Misinformation from the ABC
Do school suspensions put students on a trajectory to the justice system?
These days, we are all supposed to be deeply concerned about misinformation and disinformation. The public are fools who are easily manipulated by Russian bot farms and this means heroic governments such as Australia’s need to step in with a little benevolent censorship in order to save democracy. I am not a fan of such censorship and Claire Lehmann does a good job of explaining the problems with it in The Australian.
I don’t trust governments, commissioners or other bureaucrats to censor content for me, but misinformation certainly does exist. And it crops up in unlikely places, such as on the website of Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC.
Yesterday, the ABC published a piece by reporters Alison Bradley and Nas Campanella about school suspensions. It was the typical romanticism we have come to expect. Despite an assertion in the article by Matilda Alexander, CEO of Queensland Advocacy for Inclusion (QAI), that students with disabilities are being suspended from school for ‘really silly reasons,’ the reporters tell the story of a boy suspended for violence towards two teacher aides. Perhaps they could not find a kid suspended for really silly reasons. Perhaps such kids are hard to find.
The article is based on a report released by QAI — although there are some issues with that which we will get to. Bradley and Campanella talk to Alexander and to Linda Graham, an education professor with an interest in inclusion. Despite never having taught kids herself, Graham is convinced that the problems leading to suspension could be prevented if teachers planned more inclusive lessons and generously suggests they be given more time to do so. I’m not sure what such lessons would look like and I suspect Graham doesn’t know either.
The reporters rightly state that students with disabilities are suspended at greater rates than those without. It is worth highlighting that this will still be a minority of both groups. There is nothing about having a disability that makes a child violent and the vast majority of kids are not violent, whether or not they are disabled. However, some disabilities, such as ADHD and autism, are associated with challenging behaviours. It is the challenging behaviours that mean these kids are at greater risk of suspension, not the fact they have disabilities.
This also suggests there is a little more to addressing this problem than lesson planning. When I wrote about the ABC piece on LinkedIn, a disability advocate noted that the student in the article may have been dysregulated and the adults should have been trained to not enter the personal space of a dysregulated child. Which sounds simple. After all, why would teachers want to enter a child’s space? Well, what if the child is damaging property, hurting another child or hurting themselves? Might that be a reason?
The closest the journalists got to talking to an actual practitioner was interviewing Andy Mison, president of the Australian Secondary Principals Association. Mison sensibly argued that, “the rising rates of suspension were reflective of schools admitting more students with disability, but resources were not keeping up.”
It is true that mainstream schools have no hope of matching the kind of resources that specialists schools can use to support students. Simply dumping a child with profound difficulties in a classroom with 29 peers and exhorting the teacher to plan better lessons does not seem like a great solution.
As part of their article, Bradley and Campanella summarise the QAI report it is supposedly based upon and one of the points in their summary is this:
“Suspensions put students on a trajectory to the justice system. The involvement of 300 students with disability equated to up to $9.8 million in youth justice costs.”
That’s a strong causal claim. Yes, students who are suspended are more likely to come into contact with the justice system, but the obvious explanation for this is that the behaviours that lead to suspension are the same kinds of behaviours that lead to contact with the justice system.
However, Bradley and Campanella are claiming that it is the fact of being suspended that puts, ‘students on a trajectory to the justice system.’ Suspensions are the cause and contact with the justice system is the effect. If so, reducing suspensions by whatever means necessary would reduce such contact. That would be a huge claim if true and one with implications for policymakers.
So, I decided to look into the QAI report. Bradley and Campanella do not provide a link, but by examining the QAI website, it seems pretty clear it must be, A Right to Learn - Economic cost of suspensions for Queensland students with disability.
I can find nowhere in the report that makes the same causal claim about suspensions as Bradley and Campanella. Instead, the report’s Key Findings state:
“Research in Australia and overseas suggests suspensions have a negative association with subsequent youth offending and educational attainment.”
A ‘negative association’ just means a correlation. It does not, as any Statistics 101 graduate can tell you, imply causation.
When we come to the assumptions of the report, matters turn even more interesting:
“Impacts associated with suspensions are assumed to be driven by underlying school disengagement and behavioural challenges, with suspensions a proxy indicator for these underlying challenges being experienced by children and young people. A reduction in recorded suspensions that is not accompanied by an improvement in student engagement with their school and learning is not expected to lead to any change in life course impacts.”
In other words, the report’s authors assume that the fact of being suspended is not what causes any adverse criminal justice or economic outcomes, it is ‘school disengagement and behavioural challenges’ that cause these outcomes. Suspensions are simply a convenient proxy measure.
Critically, any artificial attempt to lower suspensions such as, say, making it harder and more bureaucratic for principals to suspend students, would not affect the underlying level of school disengagement and therefore would be assumed to have no impact on these outcomes.
What the researchers are effectively doing is using data from elsewhere and the correlation between suspension and negative outcomes to estimate the economic costs of these underlying factors — school disengagement and behavioural challenges — in Queensland. It clearly has little to do with what Bradley and Campanella have reported and nothing to do with whether students are being suspended for ‘really silly reasons’ or not, even if Matilda Alexander, who presumably commissioned the report, does not seem to be aware of this.
Why is the ABC publishing false news? It’s hard to know, but we can speculate. Although wrong, the story is wrong in the right way, feeding a romantic narrative about children that makes people feel good about themselves. Reporters and activists can take pride in fighting against those mean-spirited schools that suspend kids for really silly reasons or because their disabilities make it hard for them to conform to unenlightened school regimes.
Teachers, on the other hand, have no such luxury because they have to deal with the consequences.
I’m sorry, although i’m concerned for Australia, as a teacher here in the United States I’ve got much bigger fish to fry. Apparently ice cream consumption increases murder rates over here. Pray for us.
Hi Greg,
If you read the research (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8277153/) I think you’ll find there IS growing evidence of a causal link between suspensions and subsequent levels of offending.
Regardless, even without causality, there’s ample evidence that suspensions are an ineffective mechanism for improving or managing student behaviour. In fact, the NSW Department of Education said so in their 2021 ‘Student Behaviour Strategy’ (paragraph 10, page 7 - https://education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/student-wellbeing/attendance-behaviour-and-engagement/media/Student_Behaviour_Strategy_March_2021.pdf).
Knowing that suspensions are ineffective and there’s growing evidence that they’re actually harmful to children and adolescents, the real question is ‘Why do schools, education authorities and policy makers persist with exclusionary disciplinary practices, like suspensions?'
I have my theories. No doubt you have yours.
James