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I'm John Quinhill and this is The Weeds.
When you're a black person living in America, it can feel like discrimination is lurking
at every turn.
And if I'm honest, when I was younger, there were times that I thought this creeping
feeling was paranoia on my end.
No, there are real hard numbers that prove this.
The average black person makes 30% less than the average white person.
Black people have to wait for about 10 more seconds than their white counterparts for cars
to yield to them at a crosswalk.
Well-sea black people spend almost an hour of their day waiting, compared to 28 minutes
for their high-income white counterparts.
Black people have a 74% greater chance at longer wait times at whole increases.
The life expectancy for white people is over five years longer than for black people.
For many black children, the first time they experience this kind of discrimination is
in the school system, a system where they are five times more likely to attend a segregated
school than their white counterparts.
And that can have a lasting impact.
This early exposure to segregation is one of many possible factors contributing to what's
known as the racial achievement gap.
The gap between black and white students test scores.
Education experts have looked to a number of factors as the root causes of the gap.
Things like family income and school resources.
But today, we're going to explore a different one.
School discipline.
Black students make up about 15% of total students, but they make up 36% of all expelled students.
And you have to wonder, could rethinking disciplinary action in schools reduce the achievement
gap?
To help answer that question and to entangle the factors driving the achievement gap, I knew
just who to call.
My name is Francis Paramitt and I'm an assistant professor of education at Stanford University.
Not too long ago, Paramitt did a study on race in the achievement gap.
The disparities in reading and math test scores on standardized tests between black and white
students.
The achievement gap doesn't just exist on racial lines, but socioeconomic lines too.
One of the first questions I asked him was how the gap has evolved over time.
We've been tracking achievement differences, racial achievement differences for about
60 years or so.
There's a number of reasons for that, certainly Brown versus Board of Education, which
is a landmark Supreme Court case that was about sort of promoting integrated schooling
environments.
Part of that rationale or part of that reasoning was that if we're going to create better
access for students in terms of their learning environments, we really should be pushing for
integrated schooling systems.
And one way to assess that is by looking at achievement over time, right?
So we've had data on achievement for quite a while and racial achievement gaps for quite
a while.
I think there's two primary test score disparities that we're really interested in.
That's racial achievement disparities and socioeconomic achievement disparities.
There's a number of factors and I want to underscore when we're talking about a slight
decline in racial test score disparities.
We're still talking about a substantial gap that remains today, with regard to the increasing
sort of significance of socioeconomic or economic achievement disparities.
In some respects, this is a reflection of broader growing income disparities in the United
States and sort of the associated opportunity hoarding behaviors that we've sort of observed
across socioeconomic classes.
The amount that American households are investing in children has exploded over the last
number of years, but it's also exploded in ways that exacerbate inequality.
So the most affluent households are spending far more than the most affluent households
did in terms of child investments today than 20 years ago.
So I think what we're really sort of seeing here is the ways in which broader income inequality
in the United States is continuing to sort of play and shape the opportunity landscape
that children are navigating.
This conversation is part of a larger package that my colleagues and I at Vox are putting
together about discrimination with the news organization, capital B, and particularly
we're getting into the discrimination that black people face in this country.
In 2021, you released this study called Collective Racial Bias and the Black White Test
Score Gap, can you talk about what you found in that study?
We've long known that racial test score disparities exist.
They've existed for as long as we've had reliable data to study them.
Folks have offered a number of theories for why those gaps exist and why they persist.
So in this particular project, I was able to leverage data from some colleagues at Harvard
University where they've essentially collected survey data on racial attitudes for over a million
households across the United States.
From this survey, because of the scope and scale of this survey, we've gotten to the point
now there's basically enough representation across the United States that we can now
begin to study variation in racial attitudes across places.
So what I was interested in was really studying how that variation in racial attitudes
and when I say racial attitudes, really what I'm talking about is anti-black bias, both implicit
racial attitudes but also explicit racial attitudes.
It was interesting exploring the extent to which collective racial bias at scale, specifically
anti-black bias, relates to black white test score disparities.
That was the heart of the project and what I found was that in fact, racial biases measured
at scale do predict black white test score disparities.
Knowing how much racial bias exists within a community tells us about as much about the
black white test score gap as knowing black white differences in family income.
So here we're finding that collective rates of racial bias are as predictive of black
white test score disparities as conventional explanations that we have used to make sense
of black white test score disparities for some time.
