From Restorative Justice to Social-Emotional Learning: Competing Discourses of Care in School Discipline Reform

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Sesion 4
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Holistic Examination of Education Policy: Perspectives on Context and Scale (Table 5)

Abstract

Objectives
U.S. schools are increasingly under pressure to reform school discipline (Goldstein, 2020). With growing awareness of the school-prison pipeline, many schools have implemented reforms ranging from restorative justice to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) aimed at shifting schools away from punitive, zero-tolerance practices and toward caring, responsive environments (Ispa-Landa, 2017). This paper advances a holistic examination of discipline reform, connecting state and district policymaking, intermediary organizations, and school-level practice to show how multiple alternatives to zero-tolerance are enacted simultaneously.

Theoretical Frameworks
This paper brings together literature on critical care feminism (Author, under review; Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002) with a policy enactment lens (Ball et al., 2012) to study the competing discourses of care that arise as teachers enact discipline reform. Together, critical care feminism and policy enactment provide a framework for understanding the way that teachers respond to multiple policies and pressures aimed at shifting schools toward more caring spaces, while illuminating the competing discourses that emerge as they put discipline reform into practice.

Methods and Data
The findings are based on an in-depth comparative case study (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) of discipline reform across two elementary schools and one middle school in a single Wisconsin school district, Shady Glen. Like many school districts, Shady Glen is actively pursuing multiple discipline reforms, including SEL and restorative practices. Data include over 60 interviews with 30 participants (e.g., teachers, school leaders, support staff, district leaders), over 300 hours of classroom and staff meeting observation (e.g., district meetings, state-provided professional development), and archival documents.

Findings
Across the three schools, I find that staff responded to state pressures and district mandates, as well as ideas from a range of non-profit and for-profit intermediary organizations to craft novel behavioral frameworks. In doing so, they aimed to distance themselves from punitive, zero-tolerance discipline and advance racial equity by decreasing exclusionary practices (e.g., suspension, expulsion) that disproportionately harm Black students. Yet, two competing discourses arose that offered disparate explanations for racially disproportionate school discipline and, ultimately, different school-based solutions. The coopted care discourse centered on teaching students white, middle-class norms for comportment through direct instruction of SEL using a purchased curriculum. From this perspective, restorative practices were seen as a tool for addressing students’ “behavioral mistakes” and for providing students with “logical consequences” for poor behavioral choices. In contrast, the critical care discourse offered a more radical commitment to re-imagining student-staff relations and school-wide expectations. Staff used restorative practices among themselves to process difficult topics, such as race, and to reconsider school structures to better support marginalized students. These contradictory discourses ultimately muddled the meaning of discipline reform at the school level and led to incoherence in teachers’ work.

Significance
While studies have examined school-level implementation of particular reforms at the school level (e.g., Lustick, 2017), and others have examined the national discipline reform context (Author, in press; Koon, 2020; Hirschfield, 2018), this multiscalar study connects the broader reform landscape to school-level practice.

Author

• Abigail J Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison