 and 2012 were reported low school engagement entering high school. A similar pattern was seen with regard to a sense of belonging in school.

 Percentage of fall 2009 ninth-graders who were ever suspended or expelled through spring 2012, by school engagement and sense of school belonging: 2012

¹A school engagement scale was constructed based on students' responses to questions about how frequently they went to class without homework done, without pencil or paper, without books, or late.

²A school belonging scale was constructed based on the extent to which students agreed or disagreed that they felt safe at school, that they felt proud of being part of the school, that there were always teachers or other adults at school they could talk to if they had a problem, that school was often a waste of time, and that getting good grades was important to them.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:2009).

The percentages of students who had ever been suspended or expelled were higher for those students with lower grade point averages (GPAs). Nearly half of students with a cumulative high school GPA below 2.0 had ever been suspended or expelled and just 11 percent had a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Additionally, as of 2013, a higher percentage of students who had not completed high school than of students who had completed high school had ever been suspended or expelled (54 vs. 17 percent).

Percentage of fall 2009 ninth-graders who were ever suspended or expelled through spring 2012, by cumulative high school grade point average and high school completion status: 2013

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:2009).

Differences in the demographic characteristics of students who had ever been suspended or expelled were similar to those found in other datasets, such as the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). Characteristics of youth in the HSLS study who were ever suspended or expelled include:

• A higher percentage of males (26 percent) than of females (13 percent) were ever suspended or expelled.
• A higher percentage of Black students (36 percent) than of Hispanic (21 percent), White (14 percent), and Asian students (6 percent) had ever been suspended or expelled.
• A higher percentage of students of Two or more races (26 percent) and Hispanic students had ever been suspended or expelled than White students.
• A lower percentage of Asian students than of students of any other race/ethnicity with available data had ever been suspended or expelled.

For more information on the characteristics of students who have ever been suspended or expelled, please see the full spotlight in Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2015.

In April, the annual Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) held its annual Convention and Expo, during which scholars were recognized for their research contributions to the field. A number of NCSER-funded investigators were among those honored by the CEC.

Michael Wehmeyer (right) received the CEC Special Education Research Award, which recognizes an individual or team whose research has made significant contributions to the education of children and youth with exceptionalities. Dr. Wehmeyer has served as the principal investigator (PI) on two NCSER-funded awards.  He tested the promise of efficacy for the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction, an intervention to promote self-determination, access to the general education curriculum, and support for the needs of students with disabilities to achieve academic and transition-related goals.  He and his research team are currently developing an assessment, the Self-Determination Inventory System, to measure self-determination for a range of disability groups as well as youth and young adults without disabilities.

Rob Horner (right) is the 2016 recipient of the Kauffman-Hallahan Distinguished Researcher Award. This honor, awarded by the CEC Division of Research, recognizes individuals or research teams who have made outstanding scientific contributions in basic or applied research in special education over the course of their careers. Dr. Horner has been the recipient of several IES-funded awards. He is currently testing the efficacy of Team-Initiated Problem Solving, a training and coaching intervention for teaching school teams to use behavioral and academic progress-monitoring data to define and solve problems. For a number of years Dr. Horner has also been a lead faculty member of the IES Summer Research Training Institute for Single-Case Intervention Research Design and Analysis, a professional development program that has increased the national capacity of education researchers to conduct methodologically rigorous single-case intervention studies.

Brian Boyd (left) is the winner of the 2016 Distinguished Early Career Research Award, an honor from CEC’s Division of Research that recognizes individuals with outstanding scientific contributions in special education research within the first 10 years after receiving a doctoral degree. Dr. Boyd has played key roles on several NCSER-funded grants, including as co-PI on an award to develop Advancing Social-Communication and Play (ASAP), an intervention aimed at improving the social-communication and play skills of preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders. He is also the PI for a current grant examining the efficacy of ASAP.