So essentially knowing anti-black bias at this scale is highly predictive and it tells
us a lot about test score disparities at the school district level.
Can you talk about how those anti-black biases express themselves because I can hear people
listening at home and being like, oh, did you get a bad test score because someone called
you the inward at school?
How are these biases expressing themselves in ways that impact test scores?
That's right.
And why I find this question really interesting is when we think about racial biases and
the ways in which racial discrimination plays out within our school systems, it's really
easy to think about the teacher student interaction or like micro social interactions like
the one you just mentioned.
And there's a whole large body of research to get at those factors.
Now the scale of the project that I'm referring to allows us to examine what we might refer
to as sort of structural conditions, policies, practices at the school district and county
level that sort of explain this relation.
So we actually addressed this very question in this research project and tried to say,
okay, well, if we know that collective rates of racial bias are predictive of black
white test score disparities, why is that the case?
And you can think about a number of explanations.
One might have something to do with funding disparities.
School funding has long been a topic of interest for folks who think about and consider
on a fight for racial equity in schools, right?
Off the belief that resources are not always equal.
So perhaps this is the case that in more biased communities, there's worse funding disparities
between black and white students and maybe that's predictive of the achievement disparity,
the achievement gap that we're referring to.
Another might have something to do with like access to early childhood educational opportunities,
right?
We know that test score disparities are sort of identified kind of our entry, right?
And in some cases, Crow in the years following that.
So maybe it's something to do with access to early childhood opportunities and maybe
in more biased communities or communities with greater levels of anti-black bias that
perhaps black children who grow up in those communities have less access to early childhood
resources.
But it turns out that neither of those sort of pathways explain this connection between
sort of aggregate rates of anti-black bias and black white test score disparities.
It turns out that the mechanisms driving this relationship is what I broadly refer to
as sorting mechanisms.
So segregation in communities that have higher levels of anti-black bias, schools are far
more racially segregated than communities with less anti-black bias, right?
And those are also the same communities that have higher levels of racial segregation,
right, are also the communities with worse black white test score disparities.
But there's a couple other sort of sorting mechanisms that also played out.
One has to do with access to gifted enrollment.
So black white gifted enrollment disparities are worse in communities with elevated rates
of anti-black bias because black children growing up in communities with elevated rates
of racial bias are less likely to be identified for gifted and talented programs, which are
also predictive of higher achievement, right?
And there's another kind of flip side to that as well, which is these same children in
these communities are more likely to be designated for special education services and being
tracked to sort of lower achievement tracks, right, which can curtail or stymie or limit
their educational progress.
I think that's so interesting.
I think back to my own experience in school, and I don't talk about this often because
no one wants to be that 30-something adult talking about how they were in gifted classes
when they were in elementary school.
But I remember I was first tested and put into the gifted program in the Kansas City
Missouri Public School District where I had predominantly black teachers.
And then we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I went to a predominantly white school
and my parents had me tested for the gifted program because I did it in my other school
district.
And I did not know how big of a faux pas this was at the time or how unprecedented it
was, but the person who administered the test tested me twice because she thought my
verbal score was too high and thought it was a false positive.
And I had no idea what a big deal that was until years later, at the time I was just
like, why are my parents up at the school angry right now?
That's absolutely right.
And this is sort of where the rubber meets the road in terms of how I went about studying
this phenomena in the broader structural factors and policies that could be a link between
sort of collectivary to racial bias and student outcomes.
And that's the fact that policies allow for varying degrees of discretion in terms of choices
that impact students trajectories.
So you gave the case of gifted and talented placement.
You know, in many school districts, they operate as you just mentioned, which is a certain
subset of students are tested for services, right, gifted and talented services.
These students could be identified any number of ways.
Maybe it's a parent who requests it.
Maybe it's a teacher who recommends it.
But in all those cases, we're talking about factors that contribute to a student being
tested for these gifted services, whatever those factors are that drive that, those factors
could vary systematically across different subgroups of students, right?
Where this kind of comes into play is, we also know that in districts and states where
there's what's called universal testing, that is not where a select group of students
or group of students who voluntarily or that teachers identify as prospects for gifted
and talented placements in districts that adopt universal testing, racial disparities
and gifted enrollment is actually less.
So by testing everyone, by testing all students, the likelihood of overlooking some students
goes down.
A lot of my work is thinking about the types of decisions that are made that can exacerbate
inequalities in schools and figure out ways to make those decisions less discretionary.
The other big pathway is discipline.
