Classroom Management and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

• In Event: Recent Research on Classroom Management: The Latest Edition of the Handbook of Classroom Management

Abstract

Classroom Management and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
This presentation examines the classroom management components of the school-to-prison pipeline. It employs a phenomenological-ecological lens to learning and development that addresses how historical and macroprocesses of institutionalized racism and privilege play out and are remade in the dynamic interactions between and among adults and youth in classrooms, nested in schools and communities. The presentation synthesizes empirical findings regarding:
• student support and classroom management
• school climate and conditions for learning
• disciplinary policy and practices
• social-psychological, socio-cultural, pedagogical, and procedural dynamics of the pipeline, and
• the cumulative impact of micro-aggressions and processes
Research on the science of learning and development suggests that all children can thrive under supportive conditions and, at the same time, are harmed by toxic conditions in school and community. In presenting and interpreting the research on classrooms, schools, and the school-to-prison pipeline through the lens of the science of learning and development, the presentation will examine how structural (e.g., school design and supports available to teachers), cultural (e.g., prejudice and meaning making), and intrapersonal factors (e.g., teacher and student social and emotional competence and stress-related processes) frame classroom management and school discipline processes in a manner that can exacerbate or buffer the effects of school and community-based adversities.
Consistent with this lens, the school-to-prison pipeline involves a set of negative transactions (among children, families, schools, and other service providers) that can lead to disengagement from school and a multi-stepped path toward incarceration. This pipeline is socially patterned by race, with students of color encountering school systems’ inequities in learning opportunities and unequal rates of suspension and expulsion. Students of color experience poor conditions for learning and constricted opportunity structures marked by low expectations curricula and pedagogy that ignore students’ knowledge and focus on behavioral control and surface learning. When these students exhibit troubling behavior, which sometimes may be age normative, they disproportionately are met with punitive and exclusionary discipline that contribute to academic disengagement, diminished school connection, chronic absenteeism, and dropping out.
Schools can disrupt the pipeline by eliminating school–related risk factors and addressing community–related risk factors, building individual and ecological assets that involve opportunities for developing the skills and grounding that enables them to thrive socially, emotionally, and cognitively, both in and out of school. This requires enhancing teacher support and conditions for teaching and learning (via safety, support, engagement, and social-emotional learning), and support for positive teacher-student relationships in a manner that centers equity and addresses the impacts of institutionalized racism. Schools can support students’ learning and development by providing supportive conditions for developing social, emotional, and academic competencies, and by providing culturally responsive emotional and instrumental support. Such support should build upon strengths and avoid deficit-oriented approaches that focus on behavioral compliance and contribute to fostering poor teacher-student relationships. Multi-tiered systems that are personalized, strengths based, culturally responsive, and child and family driven can support these processes.
This presentation will discuss all the above school-to-prison pipeline issues.

Author

• David M. Osher, American Institutes for Research