School Police: Sound Educational Policy or Failed Social Experiment? The Empirical Evidence and New Research

• In Event: Racialized Perspectives on Educational Policy

Abstract

Debate on school police policy has continued to sharpen. This paper, intended for policy audiences, utilizes Gramsci’s contradictory consciousness and BlackCrit as a lens for analysis but couches findings in a less theoretical form. Researchers first provide a systematic literature review of the past 25 years of research on police in schools and then share findings of a large-scale qualitative comparative case study that examines the differences between expressed attitudes towards school police held by administrators, teachers and students and actual interactions with them, concluding differing levels of contradictory consciousness with policy implications.

Authors

• Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, University of San Francisco

• Cecelia Jordan, University of Texas at Austin

• Jeremy Kidd Prim, University of California - Davis