Education and School Law Order Discussion.
Description
After reading La Morte Chapters 5 and 7, write a scholarly research paper (cite at least 4 recent references beyond text) on the impact of school vouchers and charter schools on public education. How do you see it playing out over the next five years? What needs to be done to ensure quality education for all students?
Violence and disparate discipline measures against students of color can involve physical
assaults, as well as sustained institutional and public policy discrimination. Such discrimination often stems from exclusionary or targeted policies that have unfair impacts on particular communities and students. Moreover, students of color experience violence—some–
times immediate and sometimes institutionalized and gnawing—in intersecting ways. Education and School Law Order Discussion.In the
context of unequal social structures, students’ multiple social statuses and identities — as
LGBTQ, poor, non-native English speakers, and immigrants, for example – increase their
vulnerability to state-sponsored, individual, and community violence.
In addition, students of color paradoxically experience violence within their communities,
which are often racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically segregated. Perpetrators of
violent acts are often themselves, in turn, victims of police, educational, or institutional dis–
crimination and injustice.5 Students of color are more likely to attend schools segregated by
race, income, and language. Education and School Law Order Discussion.They are more likely to have inexperienced teachers with higher
turnover rates than do their more affluent or White peers. Their schools are often targeted
for radical, disruptive reforms such as reconstitution, turnaround, or closure. And they are
more likely to attend schools where discipline policies result in high rates of suspension and expulsion and the presence of police inside and outside of the school.
Although crime rates have decreased across the United States over the last 10 years, especially violent crime,6 the perception of danger in cities persists. The stereotypical images of
young men of color as perpetrators of violent crime, and therefore in need of policing, arrest,
and incarceration, are reinforced by the concentration of gun-related violence in particular
cities, such as Chicago. Yet the fact that young men of color are also more likely to be victims
of violent crime is overlooked by such diagnoses.7 The recent uprisings across the country
against discriminatory policing policies such as “stop and frisk,” which target communities
of color for arrests and, in many cases, police violence, have led groups like Black Lives
Matter (BLM) to attempt to explicitly reframe who is being violent and to whom. In fact,
overlapping and intersecting social policies in the context of housing, labor, policing, and
education leave many communities of color in segregated cities and suburbs isolated from
social and educational opportunity more broadly. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
Many Americans may fixate on one negative image of communities experiencing spikes in
violent crime through framing that emphasizes the racialized violence in our communi–
ties. In reality, neighborhoods that have faced economic distress, under-resourced schools,
crime, high rates of poverty, health inequities, and low student performance have been con–
structed by public policies that determined who could live where, through de jure and de
facto mechanisms.8 For example, when asked by a television commentator how the city of
Chicago could solve its “crime problem,” President Trump responded in a way that viewed
violence as unidirectional and excused the role of the police in targeting people of color and perpetuating discriminatory practices:
How? By being very much tougher than they are right now. They’re right now not
tough….when I was in Chicago, I got to meet a couple of very top police. I said,
‘How do you stop this? How do you stop this? If you were put in charge — to a
specific person — do you think you could stop it?’ He said, ‘Mr. Trump, I’d be
able to stop it in one week.’ And I believed him 100 percent.
When the commentator asked how, Trump responded: “he wants to use tough police tac–
tics, which is OK when you have people being killed.”9
Similarly, the President recently referred to both African American and “Hispanic Ameri–
can” people as “stuck” in inner cities and “living in hell,”10 while suggesting that he would
send in the National Guard:
The National Guard has been deployed during other times of racial tension and caused civil
disruptions because of the militarization of situations and the behavior of law enforcement.11
The systematic forms of violence that impact schooling and life chances for so many children
of color are minimized by President Trump’s conflation of race, urbanicity, and dangerous–
ness in this exchange.
As Chicago City Council member Carlos Ramirez-Rosa pointed out, Trump’s language about
what needs to happen in Chicago is steeped in uninformed perceptions about the root causes
of violence and racial prejudice. It furthers racist stereotypes and the criminalization of peo–
ple of color. “[By “send in the feds”] He didn’t mean the resources of the federal government
coming in to create jobs on the South or West Side of Chicago, to create jobs for people of
color, to take the guns out of people’s hands and put them to work,” said Ramirez-Rosa of
Trump’s comments. “You know what he meant. He meant locking up more black and brown
folks.”12
Activists and researchers have called attention to the use of disproportionate discipline in
schools as a form of early policing and violence.13 Education researchers studying the con–
nections between educational and social opportunity have coined the phrase, “the school-
to-prison pipeline,” which has come to signify the predictable relationship between the con–
ditions and results of schooling for boys of color — especially African American and Latino
boys — and their entanglement with juvenile justice systems or incarceration. Although
much less explored in the research literature, Black girls also experience disproportionate
rates of school discipline.
