How Niceness in School Administrators' Talk Elides Discussions of Racialized School Discipline in an Urban School District

• In Event: A Culture of Nice: How Educators’ Niceness Holds Inequities in Place

Abstract

This paper is derived from a larger critical ethnographic study of a race-conscious approach to parent engagement in “Rivertown,” a school district with “urban characteristics” (Milner, 2012) in upstate New York undergoing rapid demographic shifts as Black families migrate from New York City. The primary purpose of our research and community-based activism over the past 4 years has been developing policies and practices to disrupt the persistent pattern of disproportionate disciplining of students of color, particularly Black students, for which the district has been repeatedly cited by New York State. In this chapter, we shift our focus from the school setting to an out-of-school context: the Rivertown Board of Education and district administrators. Theoretically informed by critical race theory (Howard & Navarro, 2016; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2009) and critical whiteness studies (Castagno, 2008; 2014; Pollock, 2001; 2004) in education, and based on a critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 2001; van Dijk, 1993; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) of audio-recorded school board meetings, we analyze how school administrators and board members approach (or resist) discussions of this issue in the midst of activism by parents of color and community members, as well as high turnover among school and district administrators. We discursively trace when, how, and to what ends board members, administrators, parents, and community members deploy niceness, and when they do not. How do administrators represent students, teachers, and parents? How do they represent school culture and norms? In what ways are these representations “nice” or “not nice”?

Based on a systematic analysis of discourse, findings indicate that Rivertown school administrators and other district and building staff, in their regular reports to the board, cover up existing racial inequities around both achievement and discipline by (1) reporting their findings to the board in colorblind terms, i.e., without disaggregating the data by race, thus perpetuating a “nice” silence around race; (2) meritocratically presenting disciplinary decisions as a matter of students’ individual behavioral choices, rather than institutional policy; (3) engaging in “feel-good” stories of “what makes our school unique” and heartwarming stories of individual children’s challenges and successes that function as distractions from the equity issues at hand. Each of these discursive moves functions to soften the impact of potentially bad news and elevates good intentions over inequitable impacts. We trace how educational administrators deploy these discursive tactics of niceness to carefully talk around and smooth over the existing racial inequities, as well as the ways in which their discourse frequently represents students, parents, and communities of color in deficit terms. In representing the school culture in “nice” ways and families of color in “not nice” ways, school administrators perpetuate the inequitable status quo by refusing to name it. The paper contributes to an understanding of how discourse outside of school settings functions to perpetuate racial inequities within school buildings.

Authors

• Marguerite A. Wilson, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Denise G. Yull, Binghamton University - SUNY