Consistency Management and Cooperative Discipline (CMCD) is a research-based K-12 discipline management program that builds on shared responsibility for learning and classroom organization through the cultivation of democratic and participatory practices that are fair, inclusive, and caring. CMCD seeks to provide a stable and orderly learning environment in which students become self-disciplined and empowered, by experiencing greater responsibility. The number of schools that have adopted CMCD in the United States and England surpassed 211 schools (involving 120,000 students) in 2001. CMCD's effectiveness assessment involved two vertical (K-12) clusters of schools, one in Houston and the other in Newark. Houston's assessment was a descriptive one-group study, while Newark's was a two-group quasi-experimental study involving a matched-pair of 228 CMCD and 228 Non-CMCD comparison students. The assessment findings indicated that, prior to CMCD's implementation in 1995-96, four of the nine participating Houston schools had Teacher-Student Relationships' mean scores above the national mean of 50, while the remaining five had scores below the national mean, but by the third year, all of the schools had achieved considerable gains, with eight schools achieving mean scores of 61% - 73%, considerably above the national average. Five of the eight schools achieved gains that were statistically significant. By the fourth year of CMCD's implementation, all of the participating schools had also experienced a significant decline in the number of students referred to the offices of their principals, with a combined decrease from 1,017 to 268 in referrals, a 74% decline. Also, teachers in CMCD elementary schools indicated during the third year that they had been saving about 36 minutes daily as a result of CMCD practices, while middle school teachers indicated they had been saving 30-31 minutes daily (3.6 weeks annually),that would have been wasted on student conduct/disciplinary problems in pre-CMCD implementation years. In Newark, CMCD students, at the end of the first project implementation year, significantly outperformed their comparison cohort in math (effect size, 0.53; 70th percentile) and in reading (effect size, 0.26; 60th percentile). This improvement in math performance among the students occurred even though the math component of the comprehensive reform model had not yet been installed. With the many benefits and factors that CMCD is capable of enhancing, the program could be implemented as a stand-alone school reform program or as a part of a comprehensive reform model involving math and reading. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)