All of this year’s CEC Division of Research award winners will give an invited presentation at the 2017 CEC Convention and Expo.  At this year’s convention, held April 13-16, the Division of Research award recipients from 2015 gave presentations. This includes two previous winners of the Distinguished Early Career Research Award – Karrie Shogren and Kent McIntosh – both of whom have been NCSER-funded investigators.

Karrie Shogren (right) had received an award from NCSER in which she analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 to identify individual and environmental factors that predict self-determination and examine the relationship between self-determination and long-term outcomes of students with disabilities. As part of a current NCSER-funded project, Kent McIntosh (left) is conducting an exploratory study to identify malleable factors that enhance or inhibit the implementation and sustainability of school-wide social-emotional and behavior support practices, focusing on School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports.

The Division of Research was not the only CEC group awarding honors to NCSER-funded investigators. Maureen Conroy (right) was awarded the 2016 Outstanding Leadership Award from CEC’s Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders. This award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to research, leadership, teacher education, and policy in the field of behavior disorders. Dr. Conroy has received funding to develop a preventative classroom-based intervention that targets problem behaviors by preschool teachers and to evaluate the efficacy of BEST in CLASS, an intervention for young children at high risk for emotional and behavioral disorders.

IES congratulates all the winners!

Written by Amy Sussman, program officer, NCSER

By Lauren Musu-Gillette and Joel McFarland

Juvenile offenders held in residential placement facilities often experience disruptions to their education as they pass in and out of traditional schooling. While most facilities provide middle- and high-school-level educational services, these services are generally not comparable to those available in their community schools.[i] Understanding the characteristics of juveniles in these facilities can help educators and policy-makers in finding the best ways to support education for these youth.  

Between 1997 and 2013, the number of youth in residential placement facilities fell by nearly 50 percent, from approximately 105,000 to just over 54,000.[ii] While the overall decline is informative, the residential placement rate (the number of juvenile offenders in residential facilities per 100,000 youth in the general population) provides a more comparable measurement across time because it accounts for population growth and demographic changes. The overall residential placement rate fell from 356 per 100,000 youth in 1997 to 173 per 100,000 in 2013. Following this trend, the residential placement rate for youth in various racial and ethnic subgroups also fell significantly as seen in the chart below.

Residential placement rate (number of juvenile offenders in residential placement facilities) per 100,000 juveniles, by race/ethnicity: Selected years, 1997 through 2013

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP).

Across America, schools struggle with addressing the academic and social needs of students who are homeless, in foster care, from migrant backgrounds, or military-dependent. These students typically change residences and/or schools frequently (often multiple times within a given school year) making it difficult for them to succeed academically.  

This year, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is shining a research spotlight on improving the education outcomes of highly mobile K-12 students through a new special topic within its Education Research grants program. The new Systemic Approaches to Educating Highly Mobile Students special topic invites research on:

• support services that reduce barriers that highly mobile students typically face;
• policies that allow highly mobile students to receive credit for full or partial coursework completed while attending their previous schools;
• policies that facilitate the transfer of student records across jurisdictions, and help highly mobile students navigate standards, course, and graduation requirements that change from state to state;
• policies and programs that address the academic, physical, psychological, and social needs of highly mobile students who may have experienced deprivation or trauma; and
• state and local implementation of services for highly mobile students that are required by federal law or are provided through federally funded programs or interstate agreements.  

Through this special topic, IES also encourages studies that create or utilize shared/integrated data systems (such as records exchanges) to identify and track highly mobile students and pinpoint factors that could potentially be used to improve these students' outcomes. 

(Dr. Jill Biden, pictured above, mentioned this new special topic area in her remarks at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference as part of her focus on military families.)

Additional Opportunities for Research on Highly Mobile Students

Researchers who are interested in studying highly mobile pre-K students are invited to apply through to the Early Learning Programs and Policies topic. Similarly, researchers who are interested increasing highly mobile students’ access to, persistence in, progress through, and completion of postsecondary education are invited to apply through the Postsecondary and Adult Education Research topic. 

IES also encourages researchers to partner with local school districts or state education agencies to carry out initial research on highly mobile students and develop a plan for future research. This can be done through the Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in Education Research topic.

