Abstract
Accountability for racially disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification has conventionally spotlighted the disparate impact on students. Typically, findings such as “x% of African American students were suspended” or “y% of Latinx students were misidentified as having learning dis/abilities” reinforce this pattern. Our qualitative study sought the outlines of a different framing that locates accountability in practices, policies, and patterns of adult actors that produce those unjust outcomes. Practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and activists participated in this interview study by giving their perspectives on that reframing. Although their analyses fell short of directly holding the educational system accountable, they did highlight reforms such as increasing student agency in discipline and classification processes, expanding those processes to include a holistic analysis of students’ lives, and acknowledging that current accountability measures evade and obscure structural racism in discipline and dis/ability classification.
Keywords
Introduction
Overwhelming evidence has documented racially disproportionate discipline and classification of students with dis/abilities (Fabelo et al., 2011; Skiba et al., 2002; Skiba & Rausch, 2013). Nearly 50 years ago, racial justice advocates chronicled disparate suspension rates for African American and White students (Children’s Defense Fund, 1975). Racial disparities have been seen in disciplining preschool students (Office of Civil Rights, 2014) and racially minoritized students with dis/abilities (Losen et al., 2021). Likewise, in the immediate aftermath of Brown, educators internally segregated their schools by dramatically classifying more African American students as having disabilities (Ferri & Connor, 2006). This practice persists to the present (Gregory et al., 2010; Harry & Klingner, 2014; Skiba et al., 2008).
With the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies (Kafka, 2011; Kajs, 2006; Wallace et al., 2008), educators disproportionately punished and excluded minoritized students. Schools have thus subjected minoritized students and students with dis/abilities to higher rates of suspension and expulsion, criminalization, and school-to-prison trends (Dunbar & Villarruel, 2004; Okilwa et al., 2016). This happens when adults such as administrators and school resource officers have surveilled students (Addington, 2014; Losen et al., 2013; Lustick, 2017) and enforced academic and behavioral norms that cast students as abnormal and worthy of exclusion (Bornstein, 2015; Youdell, 2006).
Even as this decades-long discipline disparity discourse continued, the focus continually framed students as deviant and subjugated objects (APA Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008). Previous policy analysis has explored how existing policies and reform efforts have eluded accountability for adults by camouflaging the culpable actors, policies, and practices. Efforts to reform zero-tolerance policies (Kim et al., 2010) evade exploring the culpability of who has zero tolerance for what done by whom (Lustick, 2017).
Similarly, most reform efforts aimed at disproportionate dis/ability classification call for increased use of culturally responsive interventions and data (Hosp, 2011; Sugai et al., 2011; Vincent et al., 2011), without directly challenging the structures and actors making racist and ableist diagnoses. The literature on disproportionate dis/ability classification highlights the disparate impact of policy, research, and practice. Schools have historically rationalized segregating students with dis/abilities as a form of protecting them (Artiles et al., 2016). Furthermore, those logics misuse students’ cultural, historical, and economic identities as the bases of dis/ability diagnoses (Annamma et al., 2016; Fisher et al., 2020; Skiba et al., 2011; Youdell, 2006).
Equity audits have also been posed as accountability measures. These inquiries often identify a school or district’s disparate discipline and classification rates (Capper & Young, 2015; Radd et al., 2021; Skrla et al., 2004). However, at a research conference session that critically reviewed the affordances and limitations of equity audits (Generett et al., 2021), Terrance Green noted that “expecting an equity audit to solve institutional racism is like expecting your fire alarm to put out the fire.”
Our study took that caution to heart, considering that reform efforts that have focused mostly on disparate impact could support persistent “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Artiles (2019) echoed Bonilla-Silva in his call for educational researchers to interrupt the “white innocence” inherent in equity research dis/ability classification that labeled injustice without naming its culprits. Our central research question was “How did stakeholders attempting to remedy disproportionate discipline and classification think about how accountability policies, practices, and research could focus on the systems and actors that perpetuate disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification?” We sought the perspectives of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, asking how to refocus accountability research, policy, and practice on the actors and actions responsible for unjustly disparate outcomes.
Below, we describe the elements of dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) theory that we applied as a conceptual framework to this work. Next, we outline our methodological choices regarding whom to include and how to analyze the data. Following, we present our findings that, although reformers struggled to articulate policy and practice that would hold the institution and educators directly responsible for their actions and decisions, they did articulate two promising avenues. First, they called for increased student agency in these matters. Second, they endorsed a more holistic or ecological approach to discipline or classification determinations for individual students. Finally, we found that participants acknowledged that existing accountability on disproportionate discipline and classification tends to be race-neutral, and thereby conceals structural racism. Following these findings, we suggest implications for further research, policy, practice, and activism.
