Top-Down Discipline: Linking Political and Carceral Ideology in Schools

• In Event: School Politics at the Nexus of Race, Criminal Justice, and Segregation

Abstract

Black students face significantly higher school discipline rates than their white peers. Black students account for 15.1% of public school students, yet represent 38.2% of out-of-school suspensions, 28.7% of referrals to law enforcement, and 31.6% of school arrests (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). Suspended and expelled youth are less likely to complete high school or attend college (Rosenbaum, 2020), and more likely to be arrested and incarcerated as adults (Bacher-Hicks et al., 2019). Studies that examine discipline disparities tend to emphasize behavioral and socioeconomic differences between racialized groups, as well as racially disparate treatment by teachers and administrators. Critical quantitative perspectives have highlighted how these studies often reinforce and normalize racialized differences (Gillborn et al., 2018). In contrast to a “bottom-up” view where schools respond to presumed student misbehavior, I consider a “top-down” model of discipline, where school environments shape student behavior. The policies, procedures, and practices that influence racial disparities in discipline can be characterized by schools' use of carceral ideology, defined as the propensity to solve problems through surveillance, coercion, and confinement.

Carceral ideology is a belief system that views societal problems as individual and familial failures that require correction. Carceral ideology shapes not only discipline, but also the distribution of knowledge, curricula, and materials. An accumulation of carceral practices in schools may alter the education, beliefs, and identities of poor and racially minoritized students in harmful ways, inhibiting their successful transition to college, the workplace, and other social environments (Golann, 2015). While schools often desire to reduce inequality in educational outcomes through investments in and redistribution of resources, carceral ideology shifts the focus away from structural policy reforms and towards the “correction” of individual students.

This study is part of a larger project investigating not only the prevalence of carceral ideology in schools, but also the links between carceral ideology and the local cultural and political contexts. In an earlier study, I developed a school-level measure of carceral ideology based on computational analyses of text from approximately 15,000 school handbooks. I find that carceral ideology varies across school characteristics and is a statistically significant predictor of both discipline rates (suspensions and expulsions) and racial disparities in discipline. To build on these findings, I augment the predictive model with county-level data on religious and political affiliation, using party affiliation as a proxy for ideology.

Measures for political affiliation, including party affiliation and level of exposure to members of other parties, are based on Brown and Enos’s comprehensive analysis of partisan and residential segregation in the United States (Brown and Enos, 2021). Measures for religious affiliation are drawn from data collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, which compiles the only nationwide, county-level census of religious affiliation (Grammich et al., 2018). Since schools are nested within counties and the variables of interest are at both the school- and county level, I use hierarchical linear models to estimate school-level carceral ideology scores. In summary, I draw on a novel measure of carceral ideology and its underlying data to identify which carceral practices---surveillance, coercion, or confinement---are most widely adopted, and investigate the cultural and political factors that predict a school's use of carceral ideology.

References

Bacher-Hicks, A., Billings, S. B., and Deming, D. J. (2019). The school to prison pipeline: Long-run impacts of school suspensions on adult crime. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 26257.

Brown, J. R. and Enos, R. D. (2021). The measurement of partisan sorting for 180 million voters. Nature Human Behavior, 5:998–1008.

Gillborn, D., Warmington, P., and Demack, S. (2018). QuantCrit: education, policy, ’Big Data’ and principles for a critical race theory of statistics. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(2):158–179.

Golann, J. W. (2015). The Paradox of Success at a No-Excuses School. Sociology of Education, 88(2):103–119.

Grammich, C., Hadaway, K., Houseal, R., Jones, D. E., Krindatch, A., Stanley, R., and Taylor, R. H. (2018). U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study, 2010 (County File). https://thearda.com/data-archive?fid=RCMSCY10.

Rosenbaum, J. (2020). Educational and criminal justice outcomes 12 years after school suspension. Youth & Society, 52(4):515–547.

U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (2021). An Overview of Exclusionary Discipline Practices in Public Schools for the 2017-18 School Year. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-exclusionary-school-discipline.pdf.

Author

• NaLette Brodnax, Georgetown University