The Use of Multimethod Research to Understand the Role of School Police and Stakeholder Perspectives

• In Event: Stakeholder Examination of Equity Concerns, Student Learning, Safety, and School Policing

Abstract

As school policing policies are debated, altered, and expected to be implemented, this multi-method paper highlights three distinct school districts across the state of California wrestling with, considering, and modifying school policing policies in their schools and the potential impact across their broader communities. Their approaches, organizing, and implementation is researched, highlighted, and disseminated in hopes for ripple effects across the country.
Theoretical Frameworks: Research has shown that the increased use of law enforcement in schools has paralleled the development of a more punitive school discipline environment where responses to student misconduct includes a range of exclusionary actions, including an arrest (Mckenna & White, 2018). Moreover, what is seen as “student misconduct” is shaped by race, gender, and class (Skiba et.al, 2011) and is linked to broader conceptualizations of who is truly “seen” and “belongs” in school classrooms and hallways. Cultural reproduction theory highlights the “existing power relations most subtly through the production and distribution of a dominant culture that tactically confirms what it means to be educated” (Giroux, 1983, p. 381). Black and Brown students are simultaneously pushed out of schools by exclusionary discipline, and targeted by police on campus in their communities. In this manner, the dominant narrative of who belongs in schools and who is deemed “educated” is reinforced. This paper uses resistance theory to understand current efforts to chart a more equitable course, one that, as Giroux suggests, “provide pedagogical models for new forms of learning and social relations--forms which can be used in other spheres more directly involved in the struggle for a new morality and view of social justice” (Giroux, 1983, p. 407). This paper highlights the manner by which various stakeholders work through conflict to change educational systems and move towards a more equitable schooling context.
Methods: This paper utilizes multi-method research methods, including historical analysis, participant observation, document analysis, review of expulsion and suspension data aggregated across race, class, and gender. Data analysis will highlight disproportionate outcomes aggregated across social constructs.
Results: Illuminate the fact of disproportionality, and its relationship to punitive policies. By providing a nuanced account of the ongoing process of meaning-making among various stakeholders, we suggest key signposts for other school districts.
Scholarly significance: The results of this paper suggest the utility of mixed methods approaches to demonstrate the utility of cultural reproduction and resistance theories in describing the process change in educational contexts.

Authors

• Abbie Cohen, University of California - Los Angeles

• Angela James, University of California - Los Angeles