Russell John Skiba | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
Awards | Push for Excellence Award from Rainbow/PUSH, 2011 School Psychology Review article of the year award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Educational psychology, educational research |
Institutions | Indiana University |
Thesis | Accuracy and representativeness of behavioral observation as a function of sampling strategy and type of behavior (1987) |
Doctoral advisor | Stan Deno [1] |
Russell John Skiba is an American educational psychologist known for researching school discipline and school violence. He is a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University, where he directs PBIS Indiana, a program aimed at developing a network of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports across Indiana. He also co-directs Indiana University's Equity Project, which aims to provide evidence regarding zero-tolerance policies, educational equity, and school violence to policymakers, and directs the Discipline Disparities Research to Practice Collaborative, a group aimed at bringing researchers together with policymakers to address disproportionality in school discipline. [2] He has received the Push for Excellence Award from Rainbow/PUSH for his work on racial disproportionality in school suspensions. [3]
Skiba received his M.A. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1983 and 1987, respectively. [2]
Skiba is known for his work on school discipline and how it is affected by student race. [4] [5] In 2002, for example, he published a study showing that black students tended to be disciplined for more subjective offenses than were white students. [6] In 2008, Skiba was the lead author of a task force report on zero-tolerance policies in schools released by the American Psychological Association. The report concluded that these policies were not only ineffective, but also counterproductive, in that they increased the chances of future student misbehavior. [7]
A zero tolerance policy is one which imposes a punishment for every infraction of a stated rule. Zero tolerance policies forbid people in positions of authority from exercising discretion or changing punishments to fit the circumstances subjectively; they are required to impose a pre-determined punishment regardless of individual culpability, extenuating circumstances, or history. This pre-determined punishment, whether mild or severe, is always meted out.
Juvenile delinquency, also known as juvenile offending, is the act of participating in unlawful behavior as a minor or individual younger than the statutory age of majority. The term delinquent usually refers to juvenile delinquency, and is also generalised to refer to a young person who behaves an unacceptable way.
School discipline relates to actions taken by teachers or school organizations toward students when their behavior disrupts the ongoing educational activity or breaks a rule created by the school. Discipline can guide the children's behavior or set limits to help them learn to take better care of themselves, other people and the world around them.
School psychology is a field that applies principles from educational psychology, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, community psychology, and behavior analysis to meet the learning and behavioral health needs of children and adolescents. It is an area of applied psychology practiced by a school psychologist. They often collaborate with educators, families, school leaders, community members, and other professionals to create safe and supportive school environments.
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation (BCSC) is a public school district located in Columbus, Indiana, United States. Its boundaries include all but two townships in Bartholomew County, Indiana. BCSC serves 11,000+ students on 18 campuses. 11 elementary, 3 high school, 2 middle school, 1 early childhood center, and 1 adult education center. BCSC School Board officers are President Nicole Wheeldon, Vice-President Rich Stenner, and Secretary Todd Grimes. BCSC is led by Superintendent Dr. Jim Roberts.
Education policy consists of the principles and policy decisions that influence the field of education, as well as the collection of laws and rules that govern the operation of education systems. Education governance may be shared between the local, state, and federal government at varying levels. Some analysts see education policy in terms of social engineering.
In criminal justice systems, a youth detention center, known as a juvenile detention center (JDC), juvenile detention, juvenile jail, juvenile hall, or more colloquially as juvie/juvy, also sometimes referred to as observation home or remand home is a prison for people under the age of majority, to which they have been sentenced and committed for a period of time, or detained on a short-term basis while awaiting trial or placement in a long-term care program. Juveniles go through a separate court system, the juvenile court, which sentences or commits juveniles to a certain program or facility.
Jack D. Dale was the Superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools, the public school system for Fairfax County, Virginia and the twelfth largest school system in the United States from 2004 to 2013.
A zero-tolerance policy in schools is a policy of strict enforcement of school rules against behaviors or the possession of items deemed undesirable. In schools, common zero-tolerance policies concern possession or use of illicit drugs or weapons. Students, and sometimes staff, parents, and other visitors, who possess a banned item for any reason are always punished. Public criticism against such policies has arisen because of the punishments the schools mete out when students break the rules in ignorance, by accident, or under extenuating circumstances. The policies have also been criticized for their connection to educational inequality in the United States.