Conceptual Framework
This study aimed to shift focus from disparate impact on students to direct accountability for the producers of those injustices. As an analogy, when examining police brutality, it is no longer acceptable to limit accountability to calculating “X% of African Americans were killed in police-involved shootings.” Rather, more effective responsibility measures center the practices, policies, and even the patterns in the identities of police who were responsible for that injustice.
We applied DisCrit theory as a conceptual framework (Annamma et al., 2016). DisCrit builds on both critical race theory (CRT; Crenshaw et al., 1995) and Dis/ability Studies in Education (DSE; Davis, 2006). CRT in education posits that the embedded racism in educational practices and policies is more responsible for racially disproportionate outcomes than the racialized identities of the students themselves (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). DSE applies a similar critical analysis to school structures, policies, and practices that enact ableism to disenfranchise and marginalize students with dis/abilities (Gabel, 2005), or indeed renders them impossible to include (Youdell, 2006). Annamma et al. (2016, p. 19) proposed seven tenets for DisCrit theory (see Table 1).
Tenets of Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) Theory
Racist Normalcy
Our first premise was that discipline and classification are done to students—rather than by them—via systems of regulation and decision making in which adults are the main actors. Tenet 1 of DisCrit focused our attention on the subterranean means by which racism and ableism operated in discipline and classification processes. Bornstein and Manaseri (2022) argued that ableism is the institutionally accepted rationale for persistently racist segregation. They posited that educators accept segregating students in separate classrooms or schools with special education and other programs based on their ability, and view the resulting racial disproportionality as an unfortunate unintended consequence. DisCrit contributes to this analysis by noting how normalcy is prioritized as a defining principle of school policy and practice for belonging, constituting abnormality as justification for exclusion and masking the degree to which normalcy is synonymous with Whiteness (Bornstein & Manaseri, 2022).
DisCrit asserts that special education is a persistent example of benevolent racism, focusing on fixing and controlling students of color in schools rather than fixing the systems that marginalize people of color in society. Brantlinger (2006) described the identity of being “fixed” in two senses: (a) A student with a disability requires a cure, and (b) a student has racist and ableist identities attached to them. This concept fits well with our application of DisCrit’s Tenet 2 on socially constructed identity.
Indeed, conventional special education and school discipline stem from racist imperatives. Studying zero-tolerance policies, Kafka (2011) identified the troubling origin of special education and remediation to teach students of color proper (i.e., White) classroom behavior. It was cultural remediation based on a deficit orientation toward nondominant cultures. Thus, White supremacy and ableism became interwoven and baked into special education policy, to the point that reforming such policy will not necessarily stamp out the prejudice.
When educators characterize restorative justice practices, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), and other nonpunitive approaches to discipline, they often discuss them as educative or therapeutic alternatives. Again, this posits students as defective and in need of fixing, thus swapping the deficit disciplinary identity of “disorderly” student for another pathological label of “disordered” student (Bornstein, 2017b).
DisCrit scholars have interrogated the intersection of race and dis/ability in pedagogy (Dunhamn et al., 2015) and disproportionate discipline (Fenning & Johnson, 2022). For example, school resource officers and other similarly situated security personnel exacerbate surveillance and excessive exclusionary discipline of racially marginalized students (Fisher & Fisher, 2022). DisCrit scholars have also attempted to infuse systems such as PBIS with culturally responsive and trauma-informed practices (Bal, 2018; Fallon & Veiga, 2022; Pearson et al., 2022), as have others from an antiracist platform not necessarily grounded in DisCrit (McIntosh et al., 2014).
Social Construction of Race and Normalcy
Tenet 2 of DisCrit repudiates race and dis/ability as biologically determined in favor of analysis into the dynamics of social power relations that establish and reify them, drawing on CRT and DSE. However, it does not reflexively reject race and dis/ability as identities, noting that students will experience meaningful enabling and disabling, liberating and incarcerating consequences in schools and other social institutions (Newell & Healy, 2022). Broderick and Leonardo (2016; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011) described how Whiteness and ableism co-construct identities of what it means to be a smart and good student.
Liberatory Counternarratives
The counternarrative principle in Tenet 3 logically extends CRT’s core principle to lift up marginalized perspectives to disrupt dominant oppressive paradigms (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). This principle served our study, as it did for Nortey’s (2022) research on the perspectives of African American women teachers who identified strengths of racially marginalized students as exculpating evidence when conventional deficit assessments rendered those students as having dis/abilities. Likewise, this DisCrit principle informed Leverett’s (2022) study of students marginalized by ableist and racist systems who were asked their opinions on the validity of disciplinary and pedagogical interventions.
