Echoes of Little Rock: Disproportionate Discipline as Second- and Third-Generation Segregation

• In Event: "We Are Our History”: Historicizing Current Black-White Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline

Abstract

The understanding of current social injustice is informed by awareness of the historical roots of inequity. This presentation examines the origins and development of racialized disparities in exclusionary school discipline. Although Oliver Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) was intended to set the nation’s public schools on a path towards desegregation, massive resistance throughout the South succeeded in delaying the end of school segregation by 15 years. The Supreme Court’s mandate of immediate desegregation in 1969 was met with an almost simultaneous surge in the use of methods of second-generation segregation, including dramatic increases in the rate of Black suspension. Black-White disparities in disciplinary exclusion were maintained throughout the initial period of school desegregation in the 1970’s, and were further exacerbated by the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs and the Clinton Crime Bill of 1994. In the face of continuing ubiquitous racialized disparities in school discipline and recent evidence-free attacks on school disciplinary reform by the radical right wing, current patterns of disciplinary exclusion of Black and Brown students might best be considered a form of third-generation segregation that continues to make a significant contribution to supporting and maintaining America’s racialized hierarchy.

The presentation will also examine the implications of historicizing discipline disparities for current research on school discipline. Lack of attention to the historical development of variables in current analyses of discipline disparities is problematic not only conceptually, but also methodologically. In structural equation modeling, failure to include important and relevant variables in one’s model is called specification error (Kenny & McCoach, 2003), misattributing variance to variables included in the model (e.g., individual poverty) that ought to have been attributed to variables that were not specified in the model (e.g., school contextual variables). To illustrate, we will present case studies drawn from multivariate studies of the past ten years to demonstrate how understanding the historical antecedents of current disparities changes the way in which initial models are constructed, and the interpretation of the results of those analyses. Ultimately, we argue that understanding the link between current practice and the historical context of racialized stereotypes and segregationist practices from which disciplinary disparities emerged is key in developing effective interventions that can dismantle exclusionary and disparate discipline.

Author

• Ashley L. White, University of Wisconsin - Madison