School Punishment in the US and England: Divergent Frames and Responses

Introduction

The issue of school punishment and security – how schools attempt to prevent and respond to students’ misbehaviour – has gained increasing attention among policy makers over the past 20 years in both the US and England. Given that public education offers the first form of state authority over youth, and that many youth are first introduced into the formal justice system through schools, the topic has drawn the attention of many criminologists as well (e.g. Fabelo et al., 2011; Hirschfield, 2008; Kupchik, 2010; Simon, 2007). Yet school policies and policy discourse have taken different forms and have led to different outcomes in these two nations. We explore and compare how lawmakers have framed the issue of school rule enforcement in the US and England, and compare and contrast the resulting national-level policy responses. As school systems across the UK vary, we consider only England’s, the single largest system in the UK.

We pursue two primary research questions informed by a social constructivist perspective (Loseke, 2003): How does the political framing of the problems of student misbehaviour and school punishment compare across the two nations?; and 2) How do the resulting school punishment and security policies and practices differ? Our first research question concerns the ‘diagnostic framing’ (Loseke, 2003) of the issue; that is, how its cause is constructed. Our second question concerns the issues’ ‘prognostic framing’ (Loseke, 2003), as it considers official school policies and security practices that logically stem from these causal constructions. Our analysis provides several hypotheses to explain differences among problem framing and policy responses between the US and England.

Prior cross-national comparisons of punishment serve as useful guides to our inquiry. These studies are powerful for understanding why harsh punishments − most often, the extensive use of incarceration − have been pursued more enthusiastically in some countries than in others. These studies also allow us to focus on deep-seated, underlying bases and causes of variation between countries. Yet there have been few attempts to compare school punishment cross-nationally, despite the fact that most explanations for why school punishment policies look the way they do rely on national-level factors (e.g. Hirschfield, 2008; Kupchik, 2010; Simon, 2007). The most extensive to date, a recent edited collection by Arum and Velez (2012), considers how student test scores in nine different countries (including the US but not the UK), are influenced by the ‘school disciplinary climate,’ conceptualized to include student disengagement, student victimization, and classroom disruption. Though they discuss school rules and punishments as context for their comparisons, their analytic focus is on student behaviour rather than school punishment (see also Akiba et al., 2002; Craig et al., 2009).

Our goal is to add to the growing literature on school punishment and security with a cross-national study to investigate how such approaches are shaped by distinctive, national-level factors. Given that there are no prior efforts of this kind, our inquiry is exploratory; we seek to establish levels of variation in how school punishment and security are framed and legislated, and to formulate hypotheses to be pursued in future studies that help account for these variations. Rather than limit our focus to only one school level (i.e. elementary, middle, or high), we consider policy discourse and practice concerning punishment and security in public compulsory schools, generally. ¹

Comparing Punishment in the US and England

Comparative criminology – perhaps especially comparative youth justice – requires precision and delicacy. In spite of the range of established comparative variables, categories, and typologies in the growing comparative literature (see Muncie and Goldson, 2006a), it is nigh impossible to capture with adequacy the rich and contradictory diversity of youth justice discourse, policies, practices, and trends in ways that conform in all respects to the criteria imposed by these typologies. Moreover, ‘…developments in any single nation state cannot be fully explored without reference to sub-national, regional and local diversity as well as acknowledging the impact of international and global forces’ (Muncie and Goldson, 2006b: 197). Meanwhile the pendulums of (for now) accepted and (for now) discarded discourses and practices continue to swing in every jurisdiction − sometimes even in opposing directions − as ascendant ideas and practices build on and respond to the local terrain of historical accretions. All of this makes pinning down generalities and consistent patterns all the more difficult.

Yet, ‘an observation simply is insignificant without comparisons’ (Strömbäck et al., 2008: 15); for instance, any study of one jurisdiction’s youth justice discourse and practices lacks depth and meaning without comparative analogues with which to juxtapose them. Datasets are nearly always imperfect and tools of comparison are sometimes crude. Comparativists may fail to make sufficient distinctions between cases within a given typology, or they may draw unduly and misleadingly distinct divisions within and between jurisdictions when the lived experiences on the ground may feel much less than distinct. But we work with the comparative tools we have. It is by deploying and redeploying them that their shortcomings are revealed, yielding further innovation in method and better honed comparative skills.

