Race and Discipline at a Racially Mixed High School: Status, Capital, and Organizational Routines

• In Event: Where Do We Place Our Children? Students of Color in Predominately White High School Settings

Abstract

Objective

Black students are more likely than White students to be selected for discipline and punished more harshly (Piquero 2008; Gregory, Skiba and Noguera 2010). Black students’ behavior, however, is not the primary cause of these patterns. Instead, school discipline practices seem to drive these outcomes (Gregory, et al. 2010; Ferguson, 2003), suggesting that Black and White students are treated differently by school officials. In this paper, we examine discipline practices at Riverview High School, a racially mixed school located in a Midwest suburb. We show that racial categorization, status beliefs, and forms of capital combine to shape students’ experiences within the school’s discipline routine.

Perspectives or Theoretical Frameworks

Our study is framed by work in social psychology, forms of capital, and organizational studies. We draw on social psychological studies on status beliefs (Ridgeway, 2006) to examine how Black and White students are constructed and treated differently. We draw on Bourdieu’s work on capital to examine how cultural, social, and symbolic capital interact with social status to influence students’ experiences. Finally, we use work on organizational routines – the daily interactions through which the work of organizations gets done – to study the discipline routine (Pentland and Feldman, 2005). More specifically, we distinguish between the explicit rules encoded in official policy (which often legitimize disciplinary outcomes) and the practice of the discipline routine that contributes to unequal outcomes.
Methods, data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Our evidence comes from 170 interviews (45-90 minute) with Riverview parents, students, teachers, and administrators. Riverview is racially and socio-economically diverse high school serving 48% White students, 40% Black students, 9.5% Latina/o students, and 3.1% Asian students. Our interviews were recorded and transcribed. We analyzed them using open coding to identify initial themes and then used thematic coding. We created data analysis software to create matrices and other data displays.
Results

We demonstrate that race shapes who gets selected for discipline and how they are treated, with Black students being disciplined more often and more harshly. Both Black and White respondents report that Black students are singled out for discipline even when White students engage in similar behaviors, that Black students who embrace African American cultural styles face heightened suspicion and selection for discipline, and that Whiteness functions as symbolic capital that privileges White students with the assumption of innocence and White parents with greater influence over punishment decisions.

Significance

We emphasize the daily interactions that may contribute to racial disproportionality in discipline and highlight how these experiences communicate who is and is not a full member of the school community and may have consequences for whether students feel valued, respected, and cared for at school. We therefore argue that this work may contribute to our understanding of disparities in discipline but also gaps in academic outcomes. Our work also helps sharpen the theoretical tools we have for understanding how contemporary racial dynamics become embedded in organizational contexts.

Authors

• John B. Diamond, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Amanda E. Lewis, University of Illinois at Chicago