In this report, we examine the relationship between violence and education policy. More
specifically, we urge education policymakers to understand the nature of violence in schools
and communities. Our analysis allows the research and policy community to move beyond
the well-intentioned but incomplete rendering of this connection as primarily a “school-
to-prison pipeline” existing in isolation. Instead, we consider the relationship between
schools and society with regard to racial disproportionality in school discipline policies and
in broader social policies. Informed by the research evidence, we offer an alternative set of
policies that can create more just and safe environments in U.S. public schools for students
of color, and ultimately for all students. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
Review of the Literature: The Relationship
between Violence and Schools
In recent years, consistent police violence has shaped our social context and resulted in
injury and death for people of color. Consider that Cleveland, Ohio, San Antonio, Texas,
Ferguson, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois have different demographics, histories, and public
school systems. Yet they have in common violence against young people of color at the hands
of city or school district police:
Tamir Rice, age 12.
Janissa Valdez, age 12.
Michael Brown, age 18.
Paul O’Neal, age 18.
Other names could be added to this list, with other cities, other genders, and other details,
pointing to a crisis that needs policy attention not just from the criminal justice system,
but also from education policy makers. Many of our existing policies are insufficient for
addressing systemic violence, however, and often result in more harm than good for youth
of color. Here we consider the ways that the violence within the system of public education
is inextricably bound up with the broader elements of violence in the social contexts within
which schools are embedded.14 The depiction of students and people of color as being partic–
ularly prone to violence is not only empirically wrong, it has also served to mask the degree
to which people of color are often the victims of violence and the targets of strict discipline
or policing tactics, which are applied in ways that magnify this victimization and dispropor–
tionately disadvantage people of color.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented the recent rise in incidents of racist hate
speech and violence, finding more than 700 incidents of “hateful harassment” in the ten
days following the 2016 presidential election.15 Although conservative education commenta–
tors16 have criticized educators for discussing this uptick in classrooms, arguing that teach–
ers are dramatically and unfairly lamenting the election of Donald Trump and unnecessarily
scaring children, educators should not ignore the numerous public examples of people at the
highest levels of public office committing and condoning acts of violence—against women,
immigrants, Muslims, Jews, “inner city” communities, people of color, LGBTQ people.
Racist and discriminatory perspectives have always been present, but perpetrators seem to
have been emboldened in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Physical and symbol–
ic violence against students is occurring within and outside of school, with students being
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disciplined harshly, assaulted by school officials, battered or murdered by police, threat–
ened with deportation, immigrant registries, or internment. In essence, students of color
are punished for the unjust social contexts in which they find themselves, or simply denied
resources and excluded from opportunities.17
Educators and some police departments are grappling with how to prevent and respond to
peer-to-peer violence in schools and communities. They are seeking ways that restore justice
rather than replicate harsh schooling policing tactics such as suspension, expulsion, racial
profiling, and arrests. At the same time, some advocates contend that efforts to respond
to students who commit acts of violence within school should limit students’ due process
rights, sometimes on the grounds that minors in school are not entitled to such rights.18 For
instance, in Missouri as of January 1, 2017, students caught fighting at school—regardless of
age—can be charged with a Class E felony and sent to a juvenile detention center.19 Children
of color are already more likely to be suspended, steered toward special education or alter–
native education, or kicked out of school for minor infractions or situations that escalate
when school police are called on to handle behavior issues.20 These so-called “zero-toler–
ance” policies may be intended to keep children safe, but the evidence suggests that they do
not improve student safety and are even counterproductive; they result in countless children
of color becoming unnecessarily caught up in the criminal justice system due to being ap–
plied disproportionately in urban schools.21
Critical Race Theory
As education policy researchers, we approach this brief with an assumption of the centrali–
ty of racism to the state and its embeddedness in state institutions like public schools. The
idea that racism is a central and ordinary feature of U.S. society is grounded in Critical Race
Theory (CRT), which describes how in educational settings with a predominance of students
of color, violence functions to uphold status quo power arrangements.22 Violent responses
by law enforcement rarely occur in and around schools with a majority of White students,
though research shows that illegal acts such as marijuana possession may be committed
at the same or higher frequency by Whites.23 Racism’s “ordinariness” suggests that from
slavery to contemporary times violence has been and will continue to be used by those in
positions of official power to suppress and intimidate communities of color. Moreover, the
U.S. public education system was established and developed within a sociopolitical context
shaped by colonization and slavery. This legacy of race-based oppression can be seen in
education policies old and new, such as racial and ethnic segregation, which prevent people
of color from accessing the social networks and social capital that sociologists have found
to be critical in economic and educational mobility; public school funding, which is tied to
property taxes, state politics, and reflects racially and socioeconomic discriminatory hous–
ing policies; standards, measurement, and accountability regimes that penalize segregated
schools for low scores on standardized tests despite the resource inequities they experience;
school sanctions and closures that are targeted at much higher rates to schools serving stu–
dents of color, thereby disrupting core institutions and neighborhoods; and “no excuses”
charter schools with overly strict discipline and behavioral norms enforced by high rates of
suspensions and expulsions, as discussed further below.
