Ignorance and bigotry are insidious traits that manifest themselves in varying scales of severity, ostentatious in obvious circumstances but with the ability to trickle down our institutions and have a precocious impact on those whom these perceptions are directed towards. Because these traits have been ubiquitous for centuries in the United States, even the rapid advancement of education and social liberalization have failed in deracinating the roots of mischaracterizations and racism deeply embedded in the soil of our nation and its institutions. Whether consciously aware of it or not, some people harbor views and attitudes about groups of people that have an undue influence on how they treat and react to them. African Americans are at the receiving end of much blatant racism and ignorance, but are furthermore disenfranchised by the systemic and institutionalized racism that affects how they are treated in school and beyond, having a destabilizing impact on their future success. This all finds its origin in schools, where African American youth receive punishment, such as expulsion and suspension, at rates and severities much higher than those of Caucasian students. While it is possible to challenge these harmful stereotypes to empower black youth and bolster their success, as exemplified by Oakland Tech High School’s “African-American Male Achievement Manhood Program,” most schools have not implemented programs to do so, resulting in achievement gaps in areas such as graduation rates and college readiness, and creating a dichotomy between black and white students.
Racial disparities in discipline and the social construction of “good” or “bad” students is an area that should be of great concern because they contribute to the racial achievement gap.
This labeling and ostracizing makes school employees more critical of certain students, expecting them to engage in certain adverse behaviors, underperform in school, and consider them deserving of more intense punishment in comparison to students labeled as “good.” As Gillespie and Losen point out, suspensions and expulsions hold significance because they are some of the “leading indicators of whether a child will drop out of school” and increase a student’s risk of being incarcerated in the future (2012: 6). This issue should be at the cynosure of research regarding achievement gaps because the treatment black students receive often retards their success academically, and it is known that a lacking education makes succeeding in careers difficult or impossible, leaving many African American people in a feedback loop where they can not gain financial stability or be upwardly mobile. In order to understand the multilevel impact harsher treatment of African American youth in school has, we must comprehend and observe how and why they receive such treatment in the school system. Consequently, my research question asks why and how teachers and employees in the school system punish black students more severely and at a rate higher than of white students. By observing the student-teacher interactions Oakland Technical High School, a school with a heterogenous racial composition, we hope to observe the behaviors of children in the classroom setting and whether the behavior is reprimanded differently on a qualitative level.
Literature review
While there has been a plethora of information regarding the achievement gap and education gap between black and white students, there is finite research regarding the difference of treatment and punishment between the two groups at the grassroots level and the psychological processes that contribute to those disparities. Punishment in schools is important to evaluate because the achievement and academic gaps observed between the racial groups are manifested from the categories black children are placed in, the detrimental admonishment they receive, and the stereotypes they are forced to live up to because white students are given an unfair advantage and more tolerance to their behavior in the classroom, giving them more opportunities to develop and excel in comparison to their African American counterparts. This question is important to address because it contradicts the quixotic notion that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, whereas in reality, institutions have the power to “create, shape, and regulate social identities” and create roadblocks for the success of some while being the foundation of success for others (Ferguson 2001). Through her anecdotes and fieldwork, Ferguson observes and analyzes the social relationships, day-to-day practices, behavior, and beliefs that give way to a pattern of black students, especially males, being disproportionately sent to “jailhouses and dungeons” due to racial and gender stereotypes (2001: 7). School faculty, she observed, used the “contemporary discourses about black masculinity” to identify “bad boys” and the standards by which “good kids” adhered to followed the so-called morality of society (41).
An argument that challenges this is that of repetitive negative behavior and the rationality of teachers trying to curb it. According to Reyna and Weiner, teacher-student relationships rarely involve just a single encounter and teachers may respond most negatively to students after they have had more than one negative student encounters from which they can distinguish a pattern (2001). They go on to argue that when a chronically, not spontaneously, fails to reach teachers’ expectations, then those teachers are more likely to punish them and with retribution (2001). However, some researchers and sociologists argue that instructors may be particularly likely to reprimand a Black student misbehaving over time more than they would a White student due to the racial stereotype of Black students as troublemakers in school contexts and teachers’ perceptions of Black students as having a longer and more problematic history of misbehaving, having a more negative demeanor, and earning lower grades than that of their White counterparts (Neal, McCray, Webb-Johnson, & Bridgest, 2003). Combining these two arguments, because of the perception of Black students as troublemakers, multiple transgressions over time by Black students stand out as a pattern for bad behavior more often than for White students. Black students are more likely to be written off quicker; seen as “prone to make trouble” as a characteristic of their personality.
Some researchers question if Black students are given the same protections of childhood as their peers. Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, and Jackson argue that Black boys are viewed as less “childlike,” and more “adult” than their White counterparts (2014). They go on to detail how the characteristics people associate with childhood are applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to Caucasian boys and that these trends would be compounded in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes, such as police encounters (2014). Black boys are perceived as being more responsible for their actions, more appropriate targets for police violence, viewed as older and less innocent, and they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Implicit and explicit bias are to blame, they argue, even in school settings where teachers should be tasked with treating every student equally to ensure an equal distribution of knowledge and education, or atleast the attempt to do so. Some teachers and people in general view young Black people as older than what they are and place more responsibility on them for their actions than they would a White child. Their actions and childishness are perceived as a threat that must be corrected (2014).
