Researchers are looking at ways in which PBIS can reduce the racial discipline gap.
Too often in many schools, students of color, particularly African American and Latino students, are disciplined disproportionately to their presence in the student body. At Abbott Middle School, PBIS lowered discipline rates while maintaining discipline numbers proportional by race to the school's enrollment.
"As we reviewed the data, we realized we had a few teachers who were sending a disproportionate number of African American students to the office," said Kathy Davis, assistant principal at Abbott. "When we looked at these teachers' disciplinary numbers, we found that they were sending children to the office for incidents which are not grounds for office referrals in our school. In short, once these teachers began to actually implement PBIS, these numbers decreased to where they should be."
Unfortunately, Abbott's proportionality is the exception, not the rule, even in schools implementing PBIS.
Russell Skiba, director of the Initiative on Equity and Opportunity at Indiana University has found that, overall, PBIS has enabled schools to reduce school exclusion by appropriately matching the severity of the disciplinary incident to the consequence. While PBIS reduces school exclusion for all students, Skiba found that students of color in PBIS schools were still more likely to receive harsher punishments for similar misbehavior than their white peers. Nonetheless, Skiba sees promise in the PBIS framework as a means to bring these data and these conversations to the forefront.
Skiba advocates for diverse representation on school PBIS teams to ensure that multiple perspectives aid the development of the school's behavior expectations, interventions, and reinforcement. "I believe educators are excellent problem solvers. If they see a problem, they will try to solve it," Skiba said. "If we bring that kind of awareness into the framework of PBIS, we will see that same kind of problem solving."