So districts or communities in which residents harbor higher levels of anti-black bias or
racial discrimination, disciplinary outcomes are characterized by worse racial bias than
communities with less racial bias, right?
These communities are also characterized by greater black, white suspension gaps, greater
black, white, expulsion gaps, right?
So this is another sort of key pathway in this connection between discrimination and
student outcomes, specifically test score outcomes.
So those are some of the ways that race and income influence the achievement gap.
Next up, we'll zoom in on the disparities in school discipline in particular.
Stay with us.
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This is the Weeds.
We're back and talking with Stanford's Francis Paramann about the achievement gap and
discrimination as part of a Vox collaboration with Capital B.
I want to zoom in into one of the factors you mentioned earlier in our conversation,
and that's school discipline.
When we're talking about discipline in schools, what exactly are we referring to?
When we talk about discipline in a general sense, we're talking about tools that schools
use to correct student behavior.
A student behavior is deemed as inconsistent with some sort of behavioral expectation or
standard, and there's a correction that's needed.
There are a lot of different ways in which student behavior can be corrected.
In this country of the last several decades, school discipline has been characterized in
one way shape or form as exclusionary discipline.
That is, when a student's behavior is deemed either offensive or, as I mentioned, inconsistent
with some set of standards, that student is excluded from the learning environment,
and that exclusion could take the form of an in-school suspension, right?
That is sending a student out of a classroom and sending them into a separate classroom
in a school environment.
There's also out-of-school suspensions that is for any given behavioral infraction.
Student might be set home.
There's also sort of more extreme forms, like expulsion, where you're sending a student
away from the school entirely.
There's also sort of this increasing presence of law enforcement in schools, that also
have a number of related disciplinary outcomes of interest that are similarly sort of understood
in this exclusionary framework with regard to school arrests or law enforcement referrals.
That's another part of the school discipline apparatus that's been used in school districts
really across the country.
Suspension has always been a fascinating form of discipline to me, because in my mind,
I'm kind of like, wait, at least when I was a kid, I was like, wait, they get to get
out of school for being quote unquote bad, like, oh, okay, all right, you get a little,
I mean, and it's not a little break.
You're missing out on learning, who knows, you know, parents have to find child care.
But yeah, I was always kind of the thinking behind suspension, even when I was a child,
it didn't always make a lot of sense to me.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, there's a certain irony with the decision to send a kid away from a learning environment
that we broadly understand as helpful and promoted for that child's development.
And in some cases, not all cases, but maybe the student didn't want to be in that learning
environment to begin with, right?
So for some students, that might be a welcome disciplinary action on their part.
But really, the issue, aside from just the curiousness of that approach, is we also know
that experiencing school discipline is associated with a variety of outcomes that are generally
not that good.
Students who experience suspensions, expulsions, any sort of arm of this exclusionary discipline
process, right?
Are less likely to graduate high school, less likely to persist in school, they're less
likely to go on to college or far more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system
as a result of that exclusionary discipline experience happening.
So because of that, it really is quite important to really interrogate instances of exclusionary
discipline, understand the ways in which they're being meted out in unfair ways, meet it
out in racially discriminatory ways, because again, any disparities as it relates to school
discipline will likely produce or contribute to racial disparities in these other outcomes
that we know are not good for students.
There's a number of scholars who are really interested in this research space for these
very reasons, right?
It's highly consequential for students, both short and longer term outcomes, which is
part of the reason why a number of progressive school districts have begun to rethink what
school discipline ought to look like or should look like, you know, there's this growth
in restorative justice practices, positive behavioral supports and systems, right?
Based on this idea that rather than thinking about correcting student behavior by sending
students elsewhere, we should really be thinking about correcting student misbehavior
in ways that creates bridges, right?
That repairs relationships.
So the theory goes by equipping students with the skills necessary to do that mending.
We're actually developing a different kind of skill set.
These are the kinds of social-emotional skills that actually do benefit the student in
the long term, both in school and out of school.
Can you talk about how race factors into discipline in particular?
How do we know race is a factor?
For one, you know, what folks oftentimes point to, right, is just the simple existence
of racial inequality along virtually every measure of school disciplinary outcome.
When I'm talking about racial-discipline gaps, right, of the different types, you know,
suspension, expulsion, you know, I'm primarily talking about black, white discipline disparities,
but we also know that other sort of racial groups experience similar kinds of disparities,
not at the same sort of level of disparities, the black students experience relative to white
students.