Empirical research on discipline reform suggested that, even when restorative practices reduced suspension rates overall, racialized discipline gaps remained unless staff and policy makers directly confronted White supremacy alongside discipline reform. In this vein, we looked to critical restorative justice (Knight & Wadhwa, 2014) and culturally responsive schoolwide restorative practices (Lustick, 2016, 2021) conceptually for how they combined systems reform and equity. In essence, they worked to “restore” generations of systemic and institutional harm, by both promoting more student-centered practices and ensuring that these practices did not replicate traditional patterns of power.
One clear theme in the literature review above on disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification was that scholars talked about disproportionate outcomes without directly addressing the actors, policies, and practices causing and promoting them. On reflection, we realized that policy makers and practitioners followed this pattern, too, and that even we, when we tried to talk about this issue in the active voice, struggled to do so. This, in turn, guided us back toward DisCrit’s first tenet, with which we were able to consider the implicit masking of institutional racism and ableism.
Methods
In 2019, we conceived this project as a conference to foster dialogue among researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists concerned with racially disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification. We wanted them to develop the outlines of work in their respective areas: a new research agenda, a compendium of promising accountability practices, skeletons of accountability policy at district and state levels, and an activist agenda to pressure and compel those efforts. However, because the pandemic made that impossible, we pivoted in September 2020 to an interview-based study in which we had these conversations serially and analyzed them for convergent and divergent themes.
Participants and Data Sets
We recruited 20 participants as a purposeful sample of people who were engaged in disrupting either disproportionate discipline, classification, or both (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Breckenridge & Jones, 2009). The research team knew 16 of them through our individual prior work—research, professional development, and service to the profession—and we had previously approached them for their interest in the conference we proposed. We recruited four participants through snowball sampling on the recommendation of the initial recruits (Robinson, 2014). In this research iteration of that larger project, we formally obtained their consent to be human subjects. Our sample skewed toward researchers and practitioners, although some participants straddled multiple categories. For example, two practitioners were county-level administrators who set policy and regulations for member school districts. One activist was also a dis/ability inclusion researcher.
Sample limitations
Activists and policy makers are underrepresented here. Furthermore, two of the policy makers served the same district as presidents of the school board. Despite these limitations, our data analysis revealed notably common themes among all participant groups.
Data set
Our primary data set was 30 interviews, supplemented by documents that the participants volunteered as further detail and elaboration. We held two rounds of interviews via video conferencing. Two thirds were individual interviews, and the remainder were focus groups within each participant category.
The first round explored participants’ understanding of how accountability might be done differently in a direct-responsibility paradigm. The preamble to the first-round interviews asked participants to consider an analogy from remedies for police brutality: Much of the research and accountability policy to date has been framed in terms such as “x% of African American students were suspended,” or “y% of Latinx males were identified as having speech and language disorders,” etc. That way of putting it is in the passive voice. We are interested in what it might be like to recast the same issue in the active voice. We are defining an active voice perspective as one which considers the policies, practices, structures, and actors that produce disproportionate discipline (and/or) dis/ability classification. A good analogy is the language used to frame police brutality. It is widely recognized as unacceptable to stop at declaring that a victim “was shot” or that definable groups of people “were profiled” inappropriately. There are actors, policies, and practices to ferret out, confront, and reform to bring about justice. We believe something similar could be done in education. With that in mind, we would like to ask for your thoughts on what a new agenda might look like that explored that reframing.
In Round 1, we gathered district strategic plans, policies, and guidance, and the minutes and presentations of district accountability committees (see Table 2). Having analyzed the first-round data for emergent themes, we conducted a second round of interviews (see Table 3) with a member-check protocol (Koelsch, 2013) to see if the participants validated the themes we derived, how they might therefore elaborate on those themes, or how they would correct us if we were wrong.
Participants
Data Inventory
Analysis
Within a grounded-theory method, our team conducted open and axial coding in a shared digital database (Salmona et al., 2019). We performed an interrater reliability test of coding with the first 10 interview transcripts. Next, we applied sensemaking analysis in general (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Paull et al., 2013) and with respect to antiracist leadership (Evans, 2007), examining not only the explicit arguments participants made but also the limitations and omissions in their positions. To maintain interrater reliability, we developed a single coding book, paired two researchers to code each transcript and document, and regularly reviewed our analyses as a full team (Cho, 2006; Welsh, 2002).
Coding strategy
Once every researcher was familiar with transcripts of the first-round interviews, we brainstormed a set of codes from which we developed a book of definitions and examples. Initial codes were induced from the data, not meant necessarily to fit DisCrit theory, although several researchers on the team were already conversant with that theory. We then grouped them into superordinate “parent” categories—(a) intentional institution, (b) interventions and practices, (c) orientation and sensemaking, and (d) power—each of which contained “child” codes. Table 4 includes samples from the code book within the parent group power.