With these caveats in place, categorizations and typologies often serve useful analytical functions. The US and England, for instance, are often said to share a ‘special relationship’. They make useful comparators in part because they have shared remarkably similar cultural, economic, and political trajectories since the end of the Second World War. Both countries had highly regulated Keynesian, welfare-state economies until Reagan and Thatcher swept to power, ushering in a free-market neo-liberalism that still distinguishes both countries from most of their Western peers (Garland, 2001). Both countries saw the similarly timed election of New Democrat and New Labour administrations in the 1990s characterized by a penal-populist harshening of rhetoric and reaction to public concerns about crime.

Despite the very different scale of punishment levels between the two countries – indicated by an incarceration rate in the US that is almost five times that of England – scholars have noted similarities among English and American penal cultures and policies when compared with other Western countries (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2001; Lacey, 2008). The English have recently sought to emulate aspects of American criminal justice policy, and the resulting ‘policy transfer’ (Jones and Newburn, 2006) is evident, for instance, in zero-tolerance rhetoric and three-strikes laws. Both countries have also seen remarkably similar rises and declines in both crime and prison-population trends and trajectories.

Thus in the subfield of comparative penology, England and the United States are commonly grouped together. Both countries have a majoritarian system of government − with two (sometimes three) dominant political parties and winner-takes-all election systems, and a competitive rather than corporatist interest-group system − and a neoliberal political economy. Each has largely responded to similar crime trends in similarly punitive ways, by embracing penal expansion and repressive rhetoric while at the same time eschewing the heavy state investment in welfare-oriented interventions which marked the postwar period until around 1980. Garland explains how a ‘culture of control’ has infiltrated the thinking of probation and parole personnel in both nations and ‘de-emphasized their social work functions… [giving] renewed weight to their control and risk-monitoring functions’ (Garland, 2001: 12).

Penologists Cavadino and Dignan (2006: 15) seek to account for the ‘penal tendencies’ of a dozen countries by analyzing their political economies. They group the US and England and Wales together (along with South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand) in the ‘neo-liberalism’ cluster, in contrast with the ‘conservative corporatism’, ‘social democratic corporatism’, and ‘oriental corporatism’ of other nations considered. In short, tendencies toward punitive responses to crime are highest in those countries where neo-liberalism obtains. This is due in part to neo-liberalism’s elevation of free-market principles, free will, and individual responsibility, on the one hand, and on the other, the subsequent withering of a ‘minimalist and residual’ welfare state (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: 16). In the US particularly, this has facilitated a ‘law and order ideology’ – a version of which is believed to have been exported to the UK – which is condemnatory and exclusive rather than sympathetic to and inclusive of society’s failures, whether poor, deviant, or criminal (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: Chapter 3).

Moreover, Cavadino and Dignan (2006) describe both countries as primarily ‘neo-correctionalist’ in their approaches to youth justice. Neo-correctionalism is the most punitive and exclusionary approach in their typology, contrasted with ‘welfare’, ‘justice’, ‘miminum intervention’, and ‘restorative justice’ approaches. Both countries’ youth justice histories have invoked rich combinations of these approaches over time (Goldson and Hughes, 2010b), and the American version of neo-correctionalism is more ‘unalloyed’ than that of the English (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: xiii), at least when it comes to more serious and persistent offenders. Americans have experienced a ‘fundamental legal, political and cultural shift in the way juvenile offenders are conceptualized. From being seen as innocent, dependent and often vulnerable children they are increasingly viewed as responsible, autonomous and often predatory “quasi-adults”’ (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: 218). And although ‘[t]he English system is highly volatile and constantly contested, incorporating… an eclectic mix of approaches [see Goldson and Muncie, 2006 for a thorough overview]… it is increasingly influenced by neo-correctionalist principles’ (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: 230). Of course, volatility and unforeseen shifts in guiding principles and sensibilities make it impossible to claim neo-correctionalism will continue in its current forms.

