What research says about school conduct codes and disabled students

This explainer summarises what a small but influential group of scholars have shown about school discipline policies, student codes of conduct, and how these frameworks disproportionately harm disabled and neurodivergent students. It draws especially on the work of Catherine K. Voulgarides, Russell J. Skiba, Daniel J. Losen, David Osher, and Edward Fergus.

Where possible, citations are linked to public reports or articles so that educators, families, and policymakers can trace the arguments back to the original research.

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Catherine K. Voulgarides

Disproportionality is built into policy routines

Catherine K. Voulgarides’ work focuses on how special education and accountability policies produce racial and disability disproportionality through everyday decision-making and compliance routines, rather than through a few obviously discriminatory actors.

In Pursuing Equity: Disproportionality in Special Education (2017), Voulgarides and colleagues review decades of research on how students of colour—especially Black students—are overrepresented in special education and in more restrictive settings, and they argue that technical compliance with IDEA has not produced equity. Instead, districts follow formal procedures while leaving underlying beliefs and local practices intact, which means that biased referral, placement, and discipline patterns continue even when the paperwork appears correct (Voulgarides et al., 2017).

In more recent work, Voulgarides argues that efforts to address disproportionality often remain “compliance projects” that satisfy federal monitoring but do not change schools’ underlying ideas about disability, race, and behaviour (Voulgarides, 2022; Voulgarides & Zwerger, 2024). She shows that local policy actors treat racialized disproportionality as a technical problem—something to be fixed with better data or new forms—rather than as evidence of structural racism and ableism.

Implications for conduct codes

• Conduct codes and discipline policies cannot be treated as neutral; they sit inside systems that already over-identify and over-discipline disabled students of colour.
• “Fixing” disproportionality requires changing the ideas and routines that staff use when they read, interpret, and apply codes of conduct—not just editing the wording.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code must be accompanied by professional learning that explicitly examines race, disability, and bias, or the same students will continue to be targeted under new language.

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Russell J. Skiba

Exclusionary discipline is widespread, biased, and unsupported by evidence

Russell Skiba’s body of work systematically documents the scale and impact of exclusionary discipline in the United States.

In Special Education and School Discipline: A Precarious Balance (2002), Skiba and colleagues show that students in special education are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled than their non-disabled peers, even when controlling for type of offence. The article argues that this pattern reflects a fundamental tension between the goals of special education and the logic of exclusionary discipline: one system promises support and individualised education, while the other removes students from instruction for behaviours that are often related to disability (Skiba, 2002).

In later work such as “African American Disproportionality in School Discipline: The Divide Between Best Evidence and Legal Remedy” (2010) and “Turning the Page on School Discipline” (Skiba & Losen, 2015), Skiba synthesises research showing that:

• suspension and expulsion are overused responses to relatively minor, subjective offences (such as defiance or disrespect);
• these punishments are applied disproportionately to Black students and students with disabilities;
• exclusionary discipline is associated with lower academic achievement, higher dropout rates, and increased contact with the justice system; and
• there is little evidence that suspensions improve school safety or climate.

Implications for conduct codes

• Codes of conduct that normalise suspension, office referrals, or removal for subjective behaviours (“disrespect,” “non-compliance,” “disruption”) are not evidence-based and will predictably hit disabled and racialized students hardest.
• Behaviour lists and consequence matrices that treat exclusion as a routine response directly contradict the research base.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code must sharply limit the use of exclusion and remove vague, subjective offence categories that invite bias.

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Daniel J. Losen

Codes of conduct as engines of disparity

Daniel Losen’s work at the UCLA Civil Rights Project has documented how discipline policies and codes of conduct function as engines of inequality.

In policy briefs such as Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice (2011) and reports like Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap? (2015), Losen and co-authors use national datasets to show that:

• students with disabilities are suspended at roughly twice the rate of their non-disabled peers;
• districts with “tough” discipline codes often have higher suspension rates without better academic outcomes; and
• large disparities persist even after accounting for poverty, suggesting that policy and practice—not just socioeconomic context—drive the gaps (Losen, 2011; Losen et al., 2015).

More recent reports such as Disabling Inequity (2021) and civil rights analyses commissioned by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights highlight that students of colour with disabilities experience some of the highest rates of exclusionary discipline in the system and that many districts appear to ignore their legal obligations to provide appropriate supports (Losen et al., 2021; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2019).

Implications for conduct codes

• When a code of conduct relies heavily on removal from class or school, it will almost certainly produce large and predictable disparities for disabled students.
• Districts cannot claim that their codes are “working” if they generate high suspension rates for disabled students; those rates signal policy failure, not individual misbehaviour.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code must be monitored with disaggregated data, and large disparities should trigger policy revision—not just student-level interventions.

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David Osher

Discipline, school climate, and conditions for learning

David Osher’s work connects discipline practices to school climate, safety, and conditions for learning.

Across multiple analyses, punitive and exclusionary school discipline practices—such as out-of-school suspension or expulsion—lose instructional time, reduce students’ sense of safety and belonging, and correlate with lower academic engagement and poorer long-term outcomes.

