School-to-Prison Pipeline: Teacher Disciplinary Practices and Student Success

• In Event: Understanding the Power of Analytical Shifts in Intersectional Scholarship: A Focus on Race, as Well as on Class, Gender, Religion, Sexuality, Dis/ability, and Family Configuration

Abstract

The “school-to-prison pipeline” refers to the formal and informal educational and law enforcement processes and policies (and the prejudices—acknowledged, covert, and denied—that underlie both) that have the effect of pushing PK-12 students, predominantly Black and Latino males, out of school and into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems (Clark, 2012). The research on the school-to-prison pipeline that this paper discusses is intentionally intersectional in examining the ways in which race, class, and gender reciprocally inform each other, at the same time prioritizing the issue of race, thus making it the primary research concern.
Purposes and objectives. The research at focus in this paper examines the school-to-prison pipeline through analysis of teacher disciplinary practices, broadly considered to include relationships with students, non/engagement with parents, pedagogical approaches, and classroom management techniques). The primary research questions examined in this paper are: What, if any, correlations between students’ race, class location, and gender and teacher disciplinary practices can be discerned? and, How do these correlations relate to the school-to-prison pipeline? Ancillary research questions also considered in this paper are: For whom is school rarely or never a pipeline to prison, and why? and, What are the disciplinary practices that lead to this inevitability, and why? In this research, race, class location, and gender are complexly understood and, thus, carefully discerned in manners that intersect with skin color, ethnicity, nationality, and first language; zip code/neighborhood, family configuration, and student/parent employment status; and, gender identity and expression, respectively.
Framework, modes of inquiry and data sources. Using a Critical Race Theory framework, this paper describes the ethnographic study of PK-12 teachers in a large school district in the urban Southwest that was undertaken to ascertain credible answers to the afore-referenced research questions. Through analysis of teacher disciplinary practices gleaned from classroom observation notes, patterns in teacher disciplinary practices are identified and discussed as evidence that the real or perceived race, class, and gender of PK-12 students, impacts teacher mis/understanding of student behavior and, thus, teacher decision making regarding the need to engage (or not) student behavior from a punitive posture.
Conclusions and significance. Ascribed with formal power in the classroom and lacking sociopolitically-located multicultural educational training, teachers, especially white teachers, often fail to recognize how their classroom disciplinary practices disproportionately erroneously target and, thus, negatively impact their minority students in their classrooms. While race, class, and gender are all factors in this outcome, race continues to matter more and most (Bell, 1992; Milem & Hakuta, 2000). However, as reaffirmed and amplified by the research at focus in this paper, when these same teachers are made aware of their identity-based biases and, further, learn alternative strategies for engaging with these same students, instead of continuing to amplify the school-to-prison pipeline, they become dismantlers of it (Harry & Klingner, 2006; Howard, 2006).

Authors

• Christine Clark, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Tarryn McGhie, University of Nevada - Las Vegas