And that's why, you know, folks will also talk about racial achievement gaps more generally,
but there's something sort of unique about the conditions in which sort of black students
in particular in America sort of yield these large gaps really across every dimension of
school discipline, right?
So on the one hand, we know that these disparities exist and that black students are far more
likely to experience any dimension of exclusionary discipline relative to their white counterparts,
right?
Initially, that suggests that race plays some factor, right?
Now, how race plays the factors is the next question, right?
But we know that race is a part of this story.
We also know that that racial discrimination is a persistent feature of many of our social
institutions, right?
And there's a number of psychological experiments, social psychological experiments.
There's quite a bit of evidence on this point that racial biases actually play out in
how discipline is meted out in classrooms.
You know, for instance, we know teachers are more likely to gaze at black students when
they expect problematic behavior of the classroom overall.
So if teachers are anticipating they're being a problem, they look at black students.
We know that white children are far more likely to be given the grace associated with childhood
status teachers or authority figures are far more likely to give white children a second
chance when it comes to misbehavior than they are to black students, right?
But more specifically in regard to like discipline and out-of-school suspension, right?
There's quite a bit of work that's tried to disentangle these factors over time.
We know that for any given behavioral infraction, black students in particular are not only more
likely to experience punishment, but the severity of the punishment that they experience is
also worse than their white counterparts.
This may seem like a very elementary question, I promise, no pun intended.
But what is the goal of discipline?
Like what are we trying to do when we discipline kids at school?
We're trying to correct student misbehavior.
That's the general idea, but that's an interesting objective, right?
Because there's a couple things that have to be defined when we're talking about correcting
student behavior, right?
For one, a certain behavioral expectation has to be sort of understood and set, and typically
that behavioral expectation is sort of framed up or understood in relation to these broader
goals of education.
Because what that sort of forces us to consider is the ways in which we organize our classrooms,
the ways that we organize our schools and districts more generally, right?
The ways in which our particular organization schools makes certain behaviors and actions
problematic or more problematic than others.
And we have school systems that are structured such that the kinds of behaviors that are
esteemed or valued or make classroom life easier are the types of behaviors that align
with sitting still, not speaking out of turn, not being ran bunches, not having sort of
an entrepreneurial spirit in terms of how one goes through the day, right?
If we have a system of schooling that's organized around really compliance, then what that
means is that there are kinds of behaviors that are inconsistent with that particular
organization of behaviors.
So because of that, students who have a more difficult time sitting still, a harder time
following directions than others, there's nothing inherent about either one of those characteristics
that's necessarily problematic because of our behavioral expectations based on the ways
in which we structured schooling, right?
You can imagine a situation in which we actually are trying to get students to sort of think
outside the box and not necessarily fall in line, right?
Or where we are really trying to promote independent thinking, where we're sitting still
and sitting in a single desk over time, isn't that that important, right?
The irony there is, you know, any, you look sort of as children age, you know, there's
no, there's very few job circle rears which require the kinds of things that we expect students
to have, you know, from grade K through 12, which is-
Yeah, it's like, hey, don't be a disruptor until like you graduate and or drop out of
college and then, you know, move fast and break things literally.
That's exactly right.
Now, the part that that's really intriguing as a scholar and as a researcher is school
systems, individual schools, right?
Very quite a bit in how they organize the learning environment.
There are some schools, for instance, that prioritize the type of wrote compliance that
we're referring to.
And why this matters for issues of sort of race and racial equity is that those are also
the same kinds of schools that disproportionately enroll black and brown students.
The schools that enroll, the schools that are tasked with educating most of our black and
brown students in this country are structured in such a way that behavioral standards, expectations
are defined far more in terms of compliance.
And you know, this is an interesting case, right?
Because there's other ways in which you can promote sort of student progress, student achievement
that result in the same- the same thing, right?
And what I mean by that is you can imagine schools, school classrooms where student behavior
is guided not by sort of a principle of compliance, but a principle of engagement.
An engaged student sits where they need to sit and engaged student generally follows along
with a lesson.
But the problem is that many of our schools, many of our schools that are tasked with,
you know, educating many of our black and brown students around the country, the primary
objective is not one of engagement, right?
It's one that we can get away with having non-engaging curriculum, but we can keep students
seated, right?
And doing what they ought to do because of fear of discipline, rather than progressing
because I'm engaged with the concept, rather than following along and following a productive
trajectory, being based on rich, engaging, innovative teaching, it's fear of getting
in trouble, right?