We rely on CRT, integrated with Moses’s notion of the social context of choice – i.e., the
environment or circumstances within which persons make choices about their lives – to
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frame our examination of the existing research knowledge on how educational inequalities
may exacerbate the unjust social contexts in which police regularly assault, shoot, and kill
unarmed people of color and in which schools mete out discipline disproportionately to
students of color.24 We examine how schools are implicated in the creation of the social
conditions, including policing and public policy, which lead to violence and tragedy. We
analyze law enforcement and education, individually and in cooperation with each other,
and how they are nested in a broader social context in which race and racial markers are
central. We examine the ways in which policing, in all its forms, has served America, and we
consider how the educational system implements its own form of policing through policies
and practices that unfairly target students of color. When combined, disparate policing and
modern educational policing traumatize historically marginalized communities. We argue
that public education must change so that young people of color have educational opportu–
nities and experiences that value who they are and the communities from which they come,
and expand and enrich their social contexts of choice. To achieve this shift, we recommend
that education policy refocus energies on providing equal educational opportunities for stu–
dents of color with a deeper understanding of their social contexts. More specifically, our
recommendations center on specific policies for which there exists evidence of their effec–
tiveness, but which are not common enough across the U.S. to begin to alter these patterns
in systemic ways. We suggest policies ranging from strengthening communication across
local agencies such as police and schools, to investments in curricula and activities that are
more grounded in socio-emotional development and the development of new pathways to
teaching for students of color.
Historical Perspectives on Policing People of Color
Policing, in the broad meaning of the word, is the process of maintaining control, order,
and discipline to secure peaceful societies.25 To understand the connections between the
public education system and persistent police violence against people of color in the U.S.,
we must first analyze the role of the police and policing. American policing existed before
public education. Policing existed even before the creation of constables, the predecessors
to modern-day police.26 In colonial America, the harshest form of policing was imposed
upon enslaved people, as slave owners and their overseers policed the enslaved person’s
body, mind, and spirit to maintain obedience and control.27 Policing the enslaved person’s
body kept what was considered a commodity in a physically controlled space and available
for production at will. Policing the enslaved person’s mind was considered mandatory for
keeping them docile and unquestioning of authority. Policing the enslaved person’s spirit
was required to subdue hopes of freedom. Combined, these policing activities defined both
who held the power and the boundaries of acceptable behavior by marginalized people.
Policing under slavery involved administering punishments that forced compliance. Whip–
ping, beatings, lynching, dismemberment, and other corporal punishments were regularly
administered to control enslaved people’s behavior and attitudes. There existed public and
private forms of policing practices in place, and there were important differences between
forms of punishment required by the law. Some states required the execution of slaves who
used violence against their enslavers, regardless of the wishes of slave owners. A peculiarity
of slavery and the law shaping it was that for some infractions trials were required, not to
protect the rights of the slave, but the property rights of their enslaver. Some disciplinary
actions were merely authorized by the law, but not required by it. For example, whippings
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by slave owners or their surrogates were allowed. “Lynching” was, by definition, a violation
of law, and the willful killing of slaves was mostly illegal, although “accidentally” whipping
a slave to death was permitted. Violence to enslaved bodies served as a form of punishment
to the slave who acted unacceptably, as well as a deterrence to other slaves.
This form of policing continued after Emancipation as Jim Crow laws and lynching served
as reminders to Black people about their second-class citizenship and how it relegated them
vulnerable to private and state-sponsored violence and surveillance. Alexander has argued
that the rise of mass incarceration, which she traces to the end of slavery, is a continuation
of the slave-era control over the lives of Black people aimed at framing Black people as a
permanent under-caste in American life.28 In the contemporary context, criminal justice
continues to operate under private and public oversight. For example, many of today’s pris–
ons have transitioned from public to private institutions. The Bureau of Justice Statistics
estimated in 2015 that for-profit prisons held 7% of state and 18% of federal prisoners.29
A disproportionate number of Black, Native American, Latinx, and undocumented immi–
grant prisoners30 are not only imprisoned, but also held in for-profit prisons.31 The two larg–
est for-profit prisons, Corrections Corporation of American and the GEO group, saw their
stocks increase by 100% after Donald Trump was elected, and Trump endorsed the use of
private prisons on the campaign trail.32
Recent Developments
The last several years have seen police killings of largely unarmed Black, Latinx, and Native
American people across the United States in the course of routine interactions. In response,
the public began discussing the connections between policing strategies and racism more
broadly and asking why people of color tend to be victims of more violent police interac–
tions. For example, “stop and frisk” and “broken windows” policies introduced as “preven–
tative,” “proactive” measures have resulted in the disproportionate stopping, searching, ar–
rest, and incarceration of people of color. These interactions generate significant resources
for police departments and municipal courts as accused offenders are ordered to pay fines
that send them into deeper poverty or interfere with their ability to maintain employment.