Code Book Excerpts
Next, we created new parent codes informed by DisCrit, which became the emergent themes reported here. The parent codes at that stage were (a) student agency, (b) ecological or holistic perspective, (c) racialization, and (d) yes, but. . . counternarratives.
Positionality of the researchers
We have individually researched germane issues of racially disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification. Several of us have also been administrators, policy makers, and activists. We used our rich networks of contacts to recruit participants. As noted, such networking was the original impetus for bringing us together as conveners of a conference, from which we pivoted to conducting an interview study. Because this study explicitly examines intersections of identity and ableism, we present the diversity of our identities in Table 5. Beyond these identity labels, each of us has experiences of marginalization that inform our careers as educators and scholars as well.
Researcher Identities
Findings
We identified four major themes in the data. First, although our participants were consistently frustrated with the old paradigm and recognized the need for a new one, they struggled to articulate a new paradigm in policy and practice. Second, they saw increased student voice in discipline and classification processes as promising. Third, they advocated the use of ecological or holistic considerations about the student(s) in those discipline and classification processes, Finally, they acknowledged that current reform efforts were race-evasive.
Change the Status Quo, but How?
Most participants endorsed reimagining practices and policies, but rarely went further to describe alternatives to the disparate impact paradigm. Several responded with minor changes to the existing focus on disparate impact. For example, one activist called for federal mandates to examine disproportionality data. In his view, a federal imperative would raise the stakes for those data analyses.
A policy maker shared a local version of democratic accountability by having local families and students review disparate impact data. A researcher echoed this grassroots empowerment impulse with more research collaborations among (a) locally engaged practitioners, students, and families; and (b) academic colleagues among the “silos” such as special education, general education, and bilingual education. Both the policy maker and researcher who pointed to those democratizing tendencies also cautioned that the power relationships among people doing the work would need to be explicitly addressed to avoid reproducing the oppressive status quo.
Participants spoke in broad principles for change when asked about a new paradigm. For instance, one researcher suggested that a new model of classrooms “might decenter control and instead center care and relationships, and really valuing who our students are as opposed to trying to control what our students are doing.” Others focused on institutional racism and oppression in school systems such as Response to Intervention (RTI) and PBIS. One practitioner thus wanted to push beyond limited discussions of disparate impact as solely “the result of the intentional acts of racist people.” However, she did not define more fully how an expansive conversation would be different.
Of the four participant groups, practitioners most consistently identified restorative practices (RPs) and multitiered systems of support (MTSS) as promising responses to disproportionality. One district-level administrator wanted to see practices like restorative circles being used routinely by teachers, because such a circle was “a safe and structured way to have conversations that may be a little challenging to have.”
Interviewees saw potential in restorative practices because they were still seldom practiced and continually relied on disparate outcomes as their measure of progress. Practitioners wanted to identify which schools used restorative practices and to what degree. Two administrators shared a strategic plan to “train all school administrators in the use of restorative circles conferences and related best practices and ensure strong implementation across schools.” It measured success by the number of leaders trained and suspension rates disaggregated by race. Analytically, that plan asked, “Did the training of principals and school staff on restorative and culturally practices lead to improved practices and processes in schools?”
One activist wondered if research could show “how many schools are doing [restorative justice], what [is] the proportionality of schools, and what are their success rates.” This inquiry could point the analytic lens at the school rather than at the student. This activist measured success as a drop in disproportionate suspension. That truth claim—while introducing a new perspective on the workings of the institution—implied that disparate impact data were still primary. Similarly, one policy maker—a school board member—wanted district administrators to query whether restorative practices were meeting their goals to reduce suspension and discipline of BIPOC students.
Practitioners regarded MTSS as a similarly promising but underused reform. They looked to MTSS protocols for monitoring student progress and teachers’ fidelity to research-validated interventions to demonstrate meaningful change. For example, two district administrators shared their strategic plan on disparate impact. That plan contained numerous measures for making MTSS ubiquitous, although fidelity checks for adults were less common than progress monitoring of students. Furthermore, whereas student progress monitoring data were to be disaggregated by race, gender, and dis/ability to measure disparate impact on students, there was no such attention to progress monitoring to measure disparate implementation by adults. Neither did the plan highlight the need to see if the research-validated practices were themselves culturally responsive to the diversity of the student body.
In sum, participants believed that disrupting disproportionality lay in implementing RPs and MTSS robustly, and in engaging stakeholders in data review. They regarded those moves as fledgling challenges to the status quo. However, this challenge was mostly tactical. Below, we explore areas in which the participants were clearer about possible paradigm shifts.
