Understanding the antecedents of the 'school-to-jail' link: the relationship between race and school discipline.

• Author: Rocque, Michael

1. INTRODUCTION

   By virtually any measure, African-American youth fare worse in school than whites. For example, black students show less interest and effort in school activities than whites and have lower grades. They are more likely to be held back, more likely to be in lower academic tracks, more likely to be in special education, more likely to drop out before graduating, and less likely to go to college. (1) In addition, compared with whites, blacks have higher rates of crime and incarceration as adolescents and young adults. (2) These are not unrelated facts. For example, Lochner and Moretti concluded that "schooling reduces criminal activity," (3) and the connection between black academic failure and crime has been the subject of much research and debate. (4)

   Research is increasingly beginning to examine the connections between school failure and later contact with the criminal justice system for minorities. Various explanations for this "school-to-jail" (which some have deemed the "school-to-prison pipeline") trajectory for blacks have been offered. (5) Among these are accounts noting racial differences in socioeconomic background, (6) the family life of black children, including their lack of cultural capital, (7) and the existence of an oppositional subculture and identity among young blacks, wherein academic success is dismissed and ridiculed as being "too white." (8) Another possibility is that the school itself is partially to blame for the academic problems of black students, because it creates a hostile learning environment, which may be formed very early in children's educational lives--in elementary school. In other words, school disengagement and the academic troubles of young blacks could be due to feelings of racial hostility or disparate treatment by teachers, particularly disciplinary treatment, (9) and it is this racial hostility that in part leads students to disengage from school and ultimately find crime more economically attractive than legitimate labor. These explanations would theoretically link school disengagement and later involvement in the criminal justice system by a common theme of hostility toward white authority, which has its origin in the school and the coercive response of the school in reacting to this conflict with punishment. Ferguson has expressed this possibility perhaps most clearly in her account of life inside one West Coast elementary school:

   What I observed at Rosa Parks during more than three years of fieldwork in the school, heard from the boy himself and his teachers, from his teachers, from his mother, made it clear that just as children were tracked into futures as doctors, scientists, engineers, word processors, and fast-food workers, there were also tracks for some children, predominately African American and male, that led to prison. This book tells the story of the making of these bad boys, not by members of the criminal justice system on street comers, or in shopping malls, or video arcades, but in school and by school, through punishment. (10) Ferguson's thesis in her qualitative work and the thesis of our own work, presented here quantitatively, is that because of a conflict of racial cultures and the existence of stereotypes, black youth are singled out for punishment in school, independent of their actual behavior. While we do not test the entire sequelae in this Article, we argue that this phenomenon is part of what begins the process of school disengagement for minority youth, which ultimately will land them in jail in disproportionate numbers.

   Psychological research has indicated that youths are likely to disengage from school and academic pursuits if they perceive negative information about themselves or their racial group within the school environment. Steele, for example, has argued that when students perceive that racial stereotypes are being employed by teachers, they are more likely to perform poorly, which eventually leads them to detach themselves from the educational process. (11) One particularly virulent outcome of racial stereotyping is racial discrimination. (12) Ogbu has called this the "Pygmalion" problem; (13) white expectations of blacks are internalized, leading to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. A stereotype by teachers that black students are academically deficient and hostile to the teachers' goals could easily lead teachers to see black students as "troublemakers" or menaces. (14) With this mindset, teachers may respond more punitively to the conduct of black students than toward identical behavior by white students. An appeal to a modified version of racial threat theory provides one possible reason for this disparate treatment in the school. While racial threat theory has traditionally implied that racial minorities pose a political and economic threat to whites, it is reasonable to also expect that whites will resort to more coercive means when minorities pose a cultural threat. Both because minority students are less likely to buy into a predominately white school culture with its emphasis on academic achievement and at least the appearance of docility (due to their own cultural values that emphasize detachment and aloofness) and because teachers are likely to believe that minority youth do not buy into white school culture (because of stereotypes), teachers in the school are more likely to resort to formal punishment against minority children than against their white counterparts. This is particularly true when minorities threaten the status of white teachers in the school. In Ferguson's words, "school labeling practices and the exercise of rules operate as part of a hidden curriculum to marginalize and isolate black male youth in disciplinary spaces and brand them as criminally inclined." (15)

   This racial stereotyping and subsequent disparate treatment has implications for minority students. There is evidence that racial discrimination directed against black students is related to a host of negative developmental consequences, including diminished academic success and disengagement from school. (16) This educational disengagement in turn would make it difficult for black youth to secure legitimate employment, making a life of crime more attractive or more convenient--what we call the school-to-jail link. (17)

   Much of this research on racial discrimination in school is based upon analyses that fail to control for important variables, particularly student behavior, or have failed to simultaneously consider both individual student-and school-level factors, both of which are important in explaining disciplinary practices. (18) Thus, most previous work has been unable to clarify why racial disparity exists with respect to school discipline, regardless of the measures used, perhaps jumping to discrimination-oriented conclusions. In this Article, we hope to contribute to this literature by examining the perhaps more inferentially difficult question as to whether or not teachers actually do discriminate against black students in the imposition of school discipline, and whether any disparate treatment is manifested at a more aggregate level and at a relatively young age (elementary school). We are thus able to address only the first part or one of the antecedents of the school-to-jail link. However, we argue that this is likely to be the most important component of the process--to the extent that the school-to-jail link can be addressed early on, the chances for dissolving the link might increase.

   With data from a large number of elementary students who attended different schools within a large school district, we try to determine whether teachers are more likely to discipline black students after taking into account other possible contributory factors, including their conduct, their performance in school, and their attitudes or demeanor. By focusing on the treatment of elementary school students, we push back the window to the early years of school experience. This is a period of developmental importance, with implications for the entire life course. School scholars have long noted that racial differences in school performance, even such later-appearing events as dropping out of school, appear very early in the educational lives of students, as early as the first grade. (19) Discriminatory treatment by teachers in the early elementary school years, as students are getting introduced to the school context, may have particularly important developmental consequences later in life. (20)

   In addition to analyzing the relationship between race and school discipline at the individual level, we ask whether the racial composition of the school's student body is related to the use of disciplinary measures by teachers. This is an explicit attempt to model the contextual effect on individual outcomes. We try, therefore, to get some understanding of the school racial climate, or the cultural context within which individual teacher-to-student relationships occur--a cultural climate that is surely racially influenced. Racial threat theory has long argued that when the proportion of the black population increases beyond a particular threshold within a given environment, the white population feels threatened by the black population, especially if the white group views minorities as economic or political threats. (21) Whites who perceive blacks as a threat to their position of dominance are hypothesized by racial threat theory to respond to the perceived menace with the use of punitive legal policies. This argument can easily be extended to the school context to the extent that it is possible for racial minorities to constitute a cultural threat to whites, as well as a political and economic threat. (22) For example, school discipline can be understood within the context of racial threat theory because teachers (especially white teachers), with their culture of academic success and need for control over the school...