In Ferguson, Missouri, the site where Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, policing
resulted in an average of three arrest warrants and 1.5 court cases per household, according
to the legal advocacy organization Arch City Defenders.33 Not only do these stops frequently
result in higher arrest rates for people of color, some have resulted in injury and death. As
a result, children in places like Ferguson come to school with significant trauma of which
educators and policymakers are only beginning to be aware. While police shootings and
the over-policing of communities of color are not new, advances in and the spread of smart
phone technology and social media use have made these more visible.34 The killing of Mi–
chael Brown in Missouri, Philando Castile in Minnesota, and Freddie Gray in Maryland, for
example, triggered mass protests that were often met with more violence from police forces
intent on restoring “law and order.” It has proven difficult to arrest, indict, and successfully
prosecute police who mete out deadly violence, even with video evidence of the killings.35
Disturbing videos of these incidents within schools and involving children outside of school
provide visual evidence of the forms of discipline and policing disproportionately experi–
enced by Black children and children of color in schools that parents, communities, and
researchers have documented for some time. For example, in 2016, a video was taken sur–
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reptitiously by a staff member at a charter school run by Harlem Success Academies, a New
York City charter school management organization known for running “no excuses” schools
with strict discipline policies. The video depicted a White, female first grade teacher berat–
ing a Black girl for failing to grasp a mathematical concept, culminating in the teacher rip–
ping the child’s paper into pieces and sending her out of the circle, screaming for the placid
child to calm down.36 In another video, which emerged from a Columbia, South Carolina
school in 2015, a school resource officer, whom students of color had earlier identified as
unfairly singling them out for discipline, body-slammed a Black high school student in her
desk for failing to leave the classroom when told.37 These and other high-profile incidents
have drawn attention to the connection between social and educational policies that target
students of color for police violence, school discipline, and race-based inequality.
At times, schools define acceptable behaviors, hierarchies, and attitudes by incorporating
policing practices, consciously or otherwise. Black and brown children are placed at a dis–
proportionately low rate in programs like Gifted and Talented or International Baccalaure–
ate, which tend to lead toward academic advancement38 and more likely to be suspended or
expelled.39 This trend reinforces historic hierarchies, forms of control, and disenfranchise–
ment. Moreover, those in power often meet reforms to the discriminatory system with swift
and vitriolic attacks.40 For a child receiving the ultimate educational punishment, expulsion
is a close relative to imprisonment. If today’s prison system is the “New Jim Crow,”41 then
many public education systems, by replicating the targeting of students of color, treating
them as dangerous and in need of intervention, and punishing them at much higher rates
than their White and Asian counterparts, provide a preparatory school that, from an early
age, normalizes mass incarceration by race.
