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I have been monitoring the discipline referral activity in our six school districts for the last four to five years. As I do not have direct responsibility for responding to the data and directing change efforts, my only recourse is to report periodically to our superintendents and administrators. The charts that follow show patterns of referral activity over time, across referral categories, and across students and teachers for one building. I wish to keep this fairly short and will omit details. I will clarify those matters in our discussion on the SClist.

These data are presented in a nonstandard chart format. Should the list have comments as to more effective ways to chart these data, I'd like recommendations. This chart shows each discipline referral category for the 1999-00 school year. The dots and bracketing lines represent the 95-96 to 98-99 average yearly referral rate with upper and lower control limits. The bars show the yearly referral rate for 99-00 in each category. These referral categories are obviously problematic. However, the first category tells the reader that this school was reacting to student-student conflicts but not a rate different from previous years. The next two categories tell staff they have a big, stable problem with academically correlated behaviors like work completion, having needed materials available, and displaying an interest in learning (don't ask me how they defined this). The fourth category, respect for authority, rears its ugly head as a consequence of interactions in the first three areas.

Chart 1. Discipline Referrals by Referral Category.

Question: what pinpoints do you recommend for tracking discipline problems?

This chart rank orders staff members on the basis of their yearly referral rates. These rates may be compared to the staff average and control limits. On average, staff members (every one in the building who generated at least one referral) referred at a rate of about 17 per year. There are six staff members, five of whom are classroom teachers, whose referral rates exceed the upper control limit of 28.8 per year.

Chart 2. Staff Referrals.

Space does not permit a detailed discussion of the differences between these teachers and the others, but they stand out of the crowd because about half of their students earn at least one referral per year compared to about 30% for the others, and they struggle with categories 2 and 3 in chart 1 above.

This chart shows each student who earned at least one referral during the school year by grade level. The "concern threshold" (set at 3 referrals/year) is based on my judgment to the number of referrals needed per student to trigger a more formal evaluation and pre-referral intervention. The "referral threshold" is set at 8 and signals the need for the student to be formally evaluated for special education services or mental health services. Note the increase in number of students above the referral threshold as a function of increased grade level.

Chart 3. Student Referrals. (This Chart is actual size. It will not zoom to a larger size.)

 

This is a standard chart showing most of the discipline referral categories. Each category has nine monthly data points with celeration lines and the categories are ordered by their yearly total frequency. You will note that 'respect for others' and 'fighting' accelerated at better than x2 per six months with the remaining discipline categories accelerating at about x1.2 and one category (unacceptable language) decelerated at /1.4.

Chart 4. Number of Discipline Referrals/Month by Type of Referral.

 

	This last chart shows the monthly referral rates for grades 1-6 (combined) for each of the last five school years. While the long term trend is /1.1, the within school year celerations are general x1.3 or more. Over the last five years, this elementary school has remained fairly well within our expected limits.
Chart 5. Number of Referrals per Month per Year.

These limits are based on the following:

• 1) we expect about 1/3 of the students in a building to earn at least one referral in a given school year. (That fraction has been variable but is declining somewhat.)
• 2) we have set three referrals per referred student as the threshold for concern and intervention.
• 3) we must use the 1/3 (or whatever proportion is appropriate) and 3 to determine the number of referrals per month given the building's population: bldg pop * 3 * 1/3 divide by 9 3D expected referrals per month.
• 4) the upper and lower control limits are the expected rates plus/minus 3*sqrt(expected rate).