Students Outside the Circle: How Schools Justify Suspensions

• In Event: Beyond Policy Change Performance: Examining the Real Impact and Limitations of California's School Discipline Reforms

Abstract

Schools across California are trending away from punitive discipline measures as evidenced by significant changes to discipline policy and practice. State policies, such as AB 420 and SB 419, were passed to ban suspension for willful defiance. Districts across the state adopted alternative approaches such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, Social Emotional Learning, and Restorative Justice. Yet even as discourses, policies, and practices change in relation to suspensions as effective discipline practice, students can and still get suspended. The students who continue to be suspended are overwhelmingly Black, Native, and Latinx students described as “gang members”.

Savannah Shange (2019) argues that even though California is a place where immense resources are poured into combating the school-to-prison nexus, the state’s educational system “still reenacts the logics of Black punition and disposability.” Shange’s lens of disposability is central in our exploration of the students who have not benefited from school discipline reform measures such as Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) and Restorative Justice and remain more likely to be excluded from classrooms, suspended, and/or expelled.

To investigate the phenomena of disposability with these student populations, our team purposively sampled from the larger study schools that had sizable numbers of Black, Native or Latinx students. Our analysis focused on nine case study schools. We then reviewed all interviews for each of these schools, coding for instances where educators deemed particular students uneducable or irredeemable through alternative discipline processes. We used matrices to explore relationships between how students were described and rationales for suspension and wrote analytic memos to capture insights and concepts on emerging themes (Miles & Hubermann, 1994).

Our findings illuminate how disposability through discipline was intertwined with dominant local narratives about racial groups. For example, in schools with relatively high Native populations, educators distinguished Native students and their families who lived and worked in town from those who stayed on the reservation, the latter being described as less educable. In schools with significant Black populations, currently enrolled Black students who were considered as having discipline issues were distinguished from Black students elsewhere who had opted to attend “better” schools. Finally, the discourse of gangs was most salient in schools that were almost 100% Latinx. Here, adults suggested that the presence of gang members threatened the efforts of the larger Latinx community who strived for the American dream.

We argue that when alternative approaches to discipline fail, these reforms entrench and elaborate pre-existing ideas of student disposability. The students who refuse to assimilate to the underlying labor sorting function of schools in the United States are considered dispensable.

Authors

• Hoang Pham, University of California - Davis

• Seenae Chong, University of San Francisco