Data show that Black children’s differential experience with school discipline begins in pre–
school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, for example:
Black children represent 18% of preschool enrollment, but 48% of preschool
children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension; in comparison,
White students represent 43% of preschool enrollment but 26% of preschool
children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.42
According to this report, Black children are suspended and expelled at three times the rate
of White students. Black students are much more likely to be referred to law enforcement or
to be arrested at school, and Black students with disabilities are more likely to be physically
restrained. Both Black boys and girls receive harsher treatment for relatively minor infrac–
tions that are subjective in nature and historically laden with racist underpinnings. These
include the perception of teachers that Black students are “loud,” “defiant,” or “danger–
ous.”43 Importantly, research on the experiences of Black and Latina girls shows that those
who experience school discipline interventions such as in- and out-of-school suspension or
specialized classes for persistent infractions are themselves victims of emotional and sexual
violence.44 While it has been common to frame school violence as perpetrated by youth of
color or meted out against youth of color in cities, high-profile examples demonstrate that
unequal patterns of school discipline and state violence persist across geospatial settings
and include cities, suburbs, and rural areas.45 Under President Obama, the Office of Civ–
il Rights within the Department of Education, concerned about these patterns, partnered
with localities in collaboration with the Supportive School Discipline Initiative to encourage
more just disciplinary approaches across the United States.46
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Law and Punishment
Once society accepts that policing is necessary, then it follows that society must also accept
that punishment is required. Once punishment is acceptable, the only issue remaining is its
degree. This, in part, helps legitimize zero tolerance and three strikes policies. The faster
society accepts using tools like zero tolerance and three strikes, the easier implementation
occurs at all levels, whether focused on children or adults.47 It is far easier to define an act
as acceptable if it can be portrayed as an improvement, as progress.48 The escalation of pun–
ishments in public education becomes more visible when one considers that at one time, no
law allowed for the expulsion of a student.49 More revealing is that, for some states, the laws
permitting expulsion were created during the time when public schools were adapting to the
U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and Congress’s negotiations
over the Civil Rights Act. The de jure ability to expel and suspend students legitimized con–
trol over Black juvenile bodies at the very historical moment when the state was removing
barriers to school integration, thereby maintaining the perception of Black children and oth–
er children of color as permanently dangerous and in need of state intervention, especially
when proximal to white children.50
As policing schools increased, police became seen as experts and authorities. Many school
systems talk and write as much about controlling their students as educating them.51 With
this concern foremost, school systems yield authority to the experts in controlling popula–
tions: the police, now often redesignated “school resource officers.” For many jurisdictions,
this means that police determine who is dangerous, who should be watched, and who should
be separated while inside public schools. Once a child is so identified, such a label becomes
inescapable, following them from middle school to high school to adulthood.
From “In the School” to “In the Street”
There is no reason to expect the policing of Black and Brown children to look different in
a school setting than it does outside — except, perhaps, that in school there may be more
witnesses.52 Although the concept of checks and balances is fundamental to the distribution
of power within the American government, it has been far less applicable for day-to-day po–
licing, which is largely unchecked.
Recently, the Black Lives Matter (or #BLM) movement has attempted to become the “in the
streets” check on police power. #BLM grounds itself in the history articulated above. From
slavery to modernity, much of America has treated Black and Brown bodies as disposable.
In the 20th century, the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others
fought, in part, to protect Black and Brown bodies from violence inflicted by the state. Just
as that group stood on the shoulders of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du
Bois, and many others, #BLM looks for ways to bring their work forward. And, as the 1960s
Civil Rights Movement gained traction from media reports distributed throughout America
by a relatively new technology, television, #BLM is using social media like Facebook, Twit–
ter, and Instagram to convey the facts and images of racial inequities not only throughout
America, but to the entire world.
The Black Lives Matter Movement has helped to focus attention on the crisis in state-spon–
sored violence against Black people. In its 2016 platform, the BLM collective identified a
number of institutions and processes that could help to create more positive interactions
between Black people and police. These included securing economic justice through rep–
arations, redistribution of resources and opportunity, eliminating for-profit prisons, and
community control over education and local institutions. These activists focus on the inter–
connections between educational and other social policy, arguing that there is a symbiotic
relationship between police violence and existing policies governing housing, labor, and
civic participation. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
This platform reflects what scholars have determined: the intimate connections between
state-sponsored segregation and discrimination in housing, labor, transportation, and edu–
cation policies, and how these connections manifest in the form of school discipline and po–
licing that disproportionately fall on students and families of color. These dynamics are not
new. Historians, sociologists, economists, and policy scholars have documented how racial–
ly codified policies contributed to contemporary patterns of racial exclusion that provoke/
give rise to the uprisings that emerge to protest them. Uprisings emerged across the United
States in the mid-1960s in response to frustration with persistent racialized police violence,
prompting the Kerner Commission to investigate and report on the causes of urban unrest.
For example, as explained by Rothstein:
When the Kerner Commission blamed “white society” and “white institutions,” it
employed euphemisms to avoid naming the culprits everyone knew at the time.
It was not a vague white society that created ghettos but government—federal,
state, and local—that employed explicitly racial laws, policies, and regulations
to ensure that black Americans would live impoverished, and separately from
whites. Baltimore’s ghetto was not created by private discrimination, income
differences, personal preferences, or demographic trends, but by purposeful ac–
tion of government in violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amend–
ments.53
Unjust Social Contexts and Current Education Policy: How Efforts
to Increase School Choice and Accountability Miss the Mark
We have provided much detail about how school discipline policies mirror larger issues
around violence in our communities, but there are other important ways to think about
violence as more closely linked to the unjust social contexts and current educational policy
strategies that ignore these constrained contexts. The populations of schools in the U.S. are
becoming/increasingly more diverse, with students of color now the majority in California,
for example. Nevertheless, American students are deeply segregated and stratified by race,
poverty, and language — and in some cases have become more segregated than at any point
in recent history.54 The average Black and Latinx student attends a school that has more than
75% students of color, and nearly half of these students attend schools with poverty rates
over 80% (compared with fewer than five percent of White students).55 In addition, White
students remain the population most segregated from other racial groups.56
Because students are being taught in very segregated learning environments, both within
and across district boundaries, district leaders and state or federal policymakers seeking to
disrupt deepening inequities face unique challenges.57 These segregated schooling contexts
also mean that disciplinary and punishment policies are marked by race, for example in the
use of metal detectors and police officers in schools primarily serving students of color but
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not in predominantly White schools, though discrimination does occur in desegregated con–
texts as well in other forms.58
These trends are linked to broader demographic shifts and the policies that facilitated them.
