Inside Teacher Discretion: How Teachers Explain Discipline Referrals and Calls for Assistance

• In Event: Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Policies, People, and Practices

Abstract

Objective

When a teacher makes an office discipline referral (ODR), or involves security or law enforcement in cases of student misconduct, a process begins that may lead to suspension, expulsion, or arrest. This study seeks to understand the policies and beliefs that shape teachers’ decisions to issue an ODR and/or contact security officers or SROs.

Theoretical Framework

Teaching requires constant exercise of discretion, because policies cannot anticipate everything that might happen in a classroom. According to Lipsky’s influential theory of “street-level bureaucracy,” workers who frequently exercise discretion seek ways of simplifying their decisions, including application of stereotypes (Lipsky 2010). Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2004) found that teachers, police, and social workers often explain their decisions with reference to individuals’ virtue or worthiness. Beliefs about racial differences are one component of these judgements. Although overt bigotry has decreased, many White Americans demonstrate “color-blind racism:” a belief that racial inequalities result from cultural differences and that racial discrimination is no longer significant (Bonilla-Silva 2010). Implicit bias, stereotype-based mental shortcuts in interpreting people and situations (Goff & Godsil, 2016) may also influence these judgements (Gilliam et al. 2016; Okonofua & Eberhardt 2015).

Data and Methods

This paper is part of a larger study, which includes administrative data and quantitative measures of teachers’ implicit bias. The study site is a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse, southern school district. To date, 9 interviews have been conducted with racially diverse participants.. In early 2018, a second round of interviews will bring the total number of interviews to approximately 15. Interview transcripts are being coded using a combination of a priori and in vivo codes.

Preliminary Findings

Preliminary analysis suggests that teachers generally reserve using ODRs or calling security for especially challenging situations, and that some teachers made no, or only 1, ODR in the prior school year. Teachers rely mostly on building-level policies to guide their decisions. When they talked about their general approaches to discipline, teachers of all races described seeing students as individuals and not as members of racial groups or other categories. Despite this color-blind, individualist view, teachers also ascribed racial disparities in discipline to differences in behavior across racial and socioeconomic groups, which they attributed in turn to the quality of parenting and guidance received at home. Seeing students as individuals is in tension with making group-based assumptions about them. This tension suggests that teachers’ conscious evaluations differ from their unconscious evaluations, indicating that implicit bias may be affecting their judgements.

Significance

The findings suggest that efforts to reduce discipline disparities among racial/ethnic groups of students happen against a backdrop of individualist thinking by teachers, coupled with group-based assumptions about students’ home lives. Teachers may be at risk of relating to students in racially stereotypical way, and perhaps relying on stereotypes or implicit biases in discipline decisions. When the analysis is complete, this paper will contribute to understanding how implicit bias may contribute to discipline disparities and how to use practices and policies to reduce the influence of implicit bias.

Authors

• Kathryn A. McDermott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Robin Nicole Johnson-Ahorlu, University of California - Los Angeles

• Summer Robins, University of California - Los Angeles

• Nina Crane, University of California - Los Angeles

• Phillip Atiba Goff, John Jay College of Criminal Justice