Highlighting the Possibilities of Student Agency
In member-check interviews, nearly all participants validated the following finding from Round 1: “Present policies and practices for discipline and classification are applied to students, sometimes for students, rarely with students, and almost never by students.” Participants said that students advocating for themselves could produce real change. To that end, they articulated the need for a counternarrative by students marginalized by racism and ableism. However, the self-advocacy was primarily to be done by individual students when their own fates were on the line, rather than challenging educators or institutional practice and policy. In this, we saw a theme of accountability achieved primarily on a case-by-case basis. This limitation indicated our participants’ struggle to conceive of how significant accountability for White supremacy and ableism could make maximum use of student counternarratives.
One administrator did describe a change in practice to enhance student agency in MTSS. She wanted students to select interventions they saw as most relevant for themselves. In the vision, we absolutely want it to be wrapped within an empirical frame, that we are not pulling rabbits out of a hat, but kids are actually informed on what best practices are in terms of what that needs to look like for them, and then how to advocate for those best practices.
In this example, students had a limited degree of agency in choosing from a menu of research-validated interventions offered by adults. They might choose one they felt was a promising fit. Leverett (2022) has described a similar limited example of student choice. Notably, the “empirical frame” was limited to therapeutic interventions applied to students, avoiding any change in adults’ practice or decision making.
This version of student agency in MTSS aligned with student agency in restorative practices. They thought that restorative circles could provide avenues for students to present context for their behavior, their reflections on what they needed, and their goals in resolving particular conflicts. Participants advocated these measures as alternatives to punitive discipline and, perhaps, the conventionally unquestioned judgment of adults. One school board member illustrated this potential from the students’ perspective: “Find out what are the situations that are making us forget the ID or come to class late. Talk to us and find out what are the reasons.” All right. And so, then it goes back to, it’s not always because the student is necessarily doing something wrong. It’s because the adult assumes that they know the answers, why the students are doing something, and that’s why they deserve to be suspended or whatever, right? So, I think how it works is always to have student representation. And then, number two, to talk to the students and find out what’s going on. And you’ll find out that there are some valid reasons.
Case-by-case student voice was specifically not student voice on broad policy and practice. Practitioners and policy makers pointed to detailed strategic plans written by committees on ameliorating racially disproportionate suspension and classification as evidence. However, they did not mention students providing counternarratives in policy development.
Student agency in policy review
We heard one contrasting example on policy and practice when students might join discipline review committees. A researcher was optimistic about this practice in general, and the two school board members talked about one such committee in their district. The researcher reflected, I think districts and schools should invest in institutionalizing the practice. That is not the pet project of a superintendent or a principal. There is a commitment institutionally to have that as a significant structural feature of the way things are done at the district. That means supporting students getting organized, having assistance for them to select their leaders, and to have some kind of feedback loop between those leaders and the rest of the student population to keep them honest and straight.
One board member offered the minutes of the district’s Student Code of Conduct Review Committee. He noted that the committee included student members to demonstrate their commitment to “providing a ‘safe space’” for students to collaborate with adults as equal partners. Although the minutes did not identify any individual members’ contributions, it did summarize their policy recommendations, such as “removal of ‘gray’ language that is punitive and not applicable to the current student population.” The committee reported to the Board of Education that a revised code of conduct’s “language should reflect a more preventative, proactive, and positive, and student-centered approach that does not penalize students for adolescent decision-making.” That focus on language could be understood as questioning the power of adults to interpret disciplinary codes too broadly and without reference to the diverse student cultures of the district. However, this was the most direct data point we have on challenging such power.
Student agency in research
Eight researchers discussed participatory methodologies to shift the paradigm. One was skeptical about those methods, given that participation can be performative or superficial, rather than substantive: I see a trend in other areas of research claiming that they do a participatory approach. But the question of the power struggles involved in doing that work is rarely examined. . . . Just because we feel that we should go and ask students, get them involved, and make sure that they have agency doesn’t mean that it’s going to work out that way. There is always a power differential that needs to be checked and examined throughout those processes.
She felt that when academics use nominally participatory methods, they ought to insure equitable authority for students in research design, implementation, and analysis.
We saw these examples of greater student agency in research as similar to the hope that the school board member and district administrator placed in more student agency. However, the researchers’ optimism differs from others by focusing on student agency that can explicitly address institutional power. We consistently encountered this tension between increasing student agency for its own sake and student agency that could meaningfully challenge institutionalized power.