The political scientist Arendt Lijphart (1999) provides yet another comparative dimension linking the American and English systems by highlighting the similarities of the countries’ ‘majoritarian’ political cultures. Green (2007, 2008a, 2008b) and Lappi-Seppälä (2007, 2008) have used Lijphart’s distinction to demonstrate how consensus political cultures − like, most strikingly, the Nordic countries − generate fewer incentives to politicize high-profile crimes and crime fears. This is due in part to their multiparty and proportional representation election systems which render the game of politics variable- rather than zero-sum. This means there is less to gain, electorally, from the politicization of crime and public fears about it if parties often work together in coalitions, and politics itself is less fractious than is routinely found in majoritarian countries like the US and England.

However useful these comparative models are for understanding similarities between England and the US, or differences between these two countries and others, they are not useful to explain differences between the countries themselves because each framework tends to align American and English rhetoric, policies, and practices. Thus, to appreciate and understand differences we need comparative tools that enable finer analyses than these categorical distinctions can manage. To begin with we need to focus on how the country contexts differ.

Perhaps the most striking difference between American and English experience is Americans’ tortured racial history and evident legacies of slavery. Several contemporary scholars have made the case that Americans’ tolerance of excessively high incarceration rates are linked in part to a failure to empathize or sympathize with the minority populations most impacted by them. A callous indifference to the pains of imprisonment felt disproportionately by black-skinned men and their families has permitted their mass imprisonment at an unprecedented scale. Alexander (2012) refers, albeit polemically, to biases in the legislation and enforcement of American criminal law as ‘the new Jim Crow’. ² Wacquant (2009: 157) contends that ‘a deep structural and functional symbiosis has emerged between the collapsing ghetto and the booming prison’, with the latter representing the latest means of managing and disciplining those populations locked out of a polarizing global economy. It is possible that a good amount of contrast in the harshness of school punishment policies in the US and England can be explained by American legacies of overt racial repression and a more covert and unconscious bias against and lack of empathy for those individuals perceived to be at the bottom of the cultural heap.

However, England disproportionately excludes Black students as well. Recent data suggest that Black males are four times more likely to be excluded from schools than White males (Department for Education, 2011), a rate close to that found in the US, as we discuss below. This might suggest that the American experience of race is not so exceptional and could possibly help account for the similarities in the numbers excluded and the racial proportions of the population who are excluded.

The US differs subtly in another way from England. While the jurisprudence of each country is built upon ‘a constitution primarily designed to address centuries-old problems’ (Tonry, 2009: 385), the US constitution was a response to the particular events and pressures of an 18^th-century world. These included:

… governance by a distant Parliament, capricious actions by the British government’s local representatives and the inability of citizens to obtain redress for grievances. The principal solutions centered on respect for individual liberty and insulation of citizens from the power of the State. (Tonry, 2009: 284)

The deep-seated distrust of centralized state power, present since the nation’s founding, has shaped the truly exceptional ways American justice and justice policy are administered, with a unique focus on state-level control and local accountability. Practically in no other Western country are judges and prosecutors elected, as they may be influenced by public outrage in response to high-profile cases or issues. Moreover, Americans allow legislators to create policies − like, for instance, zero-tolerance policies for misbehaviour in school − which effectively strip away discretional decision-making power from those closest to the misbehaving student, who might be in a position to mitigate harsh punishment.

Finally, punishment schemes in place in American schools appear to have de-emphasized their softer socialization functions in favor of a more heavy-handed kind of ‘tough love’ (see Kupchik, 2010; Simon, 2007). While this might be the case in English schools as well, some evidence suggests otherwise. A 2012 review report written by Lord Carlile for the Secretary of State for Education offers a view which conflicts with Garland’s (2001) general assessment that crime is seen as a problem of indiscipline. The report, ‘The Edlington Case’, was commissioned to assess the responses of relevant authorities to a horrific attack on three boys by two young brothers in the town of Edlington, outside Doncaster, and how the two boys were allowed to continue long-identified patterns of dangerous misbehaviour. Using rhetoric that starkly opposes that which surrounds student misbehaviour in the US, the report focuses on the need for adequate services to the poor and early intervention and prevention (Carlile, 2012). It calls local authorities to task for not ensuring children’s well-being and makes clear that schools remain responsible for the education of excluded students, including the costs of administering it. This contrasts with the American zero-tolerance approach, based on the construct of a willfully deviant child in need of little more than harsh punishment (Hirschfield and Celinska, 2011).