The AIR report Advancing School Discipline Reform (2015) points out that there is little evidence that such exclusionary discipline improves school climate or safety; instead, it often functions as “a quick fix to what often is a chronic, long-term problem.”

Research focused on students with disabilities confirms this dynamic: suspended students with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be suspended as their non-disabled peers, and their likelihood of suspension remains significantly elevated even when accounting for factors like race, socioeconomic status, or prior behaviour.

These findings expose how conduct codes rooted in compliance, vague behavioural expectations, and exclusionary consequences are structurally harmful. They do not merely reflect individual misbehaviour. Instead, they encode a regime of disciplinary risk — a regime that disproportionately punishes neurodivergent and disabled students for behaviours arising from unmet needs or systemic failure.

Osher’s analyses emphasise that:

• effective discipline is inseparable from positive school climate, strong relationships, and culturally responsive practice;
• zero-tolerance policies and rigid codes of conduct damage these conditions; and
• multi-tiered systems of support, restorative practices, and social-emotional learning are more promising than rule-and-punish frameworks.

Implications for conduct codes

• Codes cannot be treated as simple rulebooks; they are climate documents that shape whether students—especially disabled and marginalised students—experience school as safe.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code must prioritise relational repair, co-regulation, and environmental changes over individual blame.
• Discipline language should be aligned with whole-school frameworks that promote safety, belonging, and voice, not threaten removal.

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Edward Fergus

How belief systems shape the use of codes

Edward Fergus’s work focuses on how educators’ beliefs about race, poverty, and behaviour interact with policy to produce discipline disparities.

In Solving Disproportionality and Achieving Equity (2016) and articles such as Confronting Our Beliefs About Poverty and Race in School Discipline (2019), Fergus shows that staff often interpret the same behaviours differently depending on a student’s race, disability label, or perceived class background. Behaviours by Black or disabled students are more likely to be read as defiance or disrespect rather than as expressions of need, which means those students are more likely to be written up under codes of conduct.

With Anne Gregory, Fergus has also examined how social-emotional learning reforms interact with discipline; they find that even in districts adopting SEL, large disparities persist when underlying beliefs and power structures remain unchanged Social and Emotional Learning and Equity in School Discipline (2017).

Implications for conduct codes

• The same code of conduct will be applied differently to different students unless staff explicitly examine how race, disability, and poverty shape their interpretations.
• Behaviour categories such as “non-compliance,” “insubordination,” or “disrespect” are particularly vulnerable to biased interpretation and therefore dangerous for disabled and racialised students.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code must be paired with ongoing equity-focused professional learning and must avoid subjective offence labels that encode adult irritation rather than objective harm.

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Discipline Disparities Collaborative

Codes of conduct under revision

The Discipline Disparities Research-to-Practice Collaborative, which includes several of the scholars named above, has produced a series of briefs on policy, practice, and interventions. Their policy brief notes that many districts are now rewriting student codes of conduct to roll back zero-tolerance provisions that mandated exclusion for minor offences, and highlights that these reforms are both possible and associated with reductions in suspension.

The Collaborative emphasises that:

• discipline reform is most effective when it revises policy language, provides alternatives to exclusion, and supports staff to implement new practices;
• policy change without implementation support does little to reduce disparities; and
• students with disabilities must be a focus of reform efforts, not an afterthought.

Implications for conduct codes

• Codes can change; they are already being rewritten in many districts to remove mandatory exclusion and to embed restorative approaches.
• A neurodiversity-affirming code is not a utopian idea but a practical next step in an existing reform trajectory.

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Neurodiversity-affirming conduct codes

Taken together, this scholarship supports several clear conclusions about what school conduct codes should look like if they are to be equitable for disabled and neurodivergent students:

1. Exclusionary discipline must be rare and tightly constrained. Research consistently shows that suspensions and expulsions harm learning and disproportionately affect disabled students; they are an indicator of system failure, not individual misbehaviour.
2. Codes of conduct must be monitored for impact, not just wording. Disaggregated data on suspensions, referrals, and removals is essential, and large disparities should trigger policy review and systemic change.
3. Subjective offence categories should be removed or radically limited. Terms like “defiance,” “disrespect,” and “non-compliance” function as containers for bias and should not be central to discipline frameworks.
4. Policy change must be paired with shifts in belief and practice. Without professional learning that addresses race, disability, and neurodiversity, even well-written codes will be applied in inequitable ways.
5. Discipline frameworks must be integrated with trauma-informed and relational approaches. Effective discipline depends on safety, belonging, co-regulation, and multi-tiered supports; codes should reflect this rather than presenting behaviour as an individual moral choice.
6. Disabled students, especially those of colour, should be explicitly named as a protected group. Their disproportionate exposure to exclusionary discipline is well documented; a just code of conduct must acknowledge this and commit to reducing it.

A genuinely neurodiversity-affirming conduct code would therefore move away from lists of student behaviours and consequences and toward a framework that describes how the school will create accessible environments, respond to distress, and protect disabled students’ rights while still maintaining safety and dignity for the whole community.