(Mis)Handling School Discipline: School Resource Officers Under the Guise of Safety and Achievement

• In Event: Accepting Our Responsibilities as Educators, Scholars, and Innovators: Reclaiming Educational Equity Efforts in a Color-Evasive World

Abstract

With the recent rise in policy proposals to defund the police, schools systems across the nation are considering whether elimination of paid security personnel or school resource officers in public schools will help them achieve racial justice in discipline. School systems are engaging this question at a time when there has been a steady increase in the number of schools employing school resource officers (Losen et al, 2015), largely in response to public concerns about school mass shootings (Addington, 2009; Muschert et al., 2014; Johnson et al., 2019). In addition, policy makers believe urban schools in particular need school resource officers to guarantee student safety within neighborhoods with higher crime rates (Fox and Burnstein, 2010; Losen et al., 2010). Yet, given the vast majority of schools do not have events of gun violence, we question how are school resource officers impacting schools and racial justice the other 99.9 percent of the time that they are not thwarting a mass shooting? Others have asked this question, noting that school resource officers play a part in the criminalization of student behavior (Theriot 2009; Johnson et al., 2019), leaving a 12.3 percent higher likelihood of being referred for non-serious violent offenses for students attending a school with SROs than those without one (Losen et al., 2015). Likewise, studies have enumerated the ways in which SROs facilitate the school-to-prison pipeline for urban students in general (ACLU 2011; Ferriss 2015) and for those of color in particular (Young et al., 2011; Broach 2015; Boyd and Clampet-Lundquist, 2019; Marcucci 2019).

Far from a settled question, program evaluations (Finn, 2005; McDevitt, 2005) conducted by the Department of Justice consistently find that SRO programs increase feelings of safety among staff and students. However, these studies do not estimate 1) differences in the odds of referral or arrest between schools that do and do not have SROs, 2) racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest between schools that do and do not employ SROs, nor 3) the impact on racial differences in individual and school-level average achievement in math given the presence or absence of SROs. To generate knowledge about the impact of SROs on racial (in)justice within schools, we rely on data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the Officer of Civil Rights data to model whether having paid security officers at public high schools is related to student achievement outcomes by race, given the likelihood of student arrests by their junior year, the school average number of arrests, and other indicators of school social order and security technologies. Our approach will build on the use of counterfactual modeling approach found in (Authors 2019; 2020) to strengthen our inferences about the relationships we observe. We anticipate finding that schools with SROs and high arrest rates will lower the average math outcomes of disciplined and non-disciplined students alike, but most for Black students. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how these findings may inform the current debate about limiting police powers and race.

Authors

• Odis Johnson, Johns Hopkins University

• Jason Jabbari, Washington University - St. Louis