The Discourse of Discipline Reform: Media Coverage of Restorative Justice in New York City Schools

• In Event: Activism and Social Change

Proposal

In New York City (NYC), as in many places throughout the US and world, zero tolerance discipline policies have come under critique for high suspension rates that impede learning and for perpetuating racial disparities (Teasley, 2014). Protests of zero tolerance discipline policies have come to promote non-punitive alternatives, such as restorative justice (RJ) (Fine, 2018). Our inquiry was launched in 2018 in conversation with a collaborative of educators, youth and adult organizers, and university action researchers working to implement RJ in NYC schools (the ‘Collaborative’). The Collaborative expressed an interest in partnering with us to understand how the media is talking about RJ to inform their organizing strategies. In this empirical study of media coverage of RJ in NYC, we use critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1992) to uncover how power is maintained, challenged, or shifted through protest of school discipline policy.

Critical Discourse Analysis
The media’s language holds tremendous power on two levels. On the surface, the media directly determine which problems people are paying attention to. On a deeper level, media determine what is defined as ‘a problem,’ how those problems are being framed, and what actions need to be taken. CDA allows us to look at both levels, seeing how power operates through language to both frame public issues and make certain policies seem more possible than others. Fairclough’s (1992) approach to CDA provides an opportunity to reveal implicit assumptions and ideologies in the discourse surrounding restorative justice policies in NYC public schools.

Methodology

Data Set
We built our data set from a Google alert Author 1 created in 2010 for “restorative discipline justice school,” which automatically collected media coverage captured by these terms. We narrowed the Google alert hits to media pieces relevant to NYC between January 2014, when DeBlasio started his first term as New York City mayor, to May 2018, shortly after he started his second term. The full data set consisted of 88 articles published between April 2014 and May 2018. With Dedoose, a qualitative analysis program, we assigned article-level descriptors that reflected CDA’s attention to media production (Fairclough, 1995): year of publication, month of publication, source (e.g., Chalkbeat), genre (e.g., news feature, editorial), author’s primary role (e.g., journalist, advocate), and article’s overall orientation toward RJ (i.e., pro, con, neutral/ambivalent).

Data Analysis
Our codebook was developed inductively and in consultation with the Collaborative. We initially open-coded a subset of articles, producing an extensive list of emergent codes grouped into the following categories: stakeholders referenced, policies referenced, definitions of RJ, arguments for RJ, arguments against RJ, disparities, and challenges to implementing RJ. Reflecting CDA’s approach to establishing reliability by assessing plausibility (Hardy, Harley, & Philips, 2004), we presented our process to the Collaborative for feedback and engaged in a joint coding exercise. We established interrater reliability to ensure all members of the research team were understanding and applying the codebook consistently (O’Connor & Joffe, 2020).

Findings
We show how power imbued the representations, identities, and relations of school discipline reform within the media’s discourse around RJ. Below, we briefly discuss our findings, focusing on our macro analysis, while the final paper will include our micro analysis of textual examples.

Representations: Unsafe Schools and RJ
The media discourse on RJ relied heavily on establishing NYC schools as unsafe. Arguments against RJ frequently found in the media discourse relied on the notion that it is too tolerant of disorder and fosters an unsafe school environment. However, we also found that representations of schools as unsafe spaces were similarly foundational to claims in support of RJ. Articles, for example, positioned schools as unsafe due to students’ unmet mental health needs and RJ as an antidote. Our finding suggests that while alternatives such as RJ were struggling to become more accepted, discipline reform did not necessarily challenge the notion that schools are chaotic and dangerous, a position that has historically fueled punitive measures.

Identities: Powerful Advocates and Oppositional Teachers
The stakeholder most frequently mentioned in relation to RJ was organizations, specifically advocacy organizations, followed by teachers. Our close textual analysis showed that advocacy organizations were framed as experts in school discipline. The most oft-cited research came from advocacy organizations, and the rise in RJ was framed as a response to the data produced by these organizations. We see actors who are external to schools positioned as powerful in the discourse. In contrast, teachers and their unions–central to the daily working of schools and RJ implementation–are positioned as largely oppositional to RJ, either in their inability or unwillingness to adopt restorative practices. Consistent with the neoliberal de-professionalization of school workers in favor of advocacy organizations, think tanks, and corporations (Anderson & Cohen, 2018), RJ may happen in schools, but the accepted authority on RJ lies elsewhere, lending power and possibility to both individual students and groups like the Collaborative.

Relationships: Ambivalent Empowerment of Youth
The media frames RJ as shifting the balance of power between students and educators, empowering students in ways that are ambivalently positive or threatening. Our analysis revealed two common arguments against restorative justice: It gives students greater control, and it puts teachers at risk. We also saw that the media frame RJ as holding students to greater account for their actions, offering a positive take on student empowerment. Of note is that concerns about student empowerment do not necessarily conflict with advocacy for RJ, suggesting that some advocates for RJ avoid challenging adult control to advance discipline reform in a more palatable manner. This discursive approach may shape RJ implementation in ways that maintain hierarchies inherent to zero tolerance discipline.



Significance
Our analysis of the discourse on RJ in NYC schools reveals that discipline reform may perpetuate power structures that conflict with the democratic underpinnings of restorative justice. These conservative discursive approaches may be effective in the short term to gain media attention and achieve policy changes, but their promise in transforming daily practice in schools is undetermined.

Authors

• Rachel Garver, Montclair State University

• Hilary Alissa Lustick, University of Massachusetts, Lowell