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Evidence supports Foundations: Establishing Positive Discipline Policies
Evidence supports Foundations: Establishing Positive Discipline Policies
Safe and Civil Schools' Foundations: Establishing Positive Discipline Policies is a program designed to create a safer climate within a school and its surrounding grounds. It focuses on using proactive techniques instead of punishment to facilitate change, a technique referred to as schoolwide positive behavioral intervention and support (SWPBIS). Foundations helps schools adopt and maintain these techniques by providing school teams with training and data-gathering materials, multiyear training, coaching support, and school visits. The program requires a team at each school to teach the staff these techniques, and data related to safety and behavior is used to gauge what is working and what is not.
A randomized controlled trial in 32 elementary schools in a large urban school district demonstrated that Foundations yielded improvements in school discipline, student safety policy and training, staff perceptions of student behavior, and suspension and tardiness rates over a two-year period. Specifically, staff reported improvements in a safe and secure environment (+0.44), that training about school safety increased (+0.35), and that a discipline policy was in place (+0.31) and enforced (+0.34). Staff reported decreases in bullying (ES= -0.24), widespread classroom disorder (ES= -0.67), and disrespectfulness/defiance (-0.15). Students in the experimental group were also less likely to be suspended than those in the control group. To determine if positive results of the program would generalize into a "real world" setting, a second study continued to evaluate these elementary schools for two more years while also scaling up to add all remaining elementary and secondary schools in the district, when these schools adopted the program without support from research funding.
74 regular public schools participated in the scale-up study: the 17 elementary in year 1 and 15 elementary in year 2 from the first study, adding 2 middle and 8 high in year 3, and 22 more elementary in year 4. All schools received 2 years of Foundations training in May, June, October, and February where school teams learned how to implement improvements related to safety, behavior, and discipline, and to collect and analyze related data to set goals for the next year. District personnel were trained as coaches by the program's staff. School teams taught all school staff, from paraprofessionals to busdrivers, techniques to teach the students about expectations, provide active supervision, give positive feedback, and calmly and consistently correct behavior and emphasize school policies.
As in the randomized study, schools in the current study showed gains in all areas. Specifically, after Foundations training, staff reported improved student behavior, with fewer suspensions, absenteeism and tardiness, with a positive relationship evidenced between years of implementation and rates of effectiveness. This held true for both studies, showing that results were not dependent upon random assignment of training, and were apparent only after the program was implemented. Therefore, authors concluded that the improvements from the Foundations training were evidence that the program generalizes well into the real world setting.
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