Since the 1920s, White people moved steadily out of cities and into new suburban commu–
nities with the help of both federal policy and private industry (including the real estate
and banking industries), enabling them to separate themselves – physically and politically
– from the city core.59 State laws facilitated this movement by permitting the incorporation
of new communities into independent municipalities and school districts.60 These demo–
graphic patterns actively reproduced inequality through their effects on the distribution of
opportunity and resources, separating people of color from political and social power.61 For
example, consider Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, which came into existence due to several
key forces in St. Louis. These include, according to Gordon, disinvestment and decline in
housing stock, problematic governance, racial wealth disparities, and redevelopment poli–
cies that negatively impacted Black neighborhoods. Black residents with lower wealth ended
up in Ferguson, where the unjust dynamics of St. Louis were replicated.62
As Holme and Finnigan point out, local govern–
mental boundaries perpetuate inequality by cre–
ating competition for scarce resources between
communities in one metropolitan area.63 As a re–
sult, affluent towns contain expensive property,
strong tax bases, and few poor residents, while
low-income suburbs and cities contain inexpen–
sive properties, low tax bases, and large concen–
trations of families needing assistance.64 These
divisions can therefore preserve segregation and inequality even after the explicit racist laws
and policies of the past have been dismantled.65 Affluent suburbs, using exclusionary zoning
policies that allowed them to zone out more affordable housing and housing discrimination,
were able to accrue and protect a fiscal advantage over time.66
Federal and state policies have largely ignored these deepening inequalities and their ef–
fect on school performance. Instead, as Finnigan, Holme, and Sanchez argue, reformers
have misdiagnosed the academic crises facing segregated, high-poverty districts, instituting
policies that place the blame for failure mostly on teachers, schools and school districts.
This includes “accountability” policies that demand improvement and threaten punishment,
and market-based reforms, such as charter schools, that seek to spur improvement through
competition. Education and School Law Order Discussion.For some, such reforms promise that the boundaries typically impeding school
desegregation will be eradicated since charter schools can draw their student enrollments
across district boundaries.
Researchers, however, have consistently found that, overall, charter schools have not lived
up to their promise in terms of providing students access to better schools.67 And with de–
segregation considerations other civil rights enforcement largely absent from market-ori–
ented school choice policies, whether charter, voucher, or open-enrollment policies, they
tend to exacerbate rather than reduce segregation. Moreover, The Civil Rights Project at
UCLA found that hyper-segregated charter schools serving predominantly Black and Latinx
students had out of school suspension rates at more than 25% of the student body, and that
hundreds of charter schools suspended 50% of their special education populations.68 In these
ways, choice, discipline, and segregation intersect. The failure to recognize in formulating
Researchers, however, have
consistently found that,
overall, charter schools have
not lived up to their promise
in terms of providing students
access to better schools.
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educational policy how housing segregation (and consequent school segregation) contrib–
utes to limited social contexts, declining enrollment, fiscal distress, and low performance
has meant that urban and inner-ring suburban school systems have faced serious challenges
and had serious sanctions imposed on them, while affluent suburbs have remained protect–
ed, praised, and even financially rewarded. As Shedd found in her study of Chicago youth,
students of color in desegregated environments developed a heightened awareness of racial
injustice when they saw how unfairly they were treated, while students of color in segregat–
ed environments came to expect unjust policing and school discipline policies as normal.
While neither of these experiences results in justice, students in desegregated schools were
able to understand that what they experienced from police and school was not normal and
not fair. Accountability and school choice policies similarly have a differentiated effect on
students according to the race and socioeconomic makeup of the schools in which they are
implemented.
Compounding Unjust Social Contexts through Educational Policy
Layered on top of these pervasive patterns of violence, segregation, and inequality exists a
system of education policies that has compounded these patterns by promoting practices
and programs that further violate communities of color inside of schools. These policies
place blame on families, students, communities, teachers, and schools—not on the broader
societal structures that maintain racial and socioeconomic inequalities. As described below,
the reforms premised on this narrow view of responsibility are ineffective and even counter–
productive precisely because they do not address schools’ powerful contextual conditions.
