The education story of the year has been the “Southern Surge.” An intrepid group of southern states have led the nation in post-pandemic recovery. In a decade, Mississippi moved from 49th to seventh in the nation on fourth-grade reading scores, despite remaining the poorest state. According to Harvard’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard, Louisiana is the only state to recover to 2019 achievement levels in both reading and math, while Alabama matched pre-Covid scores in fourth-grade math alone. All other states continue to lag prior achievement levels.
Much of this success has rightly been credited to a handful of commonsense reforms: early literacy laws that require the use of phonics, the tightening of retention and promotion policies, universal literacy screeners in early grades, and rigorous curricula. But another factor may be these states’ strict disciplinary policies. The states seeing the greatest gains academically are also the ones doing the most to bring order and stability to their schools.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
A teacher can use the best curriculum, and states can make schools use the best instructional methods, but if classrooms are chaotic, then students will not learn. The presence of a misbehaving peer causes other students to act out, dilutes instruction, and drives down achievement for other students.
Despite this, blue and red states frame discipline differently. Alabama’s regulatory codes, for example, open with a statement that “students be allowed to learn in a safe classroom setting where order and discipline are maintained,” and that “every child in Alabama” is entitled to “the right to learn in a non-disruptive environment.” Boundaries and order are treated as inherent goods.
Many blue states, however, view school discipline as a necessary evil, to be limited as much as possible. California prohibits the use of suspensions for low-level misbehavior such as willful disobedience. Massachusetts imposes prerequisites on the use of suspensions, telling administrators that they “shall not use suspension from school as a consequence until alternative remedies have been tried and documented.” In practice, this makes suspension a last resort rather than a baseline tool of classroom management.
These different approaches show in the data, beginning with how likely schools are to use punishments. For example, though Alabama and Washington report incidents to the Department of Education’s CRDC at similar rates, Alabama suspends students roughly two to three times as often as Washington. Or consider Louisiana and the District of Columbia, the areas with the highest incident rates in 2021–2022. Though D.C. reported about a 50 percent higher incident rate than Louisiana, it was seven times less likely to expel students.
One reason for this discrepancy could be that states experience violent behavior differently. Where violence is more prevalent, administrators may feel greater urgency to intervene quickly and efficiently.
But this likely only partly explains why many states still struggle with violence and disorder. The latest available data for schools reporting “widespread disorder” between the 2019–2020 and 2021–2022 school years show that Southern schools remained stable. By contrast, disorder grew at schools in the Northeast, Midwest, and Western regions and was also much higher than at those in the South.
Approaches in red states differ in another key aspect: their schools preserve broad discretion to enforce rules early, before small problems become big ones. Louisiana law says that teachers may “take disciplinary action” against any student or behavior that “interferes with an orderly education process.” Administrators may not return that student to class until they employ one of several “disciplinary measures.” Even small behaviors can trigger a consequence, and three removals can trigger a parent meeting and more severe disciplinary action.
States like Alabama and Tennessee have recently spearheaded laws that give teachers more authority to remove unruly students from the classroom and compel administrators to impose more consequences. These laws faced opposition from equity advocates, but they go a long way toward explaining why classroom disorder didn’t worsen in the South, and why educational outcomes for poor students have improved so dramatically there—the very thing equity hawks claim to want.
Students deserve orderly and safe classrooms, and that means educators shouldn’t treat discipline as a necessary evil of last resort. If we want academic recovery to endure, we need to build the behavioral foundations that make learning possible. Education decision-makers who truly care about student outcomes would be wise to review their discipline policies.
Photo: Kawee Srital-on / Moment via Getty Images