BOULDER, CO (May 20, 2025)—A new policy brief addresses growing concerns about student behavior, educators’ perceptions of that behavior, and the management of perceived misbehavior in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These issues, already urgent before the pandemic, have intensified as schools contend with increased need, trauma, and behavioral challenges.
The brief, Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Disentangling the Intersections of Student Behavior, School Discipline, and School Safety in the Post-COVID Era, is authored by Richard O. Welsh and Kathryn James McGraw of Vanderbilt University. It examines the historical and contemporary relationship between student behavior and school safety, and it offers policy recommendations for creating safer, more supportive schools.
Welsh and McGraw stress the need to distinguish school discipline from school safety. While the two are often linked, they are not the same. Discipline typically involves non-violent, everyday behavioral issues, while safety addresses incidents of harm or clear threats. Yet policymakers frequently treat them as a single challenge, leading to solutions that misidentify the root of the problem.
This conflation can be traced back to 1990s federal legislation, including the Gun-Free Schools Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. These laws introduced a “tough-on-crime” approach in schools that promoted exclusionary discipline as a tool for ensuring safety. Over time, schools increasingly adopted practices from the criminal justice system, such as hiring school resource officers and installing surveillance technologies. Though framed as safety measures, these strategies and an overall punitive approach to misbehavior are more often applied to routine behavioral issues. They have failed to improve safety outcomes while disproportionately impacting students of color.
The pandemic intensified existing disparities and placed additional strain on students and educators. Verbal and physical aggression has increased, while mental health support has lagged. In response, some states and districts have doubled down on exclusionary discipline and securitization, giving educators greater discretion to remove students and implementing stricter measures that largely ignore the root causes of misbehavior.
Welsh and McGraw argue that treating school safety and school discipline as the same issue leads to ineffective and inequitable outcomes. They call for clearly separating the two in policy and practice to better support student well-being and improve school climate. The twin policy goals of keep students and staff safe, and restoring instructional time lost to exclusionary discipline while addressing the needs of both students and educators will require thoughtful reforms grounded in current research and the realities of today’s schools.
Accordingly, the brief concludes with recommendations for adopting supportive, evidence-based strategies for behavior management aimed at making schools safer and reducing disparities in disciplinary outcomes. By treating school discipline and school safety as distinct yet related issues, schools and districts can pursue more inclusive, effective solutions.
Find Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Disentangling the Intersections of Student Behavior, School Discipline, and School Safety in the Post-COVID Era, by Richard O. Welsh and Kathryn James McGraw, at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/safety