BackHome
Refresh: Off
Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Past as Prologue: A Critical Spatial Analysis of Exclusionary Discipline

Thu, April 9, 2:15 to 3:45pm PDT (2:15 to 3:45pm PDT), JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE, Floor: Ground Floor, Gold 4

Abstract

Purposes
Compared to white peers, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students are more likely to experience suspension, calling for policy transformation that contends with spatial-historical legacies that influence contemporary discipline practices. We examined suspensions across race and space in one California region.

Conceptual Framework
Leveraging social control and carcerality theories and critical geography, we positioned discipline disproportionality as spatially concentrated via historical policies that shaped contemporary school investment. Schools contribute to the social reproduction of structural anti-Black racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2021), and spatial histories drive local ideologies and practices (Owens & McLanahan, 2020).

Methods
We used an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. We first analyzed suspensions by student subgroups. We then examined historical redlining documents and contemporary district policy documents in purposefully selected locations. Using these findings, we identified two focal middle schools for in-depth analysis and used joint display integration to generate a meta-inferential finding (Moseholm & Fetters, 2017).

Data Sources
We analyzed longitudinal student-level administrative records from the California Department of Education (CDE). This dataset provided student demographic characteristics; grade level; receipt of special education services; socioeconomic disadvantage classification; and disciplinary events.

We restricted the CDE dataset to students in one geographic location, and we merged the data file with geographic data from the American Panorama Mapping Inequality website (Nelson et al., 2023). These data come from the National Archive’s City Survey Files, 1935–1940, and include the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s (HOLC) neighborhood ratings.

Qualitative data included policy documents from two identified districts on: a) historical redlining records; b) district policy documents (i.e., school board meeting records, student handbooks, and school discipline policies); and c) local newspapers.

Results
Black students’ suspension rates were almost three times that of white peers (OR = 2.74, SE = .04, z = 64.7, p > .001). Schools in areas with low HOLC grades (i.e., C or D) had higher unadjusted suspension rates than those in locations with high grades. Schools in C and D grade areas suspended 2.45% and 3.02% of their students, respectively, compared to 0.81% of students in A-area schools and 0.89% of students in B-area schools. The HOLC documents illustrate how overt racism shaped neighborhood categorization.

Our joint display analysis (see Figure 2) uncovered the meta-inference of how HOLC policies defined today’s school structures; higher suspending schools were in historically constructed non-white and more carceral areas than lower suspending schools. This corresponded to disparate discipline outcomes reproduced through policy in schools with concentrated educational debt (Lofton et al., 2024).

Significance
Our results reflect the enduring impact of racialized school systems (Ray, 2019). A legacy of carceral logics in district policies produced and informed suspensions. Our mixed analysis provided nuance around how schools were impacted by housing and resource distribution. Such discrimination contributed to racialized practices funneling marginalized students into punitive disciplinary pathways. These trends reveal past legacies as connected to current segregation practices, illuminating a historical explanation for educational inequalities. The infamous HOLC redlining maps laid the foundation for persisting racial housing and wealth gaps today (Michney & Winling, 2020).

Authors