Yeah, fear of getting out, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's ringing true, like, yeah, I'm going to color inside the line because
I'm not trying to get in trouble.
Yeah, I'm not trying to get sent home.
I want to know.
Yeah.
Yeah, but again, why that matters, right, J.Q?
Our country is one that's rooted and based in this idea that innovation drives much of
our industry, innovation drives much of our democracy.
Innovation drives much of the progress that we've achieved over over the years, right?
And we're talking about innovation.
I'm not just talking about strictly in an economic sense, right?
Or in an industry sense, but even from a policy perspective, from a justice perspective,
we're talking about what does it mean to equip students with the skills necessary to make
four better worlds, to improve the conditions that they operate in, that their children eventually
will operate in, right?
And the concern, the fear is that how we think about schooling today and how we've organized
schooling isn't necessarily consistent with that for particular subgroups of children.
And so that's why you have a lot of scholars who are really trying to think through and
push back against this narrow conception of doing school that's rooted primarily in students
doing well academically, because you can have some high-achieving students who are not
good people.
You can have some high-achieving students who are not great citizens, right?
You can have smart students who adopt and embrace really problematic ideologies and politics,
right?
Really, what we're thinking about, what a lot of folks are thinking about now is, what
does it mean to create schools, to create classrooms that allow for a type of thinking,
a type of being that allows for children to flourish, that allows for children to think
through critically the world around them, all for the purpose of improving things, making
things better, right?
Yeah, I mean, as an adult, I look back on my own experience in the public school system.
And I remember when I was briefly in middle school in Kansas City before my family moved,
I went to this magnet middle school, like great, fantastic college preparatory magnet
middle school.
And I remember that one of the factors that I had to think of when I was getting ready
for school in the morning and being on time was that we had to go through metal detectors.
And especially at the time, and even now, I think, okay, I understand whether it's coming
from schools can be really dangerous, like it's a very vulnerable place.
And you know, if we were in line for the metal detector when the bell rang, we would be
marked as late or as absent.
It's like, you gotta, you have to factor in that time, you are responsible for that.
And at the time, I thought, yeah, this is teaching me responsibility, it's teaching me
how to manage my time, it's keeping me safe.
And I look back and I'm like, oh, maybe it was less about keeping me safe and more teaching
me how to be policed.
And that's something I think about.
But at the same time, you know, I think of those schools that are really hard and disciplined
for black children.
And how it's like, oh, it's so tough.
And the thing is, the world is not that kind to black people.
It's kind of a thing of like, well, yeah, you are gonna be watched.
And yeah, you do have to be on top of your stuff and act in a certain way that maybe
you know your white counterparts don't because this is the world we live in.
And if you want to succeed in it, this is what you have to do.
And as tragic as having to do that is, I kind of understand, especially why parents
can be so like tough on those black children because the world is tough on them.
And I just wonder how we straddle that line, like, do we live in existence where we say,
okay, but that's not the world I want to live in.
So that's what I'll prepare my children for.
Do you say like, hey, this is real life and like, yeah, you're gonna have to be way more
on top of it than people who don't look like you.
That's right.
Jackie, that's such a good, I mean, you're bringing up such an important point.
We think about the role that schools play in our society and the potential role that they
could play.
You know, in some, in one respect, you could think about schools as preparing students
to engage as the world is, right?
Cooking students with the dispositions, with the, with the skills, with the mindsets that
allow them to kind of plug and play, right?
The concern or the critique there is that the world in which they would plug and play
is deeply unequal and deeply unfair along lines that we're talking about here.
Specifically, we know that racial inequalities are a key feature of the way that the world
is.
And so many of the ways that we've kind of conventionally understood schooling and the type of preparation
that students receive, the concern is that and like the ones you just mentioned, which
is, well, this, this type of schooling that we, we organized is also one in which black
and brown students will be disproportionately exposed to these disciplinary tools, right?
Like metal detectors, right?
More likely to be exposed to school resource officers, for instance, right?
And that's just going to be a part of this story, right?
There's this concern that, all right.
Well, if we're engaging in school as it is, right, for the purpose of plugging students
into the world that currently exists, we're doing a disservice both to students and also
to the world that might become, right?
But I do want to talk for a minute about the metal detectors that you yourself were exposed
to.
We also know that black students are far more likely to have to go through metal detectors
than other students.
Black students are far more likely to be in a school in which there's a employed police officer
or a school resource officer.
Moreover, we know that how police officers and school resource officers understand their
role also differs depending on the racial composition of a school.