In summary, then, racial and ethnic divisions continue to allow for the proliferation of punitive policies in US schools that disproportionately impact racial/ethnic minorities and their children. Moreover, the levers of criminal justice and school rule enforcement are more vulnerable to the influence of legislators’ electoral ambitions in the US than in England, for constitutional reasons, and often with punitive consequences.

Student Misbehaviour and Punishment in the US

A growing literature describes a national movement that began in the US in the late 1980s, whereby schools increased their connections to formal justice agencies and adopted increasingly harsh punishment practices (see Casella, 2001; Hirschfield, 2008; Hirschfield and Celinska, 2011; Kupchik, 2010; Lyons and Drew, 2006). Higher rates of suspensions and arrests are the result, ³ particularly among racial/ethnic minority male youth (Skiba et al., 2006). Some scholars contend we have entered the era of the ‘New American School,’ as schools employ increasingly more invasive security measures, such as metal detectors and police officers, and increasingly more drastic forms of behavioural interventions (Kupchik and Monahan, 2006). Exposure to at least some of these practices is near universal for youth (Kupchik, 2010), shapes their perceptions of police and the criminal justice system (Rios, 2011), and introduces many to the formal justice system (Fabelo et al., 2011).

So-called zero-tolerance policies are an important example. Though initially a term used by the Drug Enforcement Agency with regard to illegal shipping containers in the mid-1980s, zero-tolerance school policies proliferated rapidly beginning in the late-1980s. In 1994, with the passage of the Gun-Free Schools Act, US public schools became legally required to exclude students for no less than one year if they were found with a gun on school grounds. However, by 1995, most schools had voluntarily expanded the scope of this bill to include other weapons, such as knives and brass knuckles (Dunbar and Villaruel, 2004), while other schools included destruction of property, non-violent repeated defiance of school authority (Insley, 2001), possession of over-the-counter pain relievers, and classroom disruption (Schwartz and Rieser, 2001).

Research on school punishment in the US has primarily focused on the negative effects of zero tolerance and similarly punitive policies on students (Insley, 2001; Skiba and Noam, 2002; Skiba et al., 2006). Schools across the US have devoted increasing attention to enforcing strict behavioural codes, which can transform the nature of a school’s social climate − from a supportive, inclusive environment to a site of law enforcement (Kupchik, 2010). Students who are suspended and arrested at school are at increased risk of grade retention, dropout, and future involvement in the criminal justice system (see Fabelo et al., 2011). Moreover, because racial/ethnic minority youth are far more likely to be suspended and arrested at school than are White students (see Skiba et al., 2006), school punishment further aggravates racial/ethnic divides in both justice system involvement and academic success. Though research demonstrates that school rules must be firm and strictly enforced (e.g. Arum and Velez, 2012), there is a large and growing body of work demonstrating the many negative consequences of excessively punitive penalties in American schools, which seek to punish through excluding youth rather than allowing them opportunities for social growth or continued education.

Despite the attention that scholars have been paying to school punishment in the US, the issue has largely escaped notice by the US federal government until recently. In our exploratory review of US congressional records we find very little discussion of school punishment in general through late 2012. ⁴ Apprehensions about student misbehavior, on the other hand, have always been high among the general population and the US government since the late 1960s. These concerns mirror common fears about juvenile delinquency more broadly, but grew with the occurrences of high-profile school shootings such as the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. These fears have facilitated the implementation of zero-tolerance policies and introduction of formal policing into public schools, as we describe above.

In December 2012, the federal government showed the most significant signs to date of recognizing the harms caused by this trend toward harsh penalties and invasive security. The US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights held a hearing on the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’, a catchphrase often used to capture the lasting harms to youth of overly punitive schools. In January 2013, the US House Democratic Gun Violence Prevention Task Force held a Summit on youth-violence prevention that focused on preventing school violence through evidence-based programs that dismantle punitive school practices. In January 2014 the Department of Education and the Department of Justice released a joint ‘dear colleague’ letter that addressed the problems of excessive school punishment, with a particular focus on racially disproportionate rates of suspension. This letter was accompanied by specific recommendations to schools for how they can use counseling, restorative justice, and inclusive strategies for responding to student misbehaviour rather than exclusive strategies such as suspension or arrest. It remains to be seen whether these discussions initiate actual legislation, substantial new training, or significant increases in federal funding that allows schools to implement these suggestions.

