Questioning School Authority: How Race and Gender Mediate Students' Perceptions of Teacher Authority and School Disciplinary Climates

• In Event: 35.077 - Pushing Beyond Zero: Issues in Zero-Tolerance School Discipline and Positive Discipline Alternatives

Abstract

Objective:
Although it reinforces the moral order of classrooms and legitimizes schools as institutions (Durkheim, 1925/1961; Metz, 1979), school authority is poorly understood. Existing studies focus on teachers’ enactment (Metz, 1978; Hayward, 2000), largely ignoring students’ perspectives. This paper analyzes students’ perceptions of teacher authority and school disciplinary climates, focusing on variation in perceptions across race and gender.

Theoretical Framework:
Authority is a power relationship in which the genuine consent of those in subordinate roles is crucial to its legitimate functioning (Lukes 1974/2005). Authority facilitates the proper functioning of schools only if teachers and students recognize its legitimacy. Therefore, understanding students’ perspectives in school authority relationships is critical.

Although prior scholarship focuses on teacher enactment of authority, several works examine a small set of student perspectives, linking aspects of authority (such as trust and fairness), to positive academic outcomes (Gottfredson & Gottfredson, 1985; Arum, 2003) and school legitimacy (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). However, these works have not adequately examined how race and gender shape students’ perceptions of authority. In contrast, works examining Oppositional Culture often foreground student race and gender as key mediating factors impacting educational outcomes (for example, see Ainsworth-Darnell & Downey, 1998); they do not, however, fully examine students’ perceptions of school discipline, resulting in overly optimistic accounts of students’ perspectives.

Methods:
Using nationally representative data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS), this paper operationalizes school authority as a construct, examining it from a student perspective. Employing questions from the base year of ELS (2002), I identify four factors that tap into students’ perceptions of their relationships with teachers and the strictness, fairness, and consistency of school discipline. After OLS regressions that examine perceptions of these aspects of authority across race and gender, I employ school fixed effects to examine whether variation is mainly within or between schools. As prior experience with school discipline and academic tracking may influence a student’s orientation to school authority, suspension and tracking data are included as controls in the models.

Findings:
Baseline and fixed effects analyses show varied perceptions across authority indices, with males and black students generally reporting more negative perceptions than their peers. In contrast to prior scholarship on the double-displacement of minority males (Ferguson, 2000), black-male interactions are not significant in any of these analyses, and Hispanic-male interactions are only moderately significant. Controls for suspension and academic tracking do not diminish the significant main effects of being black; black students report that school discipline is stricter, less fair and that students do not get away with misbehavior. The majority of variation is concentrated within schools.

Significance:
Pace and Hemmings (2007) state: “the most perplexing challenges for teachers are those related to diversity” (p. 22). As prior research has demonstrated significant relationships between aspects of authority such as trust and the strictness and fairness of school discipline, differing perceptions of school authority may have real consequences for students’ educational outcomes. This may be especially important as a majority white and predominantly female teaching force educates an increasingly diverse student body.

Author

• Doreet Preiss, New York University