Assessing the Role of School Discipline In Disproportionate Minority Contact With the Juvenile Justice System, Texas, 1999-2008

This project utilized data originally collected for the project Breaking Schools' Rules (Fabelo et al., 2011),. Research was conducted at the Education Research Centers of the University of Texas, Austin, and Texas A and M University utilizing individual-level data from the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), a data system of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), and CASEWORKER, a data management system of the Texas Probation Commission (now the Texas Juvenile Justice Department). The link between these records was conducted by TEA and is described in greater detail in Fabelo et al.  Through secondary analyses of these data, researchers attempted to measure the institutional and individual mechanisms that disproportionately pull and push students of color into the "school-to-prison pipeline." The project explores the predictors of school discipline contact and the resulting consequences of encountering this discipline. The project then moves to an examination of the determinants of progressing through the various decision points in a juvenile justice case. Additionally, the project explores the relationship between school strictness and various educational and juvenile justice outcomes. The "school-to-prison pipeline" (Wald and Losen, 2003) describes an "increasingly punitive and isolating" path through the education system for African American and other at-risk students.