Two strikes and you're out?
This paper suggests that having a two strikes and you're out policy could be a useful way for schools to approach their role in preventing drug use by students.
As usual when reading American papers there has to be a caveat that cultural differences may mean that we can't be sure that the intervention will work here in the UK. An additional caution that we are asked to bring to your attention with this paper is that it and the conclusions reached are preliminary.
Nevertheless, the findings are worth looking at.
I think it has been reasonably well understood that one of the reasons that schools have been pushed into developing school drug policies is that these help to set out the ways that they will deal with incidents in ways that don't leave the school open to challenge, are consistent, and help students to understand the rules.
However, my sense has been that the majority of advice has been to find ways of being supportive of students, without condoning drug use. Permanent exclusion was seen as a last resort, with the last set of guidance for schools arguing that:
Permanent exclusion should usually be the final step in the process for dealing with disciplinary offences after a wide range of other strategies have been tried without success.
But as we know the current government are keen to allow headteachers to have more powers to exclude students and have already made it clear they want to extend the rights of teachers to search and discipline students.
The paper by Glen R. Waddell from the Department of Economics at the University of Oregon suggests that schools may want to be quite specific when it comes to redrafting their school drug policies and the sanctions they will use.
After analysing national data sets he says that where schools treat first time offences similarly, but permanently exclude for a second offence:
The estimated di difference is also reasonably large, suggesting a .066 decrease in the probability that one has consumed marijuana in the thirty days prior to the survey where schools expel on second occurrences. At the mean usage of .15 this implies an impact of roughly 43 percent.
I have to admit that we've been struggling to understand the paper in its entirety, economics isn't always an easy subject for lay consumers, but what we think Professor Wardell is saying is that, controlling for variables, schools that have a two strike policy can show a 43% drop in reported cannabis use over the last 30 days.
However, as he also acknowledges it may be that harsher penalties make students less likely to self-report their drug use.
both usage and reporting may respond negatively to increases in penalty severity. That said, care was taken to elicit truthful responses to potentially sensitive areas of disclosure.
So important caveats, but some interesting thoughts...
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About this blog
This blog tries to pick up relevant media and research stories about drug education. It mainly focuses on information in England as this is the geographical remit for the Drug Education Forum. We welcome comments that are on topic.Categories
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