Policymakers at federal, state, and district levels have steadily expanded high-stakes testing
policies that research shows function more to punish communities of color than to support
them. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
Of course, these policies did not begin in the 1980s. Test-driven policies have been around
since at least the 1800s, when eugenicists advanced the belief that racial groups of partic–
ular European descent were superior to those from Africa and other regions in terms of
intellect and overall genetic composition.69 After the decline of eugenics, efforts to measure,
categorize, and confirm a racial hierarchy through purported scientific methods persisted.70
By the early 1900s psychologists developed intelligence tests whose explicit purpose was to
identify those considered to have low intelligence in order to differentiate their educational
and career opportunities.71 Eugenicists argued that disparities in test scores between racial
groups reflect innate biological differences, not environmental factors or flaws in the tests
themselves. These debates continue to the present day. Herrnstein and Murray’s notorious
1994 book, The Bell Curve, represents one of the most influential contemporary arguments
for racial differences in intelligence.72
Today, debates over the causes of the racial achievement gap and cures for it continue to
produce policies that are centered on test-based notions of merit. This framing rejects pol–
icies designed to address the contextual and historical conditions that empirical research
has proven are powerful predictors of the test performance of different racial groups.73 In
fact, over the past two decades policymakers at federal and local levels have built entire sys–
tems of standardized-test-driven reforms that are guided by unsupported, behaviorist the–
ories of extrinsic motivation, and whose cornerstones are punishments and rewards. These
theories, and the policies that stem from them, are reinforced by free-market ideologies
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that ignore a large body of social science research addressing the causes and effects of ed–
ucational inequality.74 The policies have effectively reproduced the status quo in terms of
test performance and in terms of beliefs about differences in innate ability that have been
further normalized in discussions of racial disparities among schools and communities.
Emboldened by early experiments by states and districts with high-stakes testing and ac–
countability policies,75 federal lawmakers introduced a collection of standardized-test-driv–
en reforms through the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top program, and most
recently through the Every Student Succeeds Act. NCLB in particular sought to turn around
consistently low-scoring schools’ performance by “reconstituting” their staff, that is, by lay–
ing off their current teachers, para-professionals, and administrators, converting traditional
public schools to charter schools, reassigning the management of schools to an outside au–
thority such as the state or a private management company, and even closing entire schools.
Undergirding these policies is an assumption that strong external threats motivate teachers,
principals and students to improve, that standardized test results are reliable, valid mea–
sures of student learning, that meaningful, sustainable changes in instruction and staffing
can be spurred by competition, and that test-based accountability reforms can effectively
interrupt and reverse heavily entrenched patterns of low test performance. In other words,
these reforms are based on the assumption that the primary barrier to success in the past
was teachers’, administrators’, and staff members’ lack of motivation and incentive, and
that the best forms of motivation and incentive are external threats and money.76 These
school policies were never designed to address the insidious effects of contextual factors
such as schools’ socioeconomic and racial isolation and disparities in financial or other out-
of-school resources. In essence, they exacerbate the forms of violence discussed earlier in
this brief because they further subject communities of color to unwarranted punishments. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
Proponents of test-based and market-based policies
contend that they offer the best mechanisms for
improving teacher quality and student outcomes.77
They claim that the reforms can effectively narrow
test-score gaps along lines of race and class and ef–
ficiently improve overall student achievement. Dramatically altering a school’s performance
trajectory, they reason, requires policymakers and educational leaders to implement intense
staffing and management changes.78 The media often describes these reforms as bold new
innovative approaches to changing the behaviors of unmotivated educators or students. Yet
districts and states have been experimenting with most of these reforms since before the No
Child Left Behind Act of 2001, so a sizeable body of rigorous research evidence exists about their
outcomes, including their unintended consequences.79 Multiple high-quality research studies
and evaluations confirm that each iteration of these test-driven, “no excuses” policies have
disproportionately affected students of color, and that these effects have been deleterious.
Researchers consistently document how the percentages of African American and Latinx
students and teachers in schools targeted for these reforms are higher than their respective
districts’ overall populations. In Chicago, researchers found that district and city officials
employed school closures as part of larger plans to displace African American communities,
privatize public schools, and gentrify historically African American neighborhoods.81 88%
of the students in the 54 Chicago Public Schools’ schools that were closed, phased out, or
“turned around” through mass layoffs were African American, compared to the district’s
overall African American enrollment of 43%. At the same time that Chicago’s school closures
These school policies further subject communities of color to unwarranted punishments
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displaced more than 12,700 students, almost all of whom live in high-poverty, predominant–
ly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, it has also opened more than 15 charter schools.82 The
school closings were concentrated in areas undergoing gentrification.