So this is some brilliant work by my colleague Ben Fisher at Wisconsin and Chris Kern and
some others.
School resource officers who work in predominantly black schools, school resource officers
are far more likely to understand their role as one of protection from within.
That is protecting students from other students at the school, whereas school resource officers
who work in suburban schools, predominantly white schools, are far more likely to understand
their role as protection from without, that is protection from threats that happen outside
of the school.
So my point in kind of sharing that, right, is even the mechanisms of discipline that
we've kind of set up, operate in highly racialized ways that oftentimes result in or can lead
to other kinds of racial inequalities that matter a whole lot, like student persistence,
exclusionary discipline along the lines that we just mentioned earlier, and ultimately
test score disparities as we began this conversation.
After the break, we'll look at some of the policy alternatives to traditional school discipline
and dive deeper into some of the creative ways that we could reimagine discipline altogether.
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Okay, so earlier you talked about some of the alternatives to how we discipline students
like, for instance, restorative justice.
I'm curious, what do these alternatives look like in practice?
Yeah, so there's, as you mentioned, there's a, there's many ways to reform or think about
school discipline differently.
Let's just talk about suspensions just as a, for instance, an easiest way from a policy
perspective to address those inequalities is to do a way with suspensions, right?
If you can't suspend a student, then there's, there's going to be no disciplinary disparities
of notes.
And schools can be deeply racially discriminatory in how students are treated, even before the
outcome is measured, even before the disciplinary outcome is measured, right?
So we have to be thinking seriously and deeply, not just about sort of reforming the outcome,
whether or not students are suspended or expelled, whether that stuff is made available
to teachers, right?
But also be thinking really critically about the ways in which students are engaged or
not in the classroom learning environment as is moreover, when we talk about discipline,
right?
Most of what we know about school discipline is in relation to these disciplinary outcomes
that are, that are more extreme in nature, right?
Like, student gets suspended or expelled for some big behavioral offense.
But most of the disciplining that happens in schools don't occur at that end of the
spectrum, right?
There's this whole kind of feature of learning environments that kind of broadly understood
as like classroom management practices, right, that teachers engage in, that might not
result in a kid getting suspended, right?
But have an impact on the ways in which students feel a sense of belonging in classrooms,
classroom management itself, aside from whether or not students are suspended or expelled,
classroom management can be discriminatory, right?
And impact the ways that students feel engaged or feel a sense of belonging or feel a sense
that, hey, man, this teacher has my back or this teacher believes in me.
Those are the really kind of subtle forms of discipline that can have really a cascading
effects on students' trajectories in and through school.
But yeah, so you said like practically, right?
So there's a lot of really innovative work around reforming school discipline.
You know, the one that folks are maybe most familiar with is like restorative justice practices,
right?
And I alluded to some of this earlier in the interview, the key principle here or the
area of difference, how this is sort of unique from how to do discipline is primarily
along lines of, all right, if you do something bad, you have to go somewhere else, right?
And the expectation is that, all right, if you go to somewhere else, you'll kind of learn
from your mistake.
And then when you come back, you know that there are certain expectations that if you want
to persist here, you have to do things a little bit differently.
There's this whole question around, well, does that even work, right?
And actually the evidence on that point that is does exclusionary discipline correct student
behavior.
That's surprisingly an open empirical question, there's not a whole lot of evidence that
kicking students out actually makes them better students.
The innovative sort of thinking around, all right, well, if that's not the way to do it,
if we know that not only might exclusionary discipline, like not correct the student behavior
that we're hoping to correct, but it also makes students more likely to experience all
of these negative outcomes down the line, like involvement in criminal justice system less
likely to graduate high school, less likely to go on a college, right?
And so there's a line of work that's trying to think more expansively around what does
it mean to correct student behavior?
And the first big move is to think not about individual students, but to think about communities,
right?
So any one offense that happens, right, a student behavioral infraction isn't just infraction
that that student sort of experience, but it's actually a community level issue.
And because of that, it needs to be addressed not at the individual level, but at the community
level.
So really, the reconciliation, right, is primarily relational, not behavioral.
So if a student offends another student or does something that would otherwise get that
student suspended or expelled or sent out of the classroom, the onus is really around,
all right, how do we repair the relationships that were broken?
And how can we do that in a systematic enough way, right, that this policy can be formalized
and moved across spaces, but also in a human-centered way that the student can not only understand
the mistakes that they're made, but understand the consequences of that mistake for their
community.