Ecological and Holistic Considerations to Deconstruct Racism and Ableism
We identified a broad theme that in the status quo, participants wanted schools to expand beyond a particular behavioral incident or set of academic achievement in deciding students’ fates. They believed using more expansive contexts might deconstruct the conventionally ableist and racist student identities in those decisions. Status quo discipline and special education determinations narrowed the data to identify students as either well- or ill-behaved, either academically normal or dis/abled. Participants pushed back against these established social constructions by calling for broader contexts and analyses, which they variously called “ecological” and “holistic.”
Furthermore, they described two versions of a broader holistic or ecological framework. One holistic/ecological analysis could include factors in an individual student’s life such as their home, community, or health. Another analysis could expand to include the school context around the student. This second model might consider the role of teachers, policies, and practices.
Ecology of the student
An ecological focus might include home, community, economics, and health in the data of discipline or classification analyses. One administrator of group homes for adjudicated adolescents called it the need to “look into the backstory.” Another high school administrator would include the student’s home in a holistic analysis: That understanding doesn’t just lend itself to the students’ sense of being in the school space. It’s all of the things that contribute to his or her life. That means what their family dynamic is, that means that they have to cook for brothers and sisters or pick them up from school, if they have to work to pay the rent. . . . So those are the things that give us perspective.
A third administrator’s version of that holistic analysis expanded from home into issues of mental health in disciplinary determinations. As evidence, she offered strategic plans for PBIS as an alternative response to unwanted behavior: Well, I think so often we are blaming the behavior of the student on their home life or them, and we’re detaching from the fact that chronic stress, chronic poverty, the things that our students are dealing with, the effect of that on brain development. And we’re just treating the behavior and not looking deeper that so much of the behavior, it’s not an intentional behavior, it’s just a function of the brain.
In this excerpt, holistic analysis included diagnostic considerations of “stresses,” possibly leading to therapy rather than punishment.
These examples still reflected deficit thinking. Each holistic analysis identified more things possibly wrong with the student: home life or the effects of that life on their brains. We also heard a counterargument from one researcher not to let ecological or holistic considerations devolve into deficit attributions: I think grappling with the definition and the assumptions of the idea of ecological is important because I could hear, for example, people taking a more deficit-oriented traditional approach to dispro-portionality saying, “We’re going to take an ecological approach. Look at those neighborhoods, they have violence, they have lead paint, and that means they’re broken. They need to be fixed.” And we’re being ecological by saying, “We’re paying attention to the things that surround their experiences.” . . . It’s the search for more categorical answers. Is there a problem? Are these kids to be blamed? Do they need fixing? As opposed to a different set of questions. I mean, that’s what is needed behind the ecological perspective to understand the dynamic and changing circumstances, not only of the sights but the experiences.
These attempts to broaden the analysis in important decisions were hopeful, but limited. They went past the behaviors and performances of each student, but could nonetheless still locate the problems exclusively in the student’s world.
Ecology of the school
Researchers and practitioners were willing to examine the school ecologically. Examining the classroom environment impact on discipline and classification, one high school administrator described a conventional attitude from teachers who used dis/ability screening and discipline referrals to remove unwanted students from their classrooms, never expecting to have their own role in the academic or behavioral trouble scrutinized. She spoke here in that typical teacher’s voice: “All I’m doing is just pushing the student out because that’s easier for me. And the system doesn’t make me show what I did, in terms of pedagogy, in terms of remediation, to try and help the student and develop that skillset that he or she is missing.”
By contrast, she wanted analyses that would examine teachers and students with equal rigor in terms of their strengths and challenges to improve accountability and to compel culturally responsive pedagogy.
One administrator spoke about how school ecology shaped not only a particular student’s circumstances at the point of decision, but also how the school’s disciplinary and dis/ability classification policy and practice regularly functioned. I absolutely see that oftentimes we hold students to behavioral expectations that we haven’t either included them in terms of what that means and what that needs to look like in practice in that particular space. We don’t do a really good job of reconciling behaviors that are accepted in the community and in the home with what needs to play out in a school community in order to really be in an environment that’s conducive for learning.
She noted that the school defined a learning environment that may be culturally inconsistent with a student’s life outside school and thereby set them up for conflict. She stopped short, however, of defining whether school should expand its expectations or whether school should work harder to assimilate students to the status quo.
Ecological analysis reified deficit analysis
We saw that both forms of ecology analysis could lead to deficit thinking. One strategic plan for discipline reform recommended cultural responsiveness to avoid that trap. A culturally responsive approach requires us not to conceptualize the problem as a deficit within the learner, family, or culture; rather, our initial conceptualization should focus on ecological factors such as instruction, curriculum, and classroom management. By focusing on ecological factors, we are not situating the problem within the student or family; instead, we are ensuring that the learning environment is optimal for the student. If the learning environment is not optimal, we must first fix that problem before asking what is wrong with the student and family.