Tyree Robinson analyzes both the frequency and intensity of punishment inner-city African American males endure in school in comparison to their White counterparts. By incorporating and analyzing data and studies, Robinson synthesizes statistics and reports to provide statistically significant evidence to assert that race plays an important factor in the characterization of a student as “good” or “bad,” but also details the patterns that are often seen as a result, with emphasis on more severe punishment working as a detriment to the behavior and success of certain students whose behavior is criminalized and punished while similar behavior of students of different races are written off and treated with less disdain and corrective action (2017).
Some researchers argue that we cannot make the assumption that the discipline gap is due to overt racism. A phenomenon called “implicit bias” is to be blamed, Smith argues, where instructors show unconscious partiality to White students, resulting in harsher discipline for black students (2015). He goes on to argue that studies and research show that the implicit bias is just as likely to come from a Black teacher as a White one. In Ferguson’s book “Bad Boys,” an African American adult at Rosa Parks Elementary school pointed to a 10 year-old black boy in baggy pants and a sweatshirt and said he had “a jail-cell with his name on it” (2001). However, some argue that black teachers discipline black students less frequently and less severely than white teachers. According to Lindsay and Hart, when a black male student has a black female teacher, his chances of being removed from school for a disciplinary infraction drop by 15 percent and drop 18 percent when paired with a black male educator and go on to detail that black students who were taught by black teachers achieve at higher levels academically (2017).
Research methodology
From the aforementioned research and analysis, many factors contribute to the dealing out of harsher punishment to Black students. I argue that negative racial stereotypes associated with Black students increase the likelihood that teachers will view transgressions over time as a problematic pattern and initial transgressions often shape how following infractions are perceived by the teacher, making them more concerned with the student and as a result, dealing out harsher discipline and punishment. Very little research has been conducted about how teachers are less tolerant to recurring negative behavior when Black students engage in it than when White students do. Implicit bias and racial stereotypes of black students being troublemakers and viewing their negative behavior as more problematic and serious because of their race results in less tolerance for such behavior and more frequent and harsher discipline for Black students. In my research at Oakland Technical High School, I will be observing the reaction of teachers to negative behavior portrayed by both Black and White students and the severity and frequency of punishment as this behavior continues.
To successfully gain insight and data that is statistically significant, I will spend one year at Oakland Tech (starting at the beginning of a new school year) to determine, over time, if teachers are reprimanding Black students more harshly and more frequently than White students. We want to examine the path of punishment between the two racial groups; we want to see if teachers see isolated, repeated negative behavior and transgressions as more of a problem and more of a threat if portrayed by a Black student rather than a White student. In my fieldwork, I will first observe the behaviors of students. I will be initially present at the start of the new school year to accurately follow the sequence of punishments and will observe one class and one teacher to see their different approaches to disciplining their students. Oakland Tech has much racial variety, so I will only look at Black and White students to narrow my research. I will take a random sample of 10 Black students and 10 White students from the class to give Black and White students an equal chance to be chosen, limiting researcher bias. If a person in the study were to misbehave, I would record the nature of the infraction and the reaction from the teacher to the initial transgression. I would then monitor all student-teacher relations from that part onward to document the rise of punishment with continuing negative behavior to see if teachers are more likely to reprimand Black students (through expulsions, suspensions, trips to detention, etc.) more often and with tougher consequences than their White counterparts. I will also observe how students interact with their peers, and if they are more likely to act a certain way because of their peers’ expectations of them. As we learned in the aforementioned research, group dynamics and social expectations, such as black masculinity, as well as perceptions of Black students in a stereotypical fashion by school faculty all contribute to the higher rate of suspensions, expulsions, detentions, and other disciplinary actions as well as a decrease of academic achievement, graduation rates, and college attendance rates. By observing these students, who are likely to share similar behavior due to social dynamics and proximity, I will be able to see if there is a difference for similar transgressions on the basis of race.
Conclusion
While school disciplinary policies can affect all students for all their lives, Black students are three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their White counterparts, according to a 2012 report from the Department of Education. There is sufficient evidence to conclude that African American students receive punishment, such as expulsion and suspension, at rates much higher than those of Caucasian students and that these punishments can increase their likelihood to get expelled or suspended more often, causing them to fall behind on their academic work and ultimately hindering their success in school and beyond. Consequences of these severe punishments include the discouragement of finishing high school or pursuing higher education, and even leading to involvement in illicit activities, especially in the inner cities, that may lead to incarceration. In the United States, studies of thousands of schools utilizing correlation have shown that instructors are inclined to disproportionately discipline students as a function of race (Skiba et al. 2002). However, in my research, I hope to be among the first to really delve into the causal impact of race on disciplinary practices in addition to emphasizing the psychological mechanisms and phenomenons that are the trigger.