Despite a lack of recent legislation, the federal government has prodded consideration of school punishment and security in two potentially important ways. The first is the 1994 Educate America Act, which included the Safe Schools Act and the Gun-Free Schools Act. Together, these Acts signaled federal priorities to states and incentivized action by encouraging and funding collaboration between police agencies and schools, and mandating expulsion of any student who brings a gun to school (Casella, 2001). As Simon (2007) writes, the Act served as a template for states and school districts to copy and then broadly expand, thereby creating systems of very punitive responses to student misbehaviour (see also Casella, 2001). Zero tolerance and relatedly punitive punishment policies are important not only because they increase punishment rates, but also because they structure punishment in a way that focuses only on offences, not students, using a rigid ‘one size fits all’ approach (Lyons and Drew, 2006).

A second way that the US federal government has prodded school punishment and security policies is through the Secure Our Schools (SOS) Act of 2000. This Act was created through an amendment to the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, and is operated through the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS) program (see US Department of Justice, 2011). Rather than establishing what schools must or cannot do, it is a funding stream to encourage action; the SOS Act provides grant money to be used on security, up to $500,000 in 2011. The purpose of the grant is to strengthen partnerships between schools and law enforcement agencies, and to fund the use of school resource officers (police officers stationed full-time in schools), metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and other security or policing practices. Correspondingly, President Obama’s January 2013 executive order that came in response to the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, included a call for increased funding for school resource officers (in addition to the more highly publicized restrictions on gun ownership; see US White House, 2013).

While the US federal government may have done little to alter school punishment practices, there has been a great deal of state-level activity on this topic since the late-1980s. Most of this activity has been to implement zero-tolerance policies and other harsh punishments, and to require and/or fund criminal justice-oriented security practices such as police in schools, use of drug-sniffing police dogs, and surveillance cameras (see Robers et al., 2013). Research in various states has reported the use of fairly similar tactics and policies, illustrating a national trend towards increasingly harsh policing and punishment in schools (see Kupchik, 2010; Kupchik and Monahan, 2006; Simon, 2007), but one spurred by action at the state or local level rather than at the federal level. The implementation of these policies results in increasingly rigid rules, such as zero-tolerance policies, and inclusion of criminal justice professionals such as police officers. Thus, teachers and school administrators have seen their authority over the punishment and security process decrease at the hands of policy makers (who decide which offences should receive automatic punishment) and police (who patrol schools and report to police supervisors, not school administrators).

Yet since the mid-2000s, states including Louisiana, Colorado, and Maryland, to name only a few, have recognized the problems inherent in the school-to-prison pipeline and sought to limit both suspensions and arrests. Typically, these efforts include guidance to schools or school-based police officers about strategies for responding to student misbehaviour without arresting a child or excluding her from school (e.g. Just and Fair Schools Fund, 2014; St George, 2012). One of the most common types of programs is Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS), which seeks to reward students for good behaviour and to respond to misbehaviour with a series of escalating responses, avoiding suspension until other options have failed. The discrepancy between federal and state activity levels on this issue suggests that national legislators seem content to allow local policy makers, including state legislators, local school boards, and school superintendents, to lead the way on the issue of school punishment and security, both in terms of creating policies that result in punishment of more students, and then in reducing the consequences of these policies.

Student Misbehaviour and Punishment in England

While US schools were implementing zero-tolerance policies, restorative justice programming became the major approach to school disciplinary strategies in England (Youth Justice Board, 2004). The framework of this approach is based on ‘… the idea that the response to crime should be to put right the harm, as far as possible, and not… to inflict further harm on the offender’ (Wright, 2008: 173). The use of restorative justice in schools means that responses to student offenders assume a ‘no blame’ approach and punishments are intended to integrate the student back into the school. Circle time, peer mediation, and restorative conferencing are the preferred methods of intervention, rather than less desirable exclusions. Further, the focus is on preventing bad behaviour through conflict resolution education, and more informal interventions.