And the idea there is that if a student can grow in that kind of understanding, not only
will the student sort of alter their behavior, but also will be far more likely to re-engage
the community itself.
And a student who's engaged in the community who has a sense of belonging in the community
is far more likely to persist in that community and do the things that are expected of that
community.
So it's really a shift in thinking about discipline, but it's also a shift in how we
think about students and student progression through school and how we center students
in their humanity rather than the behavior itself.
I think especially of public schools and how sort of bare bones so many of them are, like
in elementary school, I went to a school where the teacher was straight up like, we're
out of school supplies and I used my check to buy school supplies for the class, like
we just underfunded and, you know, overworked and taking on so many classes and doing so
many things.
I wonder, does the political will to create the infrastructure for this exist?
Like it sounds so lovely in theory where it's like, okay, we can have these conversations,
we can do these different things.
Like, we have counselors, we have this, but there are so many things, especially for people
working in public schools to juggle and how close are we to sort of adding this on to
that workload?
I think part of what underpins that concern is that school dependence, reliance on schools
as institutions to meet the needs of students, that varies systematically across places, across
populations.
What schools are, what schools need to be, differs a lot.
There are some students who show up to school, not to learn, but to eat.
There are some students who show up to school, ready to take AP calculus and show up to sort
of expand the horizons of their knowledge base because they have all of their basic necessities
met.
So therein lies the challenge with sort of thinking about schooling at scale in this country,
but here's the thing, right?
Systematic inequalities along all these outcomes, educational outcomes of interest, right?
Whether we're talking about educationally, behaviorally, social emotionally, and we need
to do better.
We need to do better by particular subgroups of children, specifically black and brown
children, right?
So to answer your question, yeah, it takes a lot of political will to do this work well.
Teachers are stressed, teachers are overworked.
We know that the most overworked and the most stressed teachers are the ones who work in
schools that are the least resources, the schools that they're teaching the most students
who have the fewest amount of resources available to them, to support them, right?
But we also know that those schools are also the ones where students need the most support.
So for me, the question isn't whether or not we have the political will to do what's
needed.
The question really is about how can we best understand the implications of not doing
what's needed on behalf of our students for their progression through schools?
Because ultimately, we, our communities, our country more generally, they reap the benefits
or lack thereof associated with those investments.
Do you think there might be more political will for these things in sort of the post-pandemic
lockdown era?
I mean, people were at home with their kids in a way that they were like, oh, wow, these
teachers, y'all, y'all do a lot.
Okay.
I see.
I understand.
Do you think, do you, do you see a shift towards that way?
There's a lot that we've taken for granted about the ways that our schools operate.
I think we've taken for granted the role, the value that teachers play in our society,
right?
I think the pandemic sort of brought in sharp relief sort of an understanding of just
how important our schools are and our teachers are.
So I think if there was a time over the last several decades in which there's a, there's
a deep appreciation for the value that our schools play.
I think you're right that now is probably that time, nevertheless, the types of investments
that are needed to do this kind of work well as you alluded to in your previous question.
These investments are substantial to overhaul school disciplinary policies, to implement
new reforms about classroom management, take a lot of time and a lot of resources, and
to do that, to advocate for that work, we need to not only have the political, but we also
have to have the sufficient knowledge base to draw from, and crafting, and organizing,
and moving those agendas forward, and we're sort of in the mix right now.
So I know that you and I both, probably like a lot of our listeners, have an appointment
television show most of the time on Wednesdays, and that's Abbott Elementary.
Great show, love it, like super great, super cute, also very much reminds me of my elementary
school experience at times, and there's this one episode where Jacob, who's one of the
Abbott teachers, is hanging out at a teacher's conference with some teachers from a nearby
charter school.
Did you maybe come and teach with us at Addington like yesterday?
Oh, I have had a blasty blast, but I'm an Abbott boy.
But imagine teaching at a school with the brightest kids from the neighborhood, and a bunch
of other neighborhoods, too, the cream of the crop from all over the city, they come
to us.
Wait, but there can't be room for all of the neighborhood kids at Addington if you're
accepting people from other places.
Oh, we're all about focusing on the kids who have the best chance of making it out.
Out of what?
And something that was in the recap of that episode really struck me, and the author
writes, this belief system is the modern version of separating the black people who perform
respectability the best from the ones still deemed to be ghetto and helpless.
And that really struck me because, and this is a conversation, I have with a lot of people
where it's like, oh, is your success based on how best you know how to survive and navigate
white supremacy?