For more information about funding opportunities for research on highly mobile students, please visit the IES website or contact Katina Stapleton.

For examples of previously funded research on highly mobile students, see  Promoting Executive Function to Enhance Learning in Homeless/Highly Mobile Children, Developing a Model for Delivering School-Based Mentoring to Students in Military Families, and Students in Foster Care: The Relationship between Mobility and Educational Outcomes.

Written by Katina Stapleton, Education Research Analyst, NCER; Program Officer, Systemic Approaches to Educating Highly Mobile Students

Photo of Dr. Biden courtesy of AERA

By Ruth Curran Neild, delegated director, IES

When you invite people into your home, you want everything to look nice. You clean up, organize, and do anything you can to make sure everyone has a pleasant experience. Now, imagine inviting millions of people into your home.

That is essentially what IES does every year with its website—we welcome millions of people to our online home so they can find the information, tools, and resources they want and need. A few years ago, we recognized that our home wasn’t the most welcoming place – and we decided to do something about it. Our users said the website was very text heavy and almost impossible to use on a mobile device, which is how an increasing number of users are visiting. And they said the way our site was organized made it hard for users to find what they were looking for and see the connections among our work.

Today, I am proud to announce that our home renovation has begun as we launch the first phase of a major website redesign that uses a more attractive, contemporary design, is mobile-friendly, and is better organized, including a new drop down navigation menu that makes it easier for our users to find what they are looking for.

The first phase updates our five top-level pages—the IES home page (pictured) and the landing pages for our four centers: the National Center for Education Research (NCER), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE); and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). For a comparison, here's a screenshot of the old website.

To develop the design of the new website, we spoke to focus groups of users, looked at data and analytics, and studied trends in web design. We think the result is a vast improvement over the previous site, and it will only get better over time. In the coming weeks and months we will update other pages, such as our Standards and Review Office, research programs, evaluation studies, the National Library of Education, and more.

To improve the user experience, we also will develop some new pages and content demonstrating the connection and continuity of the work that IES is doing. These include:

• Topic pages: These pages will bring together a broad array of research, evaluation, and statistics around a specific topic, such as early childhood education and high school graduation;
• A communications hub: A site where all of the latest IES news, press releases, and blogs will be hosted and easy to find; and
• An improved training site and events calendar: Information that better displays and tracks training opportunities and events.

Anyone who has been involved in a website redesign knows it is not easy. While only a handful of pages have launched today, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get to this point. I want to thank the many IES staff members and contractors who have developed and built our new site and congratulate them on a job well done. It will take us a while to fully update the website since it contains thousands and thousands of pages.

And, as with any new website, there may be some hiccups that will require further tweaking. If you see anything on our site that needs attention, please email us at Contact.IES@ed.gov and include a link to the content.

The new website is an important part of our overall efforts to improve our dissemination of the research, resources, and tools we support and develop. As I wrote in a recent piece on the Evidence Speaks website, progress is being made in this area, but we still have a lot of work to do before research is used on an everyday basis in the classroom and on campuses. In the coming months, IES will continue to make improvements to our online presences and outreach:

• In May, we will launch an IES Facebook page to better engage our community and share the work of IES on social media (UPDATE: The Facebook page has launched). We have already made improvements to our social media outreach on Twitter, and have added about 1,000 followers to the @IESResearch twitter feed this year, alone;
• In the fall, we will unveil a major redesign of the What Works Clearinghouse website and significant improvements to the Find What Works tool so it is easier to locate interventions and programs that make a difference; and
• Early next year, we expect to launch a major overhaul of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) websites to align with the start of the new REL contracts. The RELs are our primary dissemination network, and over the past five years have undertaken many new strategies for connecting research to policy and practice. The new REL contracts and website will further advance that work.

If you have other ideas for dissemination or outreach, please share them with us. We are always trying to improve. You can email our Communications Director, Dana Tofig, at dana.tofig@ed.gov. 

UPDATED May 13, 2016 to reflect the launch of the IES Facebook page.