Since 1993, tracking and understanding trends in problem behaviour and punishment have become a stated priority for the UK DfE. Through a series of legislation, policy makers have recognized that while problem behaviour is a serious concern, the traditional way of handling it may not be effective. In 2011, DfE Minister, Nick Gibb, stated, ‘With thousands of pupils being excluded for persistent disruption and violent or abusive behaviour we remain concerned that weak discipline remains a significant problem in too many of our schools and classrooms’ (Department for Education, 2011a). Such affirmations confirm the DfE is seeking to impose more stringent guidelines, but unlike discourse in the US, English policy is focused both on reforming individuals and on institutional practices that may exacerbate student misbehaviour.

While English school officials stress that bad behaviour be addressed and sanctions imposed upon the problematic individual, the English government also recognizes repeated exclusions ‘seriously hinder their [students’] chances of becoming successful individuals contributing to society’ (Department for Education, 2010). Therefore, while the majority of media and legislative attention is concerned with reducing problem behaviour, recent DfE publications suggest policy makers are seeking to improve student behaviour, reduce exclusion rates, and empower teachers and administrators to achieve these goals. Three strategies stand out as distinct from American approaches:

Summarizing Differences in Framing and Policy

Each country has clearly framed and responded to student misbehaviour and punishment in different ways. American schools have adopted a narrow focus on security and punishment, where harsh rules are rigidly enforced at the expense of attention to students’ needs. The US relies heavily on formal, criminal-justice oriented surveillance and security, such as police officers, security guards, metal detectors and surveillance cameras; authority over school punishment has grown for police and legislators, while teachers and school administrators’ authority and discretion over school punishment have waned. In England, we see a very different situation. English rhetoric and policy instead focus on addressing students’ needs, limiting punishments, and restoring teacher authority and discretion. School punishment policy has focused on de-escalation and restoration rather than exclusion, and on students rather than rules.

On the other hand, it is unclear the extent to which English schools have adopted these restorative practices, and scholars of youth justice would be justified in maintaining a healthy skepticism that punitive practices are actually secondary to pursuing the needs of disadvantaged youth. Further, while the restorative justice approach diverges considerably from those employing harsh punishment, English schools have recently begun adopting new ways to monitor students that resemble some of the security strategies employed in the US. For example, Taylor (2010) explored the relationship between the use of closed circuit television (CCTV) monitoring in schools and students’ sense of privacy, safety, and well-being; he found that students believed CCTV use was symptomatic of school officials’ mistrust of them.

This comparison between problem framing and policy responses is further complicated by the recent retrenchment of punitive policies in the US at the state level, and by the January 2014 guidance from the federal government that is consistent with these state-level reforms that seek to reduce suspensions. Indeed these reforms do make the US and England seem more alike today than they seemed in the late-1990s.

Still, important distinctions in both discourse and policy between the countries remain clear. The recent American reforms are about limiting the harms of excessive policies; state-level reforms are often about reducing arrest rates (e.g. St George, 2011), and the federal efforts are almost entirely focused on reducing racially disproportionate rates of school punishment (see US Department of Education, 2014). As we describe above, English discourse focuses instead on the needs of marginalized students. Second, outside of a few well-publicized success stories within particular cities or counties in the US, there is no evidence that any reform efforts to date have had broad impact in limiting punishments. Some researchers find that evidence-based programs like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (see above) are implemented without fidelity and then entirely superseded by punitive responses to student misbehaviour (Kupchik, 2010).

Comparing School Punishment Rates

Given these differences in discourse and policy, one might expect actual rates of suspensions/exclusions to be higher in the US than England; this is true, though the disparity between the rates is fairly small. As shown in Table 1, permanent exclusions in England peaked in 1996/1997 school year with about .17 per cent of the school population having been permanently excluded. In 2008, this rate dropped to .09 per cent, and further to .08 per cent by 2009. Table 1 continues to show that fixed-period exclusions in England have remained relatively stable from 2003 to 2010, with an average of 4.96 per cent of the school population receiving a fixed-period exclusion; the majority of these occur in special-needs schools, and the fewest occur in primary schools (tables disaggregated by type of school are available from the first author on request). Since the 2006/07 school year, fixed-period exclusions have dropped somewhat for all types of schools.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Numbers and percentages of permanent exclusion/expulsion and fixed-period exclusion/suspension by country and year.

Year	England				United States
	Number of permanent exclusions	Percentage of school population	Number of fixed-period exclusions	Percentage of school population	Number of expulsions	Percentage of school population	Number of suspensions	Percentage of school population
1973/74							1,700,000	3.7
1993/94	11,181
1994/95	11,084
1995/96	12,476	0.17
1996/97	12,668	0.17
1997/98	12,300	0.16					3,200,000	6.8
1998/99	10,450	0.14
1999/00	8320	0.11			97,177	0.3	3,053,449	6.5
2000/01	9140	0.12
2001/02	9580	0.12			89,131	0.2	3,083,810	6.6
2002/03	9340	0.12
2003/04	10,000	0.13	344,510	4.49	106,222	0.2	3,279,745	6.8
2004/05	9570	0.13	389,570	5.12
2005/06	9330	0.12	348,340*	–	102,077	0.2	3,328,754	6.9
2006/07	8680	0.12	416,240	5.66
2007/08	8130	0.11	373,450	5.14
2008/09	6740	0.09	363,280	4.89
2009/10	5740	0.08	331,380	4.46	102,680	0.2	3,160,167	6.5

Data for England derived from Department for Education (2011c). Data for United States derived from the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and the Children’s Defense Fund of the Washington Research Project, School Suspensions (1975).

*

Data for fixed-period exclusions in England (2005/06) represent only secondary school suspension rates.

US suspension and expulsion rates are not easily determined. The data that are available are limited to only certain years, and are also shown in Table 1. From 1998 to 2006, approximately 6.7 per cent of the school population had received a suspension. During the same time period, approximately .2 per cent of the population had been expelled.

In spite of the efforts we describe above to limit the use of these disciplinary strategies, the English system’s statistics reveal rates rather close to the American numbers. England maintains an exclusion rate 10-times greater than any other country in Europe (Gordon, 2001), just as they lead in the use of imprisonment

Two other similarities beyond suspension and exclusion rates are visible as well. First, both educational systems are characterized by a lack of input from the students, notwithstanding England’s expansion of restorative-justice approaches. As Gordon (2001) highlights, ‘…what seems to be missing in all of this [government policies on disciplinary practices], is input from young boys… [and] minority ethnic groups’ (p. 83). Importantly, young boys and racial/ethnic minorities comprise the bulk of exclusions in both countries. And while the relative feelings of powerlessness of American students has been well documented (e.g. Fine et al., 2004; Harber, 2004), emerging research in England finds that students there as well often feel left out of the disciplinary process (Taylor, 2010).

Second, we find similar patterns of the use of school security measures in both countries, and also similarities among students’ reactions to them. The ascendancy of the use of school security measures in the US has been well documented (Casella, 2006), and many scholars have found that students feel that these measures contribute to greater rates of exclusions because of their punitive nature (Nolan, 2011; Sobel, 2012). Emerging research on the use of school security measures in England as well suggests that students feel the use of school security is also unnecessary and serves only to increase both rates of misbehaviour and the use of harsh school punishment (Taylor, 2010).

In short, the policy discourse about punishment practices within each country diverges extensively, but the rates of the most common punishment – suspensions/exclusions – are fairly similar. Socially disadvantaged youth, racial minorities, and males are severely overrepresented in exclusion rates in both countries. English policy makers recognize this issue is systemic at the institutional-level, yet the policies they have enacted seem to have been relatively ineffective at combating the problem. While until recently US policy has largely ignored the societal-level correlates of this imbalance in punishment outcomes, the inability of English actors within the DfE to address the disproportionate impacts of punishment policy has resulted in exclusion rates that somewhat resemble each other.

