DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37186.v1
title: Assessing the Role of School Discipline In Disproportionate Minority Contact With the Juvenile Justice System, Texas, 1999-2008
title: Version 1

description: These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.
This project utilized data originally collected for the project Breaking Schools' Rules (Fabelo et al., 2011), a joint project of the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A and M University and the Council of State Governments Justice Center on which the Principal Investigator, Miner Marchbanks was a lead data analyst and co-author. 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.
The study collection includes 1 Stata (.do) syntax file (master_final.do) that was used by the researcher(s) in secondary analyses.
description: The purpose of this project was to assess the predictors of school discipline contact and the consequences of this contact on educational and juvenile justice outcomes of racially and ethnically diverse students. Further, this project examines the predictors of moving through the various stages of juvenile justice system. Last, the analyses look at the relationship between school strictness and various outcomes of great importance including school achievement and juvenile justice contact. Across analyses, the impact of race was considered.
The current study had 3 over-arching goals:

Determine the effect of a strict school-wide discipline policy on student outcomes such as attendance, test performance, grade promotion, dropout, future discipline involvement, and juvenile justice contact, irrespective of their personal discipline history.; 
Determine the effect of individual school discipline experience on student
outcomes such as attendance, test performance, grade promotion, dropout, future
discipline involvement, and juvenile justice contact.; 
Identify combinations of student attributes that characterize sub-types of youth
at particularly high risk of school discipline and/or juvenile justice contact.;
description: The data utilized in this project were accessed via secure servers at the Education Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and Texas A and M University.
The majority of the data remained unchanged from those used by Fabelo et al., except as described in the Stata .do syntax file. Researchers were able to acquire updated Texas Assessment Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) and Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) standardized testing data and utilized a different definition of juvenile justice contact than Fabelo et al.; the main difference in definition is that Fabelo et al. utilized any referral as contact while researchers for this project used only formalized complaints.
The study goals were examined through 6 key analyses:

Predicting the Effect of Strict Campus Discipline Policies; 
Predicting School Discipline Contact; 
Predicting the Severity of School Punishment; 
Predicting the Effect of School Discipline on Individual Educational Outcomes; 
Predicting Juvenile Justice Contact; 
Examining Subgroup Differences;
description: This project utilized a unique dataset that combined the databases of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), and the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD). The TEA maintains the Public Education Information Management (PEIMS) database, the statewide repository for all student records collected by school districts. Within the dataset, each student in Texas is tracked throughout their public school career. More than 500 variables are available describing demographics, attendance, course completion, special program enrollment (e.g., special education, bilingual education, career and technology, gifted and talented), standardized test performance, discipline contact, and numerous other characteristics.
The TJJD provides statewide administrative oversight of county juvenile probation departments throughout Texas. In fulfilling this role, the agency developed the CASEWORKER MIS system, through which standardized records are entered by county juvenile probation departments and uploaded to TJJD where the data are cleaned and verified. TJJD provided complete juvenile court case information for each juvenile violation from 1997 through 2011. Available records included the referral offense, pretrial detention, adjudication determination, and disposition. These data were then merged to the PEIMS data by TEA who achieved an 87% match rate.
The research is based on the analysis of large integrated statewide longitudinal databases from the education and juvenile justice systems providing nearly a decade of individual-level records covering the entire state of Texas. With this dataset, virtually every individual student in the public school system can be followed over time, through school, across campuses, and into the juvenile justice system. Researchers were able to control statistically for each child's socio-demographic, academic, and behavioral attributes; characteristics of the campus and school district each child attends (e.g., wealth, aggregate student population characteristics, and more); and community context including per capita income, and urbanicity. For students that had contact with the juvenile justice system, available records included living situation, current offense, offense history, and past dispositions.
A complementary dataset, the Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS), provided access to a variety of school-level measures, including wealth and expenditures, teacher demographics and professional experience, student-teacher ratios, campus-wide attendance rates, discipline rates, dropout rates, and much more.
For a detailed description of secondary analyses procedures, please refer to the Final Technical Report provided by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS).
description: Presence of Common Scales:
					None.
description: Datasets:
					
						DS1: Dataset
description: All public school students who were in 7th grade in Texas between the school years of 2000-2001 to 2002-2003.
						Smallest Geographic Unit: State
description: The analysis sample is extracted from a 5 million-record dataset of all public school students in the state who were in the seventh grade during the 2000-2001, 2001-2002 and/or 2002-2003 academic years. Each cohort's 6th grade data are used to control for "prior-year" attributes in 7th grade. Students' progress is tracked from 7th grade through at least their cohort's 12th grade year (2007-2008 school year).