Russell Skiba
American psychologist
Russell John Skiba is an American educational psychologist known for researching school discipline and school violence. He is a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University, where he directs PBIS Indiana, a program aimed at developing a network of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports across Indiana. He also co-directs Indiana University's Equity Project, which aims to provide evidence regarding zero-tolerance policies, educational equity, and school violence to policymakers, and directs the Discipline Disparities Research to Practice Collaborative, a group aimed at bringing researchers together with policymakers to address disproportionality in school discipline. He has received the Push for Excellence Award from Rainbow/PUSH for his work on racial disproportionality in school suspensions.
Education
Skiba received his M.A. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1983 and 1987, respectively.
Work
Skiba is known for his work on school discipline and how it is affected by student race. In 2002, for example, he published a study showing that black students tended to be disciplined for more subjective offenses than were white students. In 2008, Skiba was the lead author of a task force report on zero-tolerance policies in schools released by the American Psychological Association. The report concluded that these policies were not only ineffective, but also counterproductive, in that they increased the chances of future student misbehavior.
The public source identifies “Russell Skiba” as american psychologist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Russell, Skiba and American.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29789704. VIAF identifies the subject as 75249682. The Library of Congress control number is n84064810. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1987, 2002 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Russell Skiba” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.