This passage’s injunction to “first fix” the environment for learning was significant. It instructed leaders to take responsibility for how their schools contributed to conflicts with students.
However, the subsequent implementation guidance abandoned that commitment. Instead, it focused on student flaws, rather than how problem-solving teams could avoid deficit thinking by “reframing” pertinent information. For example, it suggested that adults might shift from seeing an academic problem as being a “within-student” shortfall such as “They do not care about their education” to “The students do not have the reading skills to complete the homework.” Adjusting from student won’t to student can’t complete their homework was still a deficit analysis.
The holistic or ecological approach had a minor impact on the disproportionality paradigm. Participants saw some promise in expanding analyses beyond the conventional analyses that were only about the immediate circumstances surrounding a student’s disruption or poor academics. More just processes could perhaps use broader context, but were still limited by two factors. First, they often maintained deficit thinking. Second, they superficially examined the school’s policies, practices, and educators for their roles in disproportionate outcomes.
Racism Obscured by Nominally Neutral Policies and Practices
All participants endorsed our finding that policies and practices on disproportionate discipline and classification masked profound racialization with apparently race-neutral language. This was true in both dis/ability classification and discipline. A researcher and an administrator saw that disaggregating disciplinary data by race would not necessarily expose underlying racist assumptions.
Schools that are continuing to do things business as usual are unaware of the impact, or don’t mind that impact. That they see that that impact is not of their doing, but they think that there is disproportionate misbehavior that students of color are doing, and that White students are not misbehaving and therefore the system is working.
There is a core of beliefs that those policies were generated from. And that is based on a middle-class, White perspective of how students should behave and how they should act. And we see it all the time . . . in policies about dress code or hair or that students are being disciplined for and those types of things directly correlate to who they are.
Likewise, disaggregating dis/ability classification data by race would not expose racialized assessment norms. Special education activists and researchers described the special education system as using apparently neutral diagnostic processes as proxies for racial exclusion. One activist pointed to the historic uses of special education following the Brown decision. “Special ed was used as a means to segregate right from the start. And if you understand that, then maybe you can see that the patterns have not gone away.”
A researcher deconstructed the prevalent ideology that “special education by design is a race-free space.” When students struggled academically in the classroom, teachers saw those struggles as “race-related issues,” until they referred those students for special education screening. In special education, “students are transformed to this two-dimensional existence: able or disabled” without reference to any other identity. Initially, when students’ behavior or academics departed from the norm, educators tend to racialize that deviance. However, special education’s medicalized discourses deemphasized race in favor of a binary of able or dis/abled.
Minutes from a district’s discipline review committee showed a similar erasure. The committee analyzed authorities’ overreliance on punishment, which they called a “threat to our district.” They rooted that threat in the Code of Conduct failing to have “an approach that allows students to exercise proactive/preventative decision-making skills, strategies, and/or techniques necessary for the Global 21st Century learner.”
In this example, the committee’s nominally neutral language obscured de facto racism. It potently identified a “threat” embodied in “an approach,” without explicitly naming either race or the actors who issued the threat or took the approach. However, they did explicitly identify students who might be “allowed” to act in a socially acceptable manner. The committee’s focus on racially disproportionate discipline indicated that educators were “allowing” minoritized students to develop the social emotional learning (SEL) techniques, but with no reference to culturally responsive SEL. Similarly, the goal of developing “Global 21st Century learners” camouflaged any cultural diversity among students.
Limited Counterexamples in Policy Documents
Several artifacts evidenced limited counterexamples of active accountability for disproportionality. One practice guidance document focused leaders’ attention on evidence of culturally responsive pedagogy during classroom observations. Another strategic plan for a county district included direct goals, strategies, and effectiveness measures for schools and educators.
The guidance document on supervising culturally responsive pedagogy suggested coaching questions and observation criteria, which aligned with other themes in the data. For example, the coaching advice included asking teachers how students might “shape the learning environment,” which aligned with our finding on the limited increase in student agency. Furthermore, leaders were to consider how they supported teachers, “to create space in their classroom for students to reflect on their own identities, beliefs, assumptions, and values.” This universal encouragement for inclusivity soft-pedaled any direct accountability for institutional racism.
The strategic plan was more elaborate but showed evidence of similarly restricted change. The plan’s overall purpose was reducing racial achievement gaps in six areas: disparate discipline, special education classification, graduation rate, access to advanced courses, student achievement, and hiring minoritized educators. While it proposed elements that held adults and schools directly accountable, the plan rigorously measured those elements with outcomes for students, but vaguely with outcomes for adults and schools.
