Beyond Policy Change Performance: Examining the Real Impact and Limitations of California's School Discipline Reforms

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

California has recently been a focal state in which state policymakers, educators, and community coalitions have experimented with a number of efforts to decrease exclusionary school discipline policies and practices, with implications for the nation. This symposium brings together four papers that examine the deeper political, economic, and cultural mechanisms by which punitive discipline practices survive and perpetuate themselves in schools despite attempts to challenge them. Taking a critical policy analysis approach to research each of the papers describe the lived experiences of policy impacts, contextualizes the outcomes of policy processes within both a history and contemporary manifestation of anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, and anti-other, and critically examine who wins and who loses as a result.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Policies, Mattering, and Praxis

Chair

• Mary Louise Frampton, University of California - Davis

Papers

• The New Hidden Curriculum in California's Postindustrial Political Economy - Danielle Huddlestun; Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, University of San Francisco

• Contradictory Consciousness and the Meaning and Purpose of School Police - Jeremy Kidd Prim, University of California - Davis; Romelia Loaiza

• What Justice Is Being Restored? Restorative Justice in Unjust Schools - Cecelia Jordan, University of San Francisco; Lawrence Torry Winn, University of California - Davis; Bianca N. Haro, Pitzer College

• Students Outside the Circle: How Schools Justify Suspensions - Hoang Pham, University of California - Davis; Seenae Chong, University of San Francisco

Discussant

• Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, University of San Francisco