Similar patterns have been documented in New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washing–
ton D.C., Oakland, Newark, and other cities.83 Students of color, often those from high-pov–
erty backgrounds, experience closures of their schools at higher rates than do their White
counterparts from higher wealth backgrounds. These reforms have continued in the face
of evidence that school closures and charter schools do not consistently result in students
attending better schools.84
Scholars who have investigated the effects of turnaround-driven layoffs and charter conver–
sions or expansions found that they decreased the representation of teachers of color.85 In
Chicago Public Schools, for instance, researchers found that reforms over the last two de–
cades, most of which included turnaround-style interventions based on mass layoffs, made
teacher workforces more likely to be White, younger, less experienced, and more likely to
possess only provisional certification, than the teachers employed at the schools prior to the
reforms.86
According to the final, longitudinal evaluation of the federal School Improvement Grant
program (SIG), which incentivized states to implement these types of changes in exchange
for large temporary grants, the reforms were found to have had little to no significant im–
pacts on math or reading test scores across all grades, on high school graduation rates, or on
college enrollment.87 Thus, in addition to their disruptive effects on schools and students,
they have also proven to be minimally or not at all effective at improving student outcomes.
The punitive policies were ineffective because they were not designed to address the root
causes of consistently low school performance – the unjust social contexts in which they
were implemented. Instead, the policies continued to lead to acts of violence, usually against
communities of color, in the form of heavy-handed penalties for test outcomes that are part–
ly shaped by the economic and political conditions outside of schools – factors beyond the
control of teachers, students, and families. Education and School Law Order Discussion.
From a legal perspective, these types of reforms have motivated concerned educators, par–
ents, community members, and community organizers to file Title VI and Title VII com–
plaints in more than 22 metropolitan centers where they have been implemented.88 Al–
though the specifics of each civil rights complaint vary based on the unique conditions in
each setting, the most common complaints include the claim that reforms such as school
turnarounds or closures disproportionately and adversely affect African American and Lat–
inx students. The reforms, plaintiffs contend, degrade either the quality of the educational
opportunities available to their students or the employment opportunities for educators.
Specifically, they contend that the reforms violate Titles VI or VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 in that they have the effect of discriminating against African Americans and Latinos by
disproportionately impacting high numbers of racial minorities or by disproportionately re–
ducing the access of students of color to adequate opportunities for teaching and learning.89
Against this backdrop, many students of color make important life choices within a circum–
scribed “social context of choice.”90 A favorable context of choice would consist of a social
environment that helps enrich and expand young people’s capacities to learn, envision their
life possibilities, and meaningfully choose among good options.91 From a structural perspec–
tive, while individuals in unfavorable circumstances can make certain choices, those choices
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are shaped by the social context within which they are choosing.92 Race is central to the
social context of choice. This means that, although persons may be making “free” choices, if
they are choosing from among a limited range of options, these choices may be empty ones.93
For example, in their study of Black and Latino male high school students, Howard et al.
found that narrow definitions of success at school consistently excluded those students and
limited their options, even though they were seen as successful within their communities.94
Similarly, how teachers perceive their students may affect how they perceive the behavior
and actions of students of color. Teachers of color generally have more positive views of
their students of color, with fewer students of color in their classes suspended from school.95
Thus, when making the claim that people are ultimately responsible for their choices, it is
important to acknowledge that such choices are shaped (limited or expanded) by the social
circumstances under which they learn about life’s possibilities.
Indeed, for young people of color operating within constrained social contexts of choice,
racist and oppressive social structures often limit what they imagine to be possible for their
education and for their lives.96 The nature of the choice makes a difference. Individuals are
certainly responsible for their choices, but an unjust situation arises when rampant social
inequalities shape the contexts within which young people grow up. For example, when stu–
dents of color experience violence, concentrated poverty, education policies that exacerbate
White supremacy, and segregated and inadequate public schools, unjust contexts and struc–
tures are (re)constituted.
Despite decades of social science research that points to the pervasive effects of poverty and
the impact of racial and economic segregation on academic performance,97 these policies
focus exclusively on within-school factors to improve achievement. They do not address the
community conditions surrounding struggling schools.98 In their narrow focus on teacher-
and school-based accountability for test results, they minimize attention to students’ social,
emotional, mental, and physical health— factors that determine students’ academic and life
outcomes to a much greater degree than the presence of high-stakes sanctions. The result is a collection of policies that perpetuate racial and ethnic inequalities. Education and School Law Order Discussion.