Explaining Similarity and Difference: Hypotheses for Future Explanation

Our findings seem consistent with Garland’s (2001) culture of control thesis and suggest that school punishment – like criminal punishment for adults – is shaped by broad structural and cultural currents that are similar across the two nations, rather than by guidance from policy makers or actual school punishment policies. One hypothesis that may explain this cross-national similarity in school punishments is that school policies are less important than institutional realities that occur on the ground in schools. The Edlington Case report (Carlile 2012) helps detail the real-world problems encountered when trying to address the needs of children, including failure to share information, poor coordination of services, inconsistent service delivery, staff churn, and middle managers’ fears of liability. The history of penology is littered with examples of practical impediments that cause well-meaning folks to fall short (Rothman, 1980). The higher-than-expected numbers of English school exclusions might thus reflect a failure to live up to or deliver on the more needs-based, compassionate discourse which distinguishes the English from the American approach to school punishment. Reasons why need to be better understood, but needs-based interventions are surely harder to do well than tough punishment is to implement.

Alternatively, similar rates of punishment may be an artifact of misleading data rather than actual trends. As we report above, nationwide US data on school suspensions are difficult to come by. But more importantly, the political nature of reporting school suspension leads to reasonable questions about data validity. Schools that report high suspension rates are in jeopardy of being seen as disorderly, which hurts them in a ‘consumer’-driven school ‘market’ where parents can opt to place their children in charter schools, private schools, or schools other than the local school for which they are zoned. Thus it would not be surprising were schools to underreport suspensions, which would make the US and England appear far more similar than they actually are.

We also need to hypothesize why the US and England have such divergence in political discourse and actual punishment practices in schools. Again, Americans’ deep distrust of the federal government endows states and local politicians with more power than their English counterparts; as a result the relationship between the central government of each nation and the individual schools within it differs considerably. Indeed, the relative silence of the US federal government on school punishment until 2014 is at odds with the many drastic steps taken over two decades by states and local school boards. Variation between the US and England in the power of local authorities to govern schools may explain a good deal of the divergence we note above.

Moreover, English policy grants teachers and school administrators the autonomy to identify and address students’ needs – to relate to students, diagnose problems, and respond effectively. In contrast, popular discourse about schools in the US often derogates teachers, particularly teachers’ unions, which are often portrayed as corrupt and seeking only to protect lazy, incompetent teachers who cannot be fired due to tenure (e.g. Brill, 2009). Thus, real differences in public confidence in schools and teachers may help explain divergence in rhetoric and policy.

Finally, it is possible that the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has influenced and shaped English rhetoric about school punishment more than it has in the US, where, along with only Somalia and South Sudan, it has not been ratified. Article 28 ensures ‘school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity’ (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, emphasis added). Article 12:

… assure[s] to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child… [and] the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law. (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, emphasis added)

While the treaty’s rhetorical effects on policy making may be stronger and more easily traced than its effects on actual practice in England – where the neo-liberal punitiveness of youth justice described by so many scholars has survived (see Muncie, 2006) – the US policy maker who favors zero-tolerance policies is under no obligation even to genuflect in the direction of such international standards.

Conclusion

Our primary goal in this article has been to compare and contrast the political framing of the problems of student misbehaviour and punishment, and the resulting school policies and outcomes, in the US and England. Through cross-national comparison we have raised hypotheses that might help explain both the ascendancy and variation of school punishment and security, a topic of growing interest among criminologists due to its important consequences to youths’ future justice system involvement (Fabelo et al., 2011). As shown, the problem of school punishment is framed very differently in each country, and the two nations have very different policies governing its use. Yet actual punishments received by students appear to be fairly similar.

Goldson and Hughes (2010a: 215) argue that ‘the principal value of comparative analysis rests not so much with state-by-state descriptive accounts of powers and procedures, but rather with critical analyses of both the contexts within which multiple, overlapping and even contradictory policy impulses are located and the means by which they are realized and expressed in practice’. We agree, and this article is one attempt to examine − critically, comparatively, and in context − contradictory policies, procedures and practices. We raise several questions to be tested in future research – the answers to which would contribute to a clearer understanding of school punishment policy and practice, of why contemporary school punishment looks as it does, where it does. This work would improve our understanding of the sources and drivers of punishment and security policies, and fill a large and important gap in the rapidly growing literature within criminology on school punishment. Utilizing comparative methods in that effort would expand the ways we think about the international proliferation and deployment of punishment rhetoric, policies, and practices, and would do so beyond the criminal and penal realms where most comparative criminological work has been concentrated.