Do sports help students stay away from misbehavior, suspension, or dropout?

Abstract This paper explores whether high-school sports are functional and accessible activities to keep students from school disciplinary behaviors. For this purpose, we included students racial and linguistic status, socioeconomic status, sex, and prior academic performance with the school’s proportion of free-lunch recipients and minorities, to understand how sport participation affects students of diverse groups. Additionally, the study implemented a multilevel mediation modeling to the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) data and assessed student dropouts with sequential mediators of sport participation, school misbehavior, and suspension. The findings of the study largely revealed that White students participated in sports more than Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Likewise, students who speak English as the primary language and male students participated in sports more than their counterparts. White sport participants displayed fewer incidents of suspension than White non-sport participants. Black, Hispanic, and White sport participants had lower dropout incidents than their non-sport-participating counterparts.