The document laid out professional development and program development strategies. In the disparate discipline section, administrators should maintain a “Focus for Black Students.” This included training all school administrators in restorative practices and “ensur[ing] strong implementation across all schools.” The plan proposed two data points to measure that goal’s effectiveness: (a) the percentage of administrators trained, and (b) the number and percentage of Black students receiving discipline referrals and suspensions compared to students of other races, disaggregated further by gender and the type of infraction. However, they notably omitted measuring how many teachers or administrators wrote referrals.
The plan called for measuring how many leaders got trained in restorative practices. However, it measured neither how many of those leaders implemented the practices they learned, nor how often they did so. The plan accounted for how many students received referrals and suspensions, but not how many leaders wrote them. It disaggregated the punished students by race and gender, but not the adults who disciplined and suspended them or the ones who used restorative alternatives.
This inconsistent rigor between examining the impact on students and the actions of adults was telling. The plan had a clear lens for examining student outcomes, but an opaque one for interrogating adult actions. Thus, the plan represented a promising but minor power shift. It did not yet have accountability mechanisms that matched its strategy for “strong implementation” of restorative practices.
Discussion and Implications
In conclusion, this study shed light on the paradigm of disparate harm in the context of accountability for disproportionate discipline and dis/ability classification in education. While participants recognized the need for more nuanced decision making on a case-by-case basis, they struggled to articulate comprehensive shifts in policies and practices that would hold institutions and individuals accountable for justice in disciplinary and classification processes.
The study highlighted the emergence of an analysis aligned with DisCrit theory (Annamma et al., 2016), emphasizing the intertwined influences of racism and ableism on schools’ perceptions of normal and preferred academic and behavioral standards. The participants expressed some hope in approaches like RTI/PBIS, MTSS (Bornstein, 2017a), and restorative practices (Gregory et al., 2017) as means to mitigate disproportionate suspensions. However, accountability measures primarily focused on the impact on students rather than examining the actions of adults.
When participants sought to expose institutional racism within these systems, they pointed out educators’ racialized judgments. They recommended expanded student agency, such as student self-advocacy in discipline and classification determinations, particularly in conjunction with restorative practices (Leverett, 2022). The study also emphasized the need for holistic or ecological analyses in discipline and dis/ability determinations, considering factors such as a student’s community, history, family, and potential experiences of trauma. This finding aligns with research on challenging socially constructed deficit identities related to race and dis/ability (Fallon et al., 2012; Nortey, 2022).
However, the participants’ discussions centered neither adult nor institutional responsibility, hindering their ability to envision accountability that directly confronted systemic White supremacy. To address this limitation, potential reforms arising from this study could include amplifying student voices in due process and granting them meaningful oversight of school practices, as well as requiring comprehensive considerations of students’ circumstances in disciplinary and classification processes.
In terms of theory, this study affirms several tenets of DisCrit theory (Annamma et al., 2016). First, it emphasizes the disproportionate impact of disciplinary practices and dis/ability classification. Second, we see the need to transform accountability frameworks to address systemic injustices and structural racism. Third, the study points to the importance of counternarratives and student agency, and, finally, to the significance of holistic analyses to challenge deficit-based narratives.
As noted in the introduction, this study was originally conceived as a conference to engage dialogue among practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and activists, but pivoted to an interview study in which we made the connections as a team. Our limited findings point to the rich possibilities for such a dialogue in real time, from which the participants themselves could publish their contributions. We have drawn on a similar conference and book as part of the DisCrit framework here (Fenning & Johnson, 2022).
We believe this study points toward policy reforms, implementation of student voice in due process, accountability audits, explicit recognition of institutional racism, and exploration of restorative approaches to institutional accountability. It encourages ongoing engagement among researchers, activists, practitioners, and policy makers to envision a new approach to disproportionate school discipline and dis/ability classification.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Authors
JOSHUA BORNSTEIN is associate professor of educational leadership at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Bornstein’s research interests are in social justice school leadership.
HILARY LUSTICK is assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Lustick’s research interests are in social emotional learning, restorative justice, and equity in urban public schools.
LACHAN V. HANNON is director of teacher preparation and innovation at Rutgers University–Newark. Hannon’s research interests are in culturally responsive school–parent partnerships, teacher self-study, and teaching for social justice.
LAUREN SHALLISH is associate professor of critical disability studies at Rutgers University–Newark. Shallish’s research examines the hyper-labeling of multiply minoritized students and how constructs of ability and dis/ability are framed in higher education equity work.
NATHERN OKILWA is associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include educational and life outcomes of underserved students, the preparation of school leaders to support diverse learners, and educational policy.