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Designing Educational Interventions to Advance Social Justice

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Disproportionality and Social Justice in Education

Abstract

Racial/ethnic inequities in exclusionary school discipline are a serious threat to equal opportunity education and positive societal outcomes. Of students from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, learning, and socio-economic backgrounds, Black (i.e., African American) students lose the most instructional time due to exclusionary discipline. In this chapter, we report on four case studies that serve as demonstrations of a data-driven process to improve equity in school discipline within a relatively short time period (1 year). The case studies add to emerging evidence for using a data-informed approach as a means for addressing discipline disproportionality in schools implementing multi-tiered systems of support. The process of training educators to use this problem-solving model to address equity in school discipline, in particular, appeared to increase school personnel agency and ownership for what could be perceived as more of a “societal” problem.

Author Note

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R324A1800027 to the University of Oregon. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute, Office, or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Correspondence to Kent McIntosh .

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McIntosh, K. et al. (2022). Designing Educational Interventions to Advance Social Justice. In: Gage, N., Rapa, L.J., Whitford, D.K., Katsiyannis, A. (eds) Disproportionality and Social Justice in Education. Springer Series on Child and Family Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13775-4_14

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