A Preliminary Investigation of the Relationship between In-School Suspension and the Disruptive Classroom Behavior of Students with Behavioral Disorders.

* The disruptive classroom behavior exhibited bv students with serious emotional disorders often is met with interventions designed to reduce these behaviors. A recent metaanalysis of intervention studies designed to reduce the intensity or frequency of disruptive classroom behavior in public education settings yielded an average effect size of -.98 for students with serious emotional disorders (SED) (Stage & Quiroz, 1997). This effect size suggests that, on average, 83% of the treated students' disruptive classroom behavior was decreased compared to that of the untreated students with SED. Nonetheless, this result also suggests that many students' disruptive classroom behavior was not affected. Several researchers have described the potential for aversive classroom management interventions to act as setting events for coercive interactions between the teacher and student (Gunter, Denny, Jack, Shores, & Nelson, 1993; Sidman, 1989; Shores, Gunter, & Jack, 1993). Patterson (1982) described these coercive behavior cycles in the social exchanges between clinic-referred disruptive children and their parents. He observed that, presumably, as parents attempted to control their children's behavior with aversive social interactions, the children learned via modeling (Bandura, 1973) in combination with reinforcing contingencies (Patterson, Littman, & Bricker, 1967) to initiate coercive social interactions. The coercion hypothesis states that with increases in both the rate and intensity of aversive behavior, the recipient of aversive responses is more likely to attempt to terminate the aversive stimuli with reciprocal aversive responding (Patterson, 1982). Such coercive interactions also might be observed when teachers rely on aversive stimuli to manage student behavior; the student may learn to counter coercion with aversive behavior to escape the teacher's aversive behavior (Shores, Gunter, & Jack, 1993). For example, in a study conducted in a residential classroom, adolescent students' noncompliant behavior sometimes led to physical confrontation between teachers and students (Strain & Ezzell, 1978). Kerr, Nelson, and Lambert (1987) described the typical continuum of aversive procedures used to discipline adolescents with learning and behavior problems. Verbal aversive consequences occur most frequently in the classroom, followed by response cost (or the loss of privilege), with in-school and outof-school suspension being the more intrusive and least frequent consequences for disruptive behavior. Many schools use both out-ofschool and in-school suspension to discipline students receiving special education (Rose, 1988). However, the use of in-school suspension for students with behavioral disorders has been challenged legally, although its use has been upheld as long as procedural guidelines are followed (Yell, Cline, & Bradley,1995). Proponents of out-of-school suspension suggest that it reduces the reccurrence of misbehavior, improves parent involvment, and illuminates the seriousness of the misbehavior (see Wu, Pink, Crain, & Moles, 1982). It is also argued that classmates should not have to suffer from the disruptive and potentially harmful behavior of a few students within the classroom environment (Garibaldi, 1979; Neill, 1976). However, out-of-school suspension has been criticized for reasons such as racial inequities and overrepresentation of students who are achieving below grade level (Children's Defense Fund, 1975; MorganD'Atrio, Northup, LaFleur, & Spera, 1995; Skiba & Peterson, 1997; Williams, 1979). There is evidence that students who are suspended repeatedly are prone to be suspended for less serious behavioral incidents than their peers (Skiba & Peterson, 1997). In addition, there is evidence that students who are suspended repeatedly are more likely to drop out of school (Ekstrom, Goertz, Pollack, & Rock, 1986). Thus, in-school suspension programs have been developed in response to criticisms of out-of-school suspension (Chobot & Garibaldi,1982; Garibaldi,1995). …