In the United States, the school-to-prison pipeline (SPP), also known as the school-to-prison link, school–prison nexus, or schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track, is the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Additionally, this is due to educational inequality in the United States. Many experts have credited factors such as school disturbance laws, zero-tolerance policies and practices, and an increase in police in schools in creating the "pipeline". This has become a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century.
Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a set of ideas and tools used in schools to improve students' behavior. PBIS uses evidence and data-based programs, practices, and strategies to frame behavioral improvement relating to student growth in academic performance, safety, behavior, and establishing and maintaining positive school culture. PBIS tries to address the behavioral needs of at-risk students and the multi-leveled needs of all students, in an effort to create an environment that promotes effective teaching and learning in schools. Researchers such as Robert H. Horner believe that PBIS enhances the school staff's time for delivering effective instructions and lessons to all students.
Social justice educational leadership emphasizes the belief that all students can and will reach proficiency, without exceptions or excuses, and that schools ought to be organized to advance the equitable learning of all students. Rather than focusing on one group of students who traditionally struggle, or who traditionally succeed, social justice leaders address the learning needs of all students. Social justice educational leadership specifically addresses how differences in race, income, language, ability, gender, and sexual orientation influence the design and effectiveness of learning environments. Social justice leadership draws from inclusive education practices from disability education, but extends the concepts further to support students from diverse groups with a wide range of needs. Through restructuring staff allocation and assessing student progress through disaggregated data, school leaders strive to create schools with equal access and equitable support for all students.
In American schools, corporal punishment is a form of violence performed on students that involves the use of physical force to cause bodily pain or discomfort in response to undesired behavior. While often viewed as a form of discipline intended to improve this, there is a consensus among medical organizations that it typically has the opposite effect on those it is performed on, often leading to aggressive behavior and less long-term obedience. Other adverse effects, such as depression, anxiety, anti-social behavior have also been shown. Because of this, pediatrician groups, children's rights organizations, and legal systems have increasingly seen the practice as a form of child abuse. The practice is predominately performed on boys and disabled children in the United States.
Culturally Responsive Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (CRPBIS) is an ongoing statewide research project founded by Dr. Aydin Bal in 2011. The purpose of CRPBIS is to re-mediate school cultures that reproduce behavioral outcome disparities and marginalization of non-dominant students and families. CRPBIS project is conducted at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison. CRPBIS develops, utilizes, and researches processes and interventions such as Learning Lab to create locally meaningful and sustainable systemic transformations together with local stakeholders (educators, families, students, community representatives). Learning Lab is an innovative methodology of systemic transformation, informed by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Bal, 2015; Engestrom, 2008).
Race Forward is a nonprofit racial justice organization with offices in Oakland, California, and New York City. Race Forward focuses on catalyzing movement-building for racial justice. In partnership with communities, organizations, and sectors, the organization build strategies to advance racial justice in policies, institutions, and culture.
Unequal access to education in the United States results in unequal outcomes for students. Disparities in academic access among students in the United States are the result of several factors including: government policies, school choice, family wealth, parenting style, implicit bias towards the race or ethnicity of the student, and the resources available to the student and their school. Educational inequality contributes to a number of broader problems in the United States, including income inequality and increasing prison populations. Educational inequalities in the United States are wide-ranging, and many potential solutions have been proposed to mitigate their impacts on students.
Sara Bullard is an American writer and sociological researcher focused on hate crimes, racism, and the civil rights movement. She is the founding director of Teaching Tolerance, a national project of the Southern Poverty Law Center to promote racial and cultural understanding among students. Bullard was the editor of the program's semiannual magazine. She authored the books Free at Last (1993) and Teaching Tolerance (1996).
Glenn Allen Youngkin is an American businessman and politician serving as the 74th governor of Virginia since 2022. A member of the Republican Party, he spent 25 years at the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, where he became co-CEO in 2018. He resigned from that position in 2020 to run for governor.
Donna Y. Ford is an American educator, anti-racist, advocate, author and academic. She is a distinguished professor of education and human ecology and a faculty affiliate with the center for Latin American studies in the college of arts and sciences, and the Kirwan Institute in the college of education and human ecology at Ohio State University.
Disproportionality in special education refers to the unequal representation of certain demographic groups in restrictive placement and discipline, particularly in the United States' public school system. Disproportionality is often displayed as the under- or overrepresentation of specific racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) groups in special education compared to their presence in the overall student population. A child's race and ethnicity may significantly influence the likelihood of being misidentified as needing special education services, raising concerns about fairness, equity, and the potential impact on students' educational outcomes.