And I mean, I realized the two of us having this conversation, you are a professor at Stanford
and I host a podcast for you know, a news organization.
So maybe, you know, it's the call coming from inside the house, but it really struck
me and it made me think, okay, like, well, what is the purpose of school?
Like, who are we educating and what for?
I too saw that episode on a huge Abbott Elementary fan that speaks to a number of issues, one
of the most significant being the ways in which value and success is narrowly defined
and how it is often defined in relation to existing systems of power.
Often times what that means today is sort of success is often times deemed in relation
to whiteness, right, proximity to whiteness, right, how well you can sort of exhibit standards
to behavioral standards, cultural standards that align with middle class, white American
cultural moors, right, lead to more opportunities, right, and the backdrop for the conversations
you mentioned happening on that show, right, these are white teachers, right, so white
teachers having conversations about, about deeming value and deeming potential.
And therein lies going back to the earlier part of this conversation, right, we've known
this for a long time, expectations, value attributions in this country are highly racialized.
And there's something sort of deeply problematic with the idea that, you know, a racialized
other can attribute value and attribute potential to young folks with immense potential and immense
value, right, the concern there, right, and this is the concern that you probably felt
in your bones as I did hearing that, is just how much potential is missed, right, how
many incredible opportunities go to waste when we narrowly define ability, narrowly define
potential, right, and therein lies, you know, the great tragedy of, you know, of so many
of our sort of most important social institutions, I mean, dating back even to slavery, like what
is the great pain there is just the amount of lost potential, right, so when we think
about our school systems and making them more equitable, more fair, right, we also need
to think about the ways in which we have to fight for high standards, high expectations,
high beliefs about what our students are capable of, because when we don't, what we wind up
with is a scenario where we're describing from the show where we're talking about, you
know, young children who are being siphoned off and others who are being cast aside and
that, you know, by itself is, you know, something that we should be thinking critically
about.
In 2014, the Obama administration put in guidelines in place regarding school discipline
that were, in part, aimed at lessening these disparities and the Trump administration
got rid of those policies.
Do you think that there is a fix for this on the national level or is the solution really
based regionally in school districts, in individual schools?
Is there a federal policy that could push this along, or is this something more on the
local level?
Well, I think this is a both-end question, right?
I mean, there's certainly a role that the federal government plays in our school systems,
right?
Data collection is really important.
Data collection in a way that allows us to track, and we're talking about discipline
right now, but really this pertains to all sort of student outcomes of interest, being
able to track these outcomes over time, become extremely important, right?
Being able to understand the subgroups that are experiencing elevated rates of, for instance,
suspensions, that's an important part of this story, you know, to be fair.
I mean, this is, you know, federal government has been tracking these over time, but my
point is there's more than we could do.
You know, I mentioned earlier around, you know, most of what we know about school discipline
at the national level pertains to these pretty extreme outcomes, right?
There are students who are being suspended expelled.
Also, I think there's a lot of room to improve sort of our understanding of classroom management
practices, right?
These lower order offenses that teachers are constantly on a day-to-day basis forced to
grapple with, right?
You know, there's ways to sort of think about expanding data coverage and access to these
sort of lower order offenses.
Now, naturally, this is a big undertaking to go down that path, but nevertheless, when
we're talking about sort of moving the needle forward and the role that federal government
plays in tracking disparities over time, you know, that I think there's a lot of fruit
to be had there.
Now, you mentioned, you know, what role do kind of more local solutions play.
You know, like everything, there's always sort of local issues and complications and opportunities
that play out, right?
There's always room to sort of nuance policies in ways that make them more responsive
to the local conditions that exist in and around a school system, right?
There's always ways to sort of think about and make our school disciplinary policies in
particular more responsive to the communities they serve.
All right, Frances Paramann, thank you so much for joining us.
Absolutely.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Shake You.
That's all for us today.
Thank you to Frances Paramann for joining me.
Our producer is Sophie LaLonde, Cristinae Alla, engineered this episode, and did so fact-checked
it, our editorial director is A.M. Hall, and I'm your host, John Quinhill.
This episode is part of a collaboration between Vox and Capitol B for the June issue of
the Highlight.
Vox is home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
You can find links to more stories from the discrimination issue of the highlight in
our show notes.
The weeds is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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information you need to book the best activities for your trip.
Download the Viator app now and use Code Viator 10 for 10% off your first booking.
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Do more with Viator.