A Framework to Operationalize Racialized Decoupling in Educational Organizations

• In Event: Constructing New Possibilities for Racialized Organizations Theory in Educational Research

Abstract

Organizational scholars have long studied decoupling, which is the disconnect, often deliberate, between an organization’s “technical core,” the core systems and structures within organizations that produce the key “product” or do the core work, and their symbolic or superficial practices (Zucker, 1987). Research has demonstrated how organizations, like firms and schools, superficially adopt, but do not implement, practices due to external pressures (Westphal & Zajac, 1997). This practice is not always conscious or strategic, and can be strongly influenced by prior beliefs and practices. Indeed Coburn (2004)’s research suggests that the decoupling of teachers’ classroom practice from messages about instruction from the institutional environment is shaped by teachers’ interpretations and by contextualized and institutionalized factors, rather than an intent to decouple. Importantly, organizational scholars have historically taken a “race neutral” perspective, not accounting for institutional racism as an external pressure, nor as a fundamental dimension of individuals’ prior beliefs or practices.
In this paper, we draw on the theory of racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) to elaborate the concept of racialized decoupling. Ray (2019) argues that one of the ways that organizations maintain White supremacy is through the decoupling of race from existing inequalities. For example, educational leaders might explain the disparity between Black/Latine/Indigenous students’ achievement in mathematics and their White/Asian counterparts as being due to “lack of educational opportunities” or coming from “low-income backgrounds.” In this way, leaders delegitimize race as the causal factor–it’s not that institutional or individual racism limits children’s learning opportunities; there are extenuating circumstances beyond the schools/leaders’ realm of control and responsibility. They “decouple” the impact of race on the inequality in learning opportunities. Prior scholarship has also shown how higher education institutions, through decoupling, maintain racist institutional practices (Edelman, 1992).
In our current context, where there is political pressure both to not recognize race and racism (i.e., HB3 in Texas) and to explicitly address racial justice (i.e., district equity officer positions, district equity statements in progressive states), it is likely that schools and teachers are decoupling from stated positions/rules/laws that address race. The choice to decouple can be framed as either to preserve racism (in progressive states) or to advance equity (in conservative contexts)–and both of these choices are racialized.
In this conceptual paper, we first present an analytic framework that operationalizes racialized decoupling in schools. We then apply the framework to two current contexts, one in Texas and one in Washington State. These contrasting institutional environments provide contexts to unpack the ways in which micro- (teacher/leader) and meso- (schools/districts) levels of organizations decouple from one another and the institutional (macro) environment in a racialized manner.
Overall, our work contributes to the research on racialized organizations by delving deeply into one of its key tenets–racialized decoupling. Organizations are essential in the reproduction of systemic racism, and our work seeks to understand the mechanisms through which this occurs in the context of education in order to identify ways to disrupt it.

Authors

• Jessica G. Rigby, University of Washington

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California

• Ain A. Grooms, University of Wisconsin - Madison