"On Our Own Terms": School Safety Policy From the Bottom Up

• In Event: 77.022 - Bottom-Up Policy Making in an Age of Misinformation: Critical Youth Participation as a Practice of Power

Abstract

In the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, a number of national politicians, government officials, and media pundits have made calls to increase policing, metal detectors, and even armed teachers in the name of keeping students safe. Such calls neglect decades of research and activism documenting and decrying the long history of racialized structural violence within school walls under the banner of “safety” that has fueled the school-to-prison pipeline—which has disproportionately impacted students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ students (Skiba et al., 2016). Reignited on the national stage by Parkland, this debate is echoing across the country.

Within this context, this paper considers the possibility of critical participatory action research (CPAR) as a means to make public policy formation more genuinely of and by the “public.”  To this end, I draw on lessons from On Our Terms, an intergenerational, critical participatory action research (CPAR) project built to ensure that those most directly impacted by school discipline policy—educators, students and families from communities of color—have a say in unfolding debates in NYC and throughout the country. The project is guided by the belief that those in the margins have critical insight to offer and, in our intergenerational research team, we each bring unique forms of expertise (e.g., academic, experiential, professional, political) to guide the research from design through dissemination. Together, we explore how “safety” and “accountability” are understood in policy debates and lived experience: Safe how (physically, emotionally, academically) and for whom? Who is held accountable (students, teachers, institutions?), to whom, for what, and how? Who gets to decide? These are theoretical concerns, but also deeply practical ones, shaping the lives of NYC’s 1.1 million students and 75,000 teachers.

Drawing on the experiences of the project team and preliminary findings of our collective research, this paper explores how intergenerational CPAR is an important mechanism of “bottom-up” policymaking, infusing policy and practice in a few key ways. First, centering the experience of those most impacted by school discipline policy helps refine our understanding of the key research concepts of safety and accountability (construct validity) and places them in their social-political context (ecological validity). Second, CPAR is fueled by the productive clash of difference in the “participatory contact zone,” with diverse standpoints as a strength rather than weakness (Torre et al., 2012)—particularly important in discourses about school safety, as educator and student interests are often pitted against each other. Third, with direct ties to educational justice movements like Teachers Unite and the Dignity in Schools Campaign, we enhance the project’s impact validity, or its capacity to support social change (Massey & Barreras, 2013; Sandwick et al., 2018). In particular, these ties provide multiple avenues to reach varied audiences of the work (activists, school-based practitioners) beyond those traditionally deemed the audiences of policy research (legislators). With specific examples in each of these domains, this paper elucidates the contributions of CPAR to bottom-up policymaking, broadening our understanding of what and who counts in education policy.

Author

• Talia Sandwick, The Graduate Center, City University of New York