Ethnic Threat in U.S.-Mexico Border Schools and the Use of Corporal Punishment

• In Event: School Discipline in the 21st Century: Social Control Through Security and Punishment Approaches

Abstract

There is an increasing link between discipline in schools and racial threat biases that nest within the school-to-prison pipeline literature. This study seeks to understand the perceived threat of immigrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, who have been characterized by some U.S. politicians and political influencers as high-risk individuals. Prior research in this area has focused on expulsion and arrest data of immigrant populations in Texas to compare border and non-border schools. With Texas being one of 17 states that legally permits corporal punishment in its schools, this study seeks to expand upon this by assessing the link between corporal punishment of Hispanic and non-Hispanic students in border school districts and non-border school districts before and after the 2016 election. Negative binomial regressions were used with the Department of Education’s CRDC database to assess the relation between corporal punishment, student ethnicity, and locale. Preliminary results indicate that Hispanic students living on the border were predicted to have fewer experiences of corporal punishment, compared to White students in border schools, after the 2016 election. This finding suggests that contextual factors play a significant role in the use of corporal punishment against students of different ethnic groups.

Authors

• Jared Griffith, University of Oklahoma

• Julie Gerlinger, University of Oklahoma