I wrote a research paper in my sophomore year for an education class about school discipline. Attending different affinity clubs for Black students on campus, I noticed how often in discussions around K-12 experiences, the topic would come up, with peers providing their real-life examples and experiences engaging with the school-to-prison pipeline. I remember being shocked — not at the suspensions and expulsions, I had seen that happen countless times in my own life —but the catastrophic effects school discipline was having on some students versus others. I became curious as to how more severe forms of school discipline were being doled out between Black students. Was it purely gender, I wondered? What role did class play? And were there any differences across ethnic groups, based on whether students were African, Caribbean or African-American?
I had no expectations of a particularly novel breakthrough. First of all, my data collection took place through qualitative surveys through Google Forms, and I couldn’t have gotten more than a dozen responses. However, one finding in particular has stuck with me — that demographics of the school overall played a significant role in how students perceived school discipline and its aftereffects. Specifically, the more Black students and Black staff members a school had, the less extreme they reported school discipline and any feelings of disproportionate distribution when compared to those of other races.
On the one hand, this should not be immediately obvious. Historians have long documented the ways in which Black communities hold each other to higher expectations and call for harsher punishments when these expectations are not met, seen for example in James Forman Jr. Pulitzer-Prize winning Locking Up Our Own about the 1980s War on Crime. Any Black woman who was once a Black girl can also likely speak to contemporary examples of being scolded by an “aunt” for showing too much skin, or just as much skin as any other White counterpart. That being said, having spent my most formative years in a majority-Black school with a large Black staff, I knew from personal experience the ways in which our Black teachers tried their best to steer us away from trouble, always preferring stern course correction over formal academic punishment. The research suggests the same, confirming the impact encountering a Black teacher has on school discipline for students, with multiple, potential mechanisms at play.
What is the objective of school discipline? Beyond the more lofty goals of an education of making students independent, preparing them for careers, exposing them to information, teachers have a duty first and foremost, to keeping students safe. This can mean keeping them safe from each other and it can mean keeping them safe from themselves, and covers a range of behaviours that almost all educators seek to eradicate from schools, from physical fights to underage drinking to stealing to sexual harassment.
But what are the ways in which school discipline goes too far? Calls for safety are often synonymous with calls for policing and surveillance, that counterintuitively create increasingly learning environments for students that resultantly feel unsafe. Actions put in place to keep students safe, moreover, can place them more squarely in the face of danger, through consequences and punishments that undermine students’ sense of self, put forth self-fulfilling prophecies, and rob students of opportunities that would allow them to exist peacefully as children and in the future as adults too. That being said, conversely and controversially, there are also ways in which we miss the mark with school discipline by not going far enough. We allow for dynamics in which we fear students or their families and go against our better judgment in failing to draw boundaries and following through when they have been violated. We place low-expectations for behaviours on students, and lower them further, sometimes from a place of well-intentioned care and sometimes from a place of unconscious ambivalence. Harm is created either way.
How do we reframe the ways in which we consider the objectives of school discipline — systems, methods, and protocols put in place to deter and respond to negative behaviours and actions in educational settings — and its effectiveness? How might we honestly evaluate the role of race, gender, class, ethnicity, language, ability and more in our approaches to school discipline and our quest for more equitable implementation? What kind of a world are we perpetuating to our students with the approaches that exist now and what would we like to see, both to the ends of our imagination and also keeping in mind the present realities that bind us? How do we keep our kids safe?
There was a school once that within the same six-week period, suspended all four of its first graders. I know this because I watched it. Three of them were little boys, one a little girl. Almost all of them dealing with trauma and instability, exacerbated further by being forced to miss days as a consequence cognitively incomprepehsncible given their age. They would throw books, jump on tables, scream at the top of their voices, run out of the classroom. I watched this too. Teachers were well-meaning, and so were administrators, all exhausted as to how to serve these students best, as well as the other twenty-something students they were charged of taking care of.
I walked in to the cafeteria one lunchtime and saw one of the students climbing on to the off-limits stage and proceeding to run around in circles. Nearby stood an adult waving her hands and narrating his emotions and pleading for him to come down. “I see you’re so excited to be on the stage. I really want you to come down and have your food so we can go outside.” More students walked in, confused at first and then they too began to vibrate slowly from dysregulation. I walked up to the adult, smiled and indicated if I could jump in, to which she nodded with relief. I kept smiling up until I got to the stage, found the students’ eyes and whispered loudly, “Stop. Get off.” He froze. Then immediately disembarked. I called him over, gave him a hug, complimented him, and pointed to his lunch. He sat.
This worked with this student. Not always, but often enough for staff members to notice and remark on my effectiveness. One day, I kept close to that student and followed him around, affirming him during his best moments, and firmly shutting him down during his more difficult moments. I had to leave midday and returned the next day to find he was absent. He was suspended, it turned out, for tearing up the classroom. When I went home later, I cried.
We can think of school discipline as having two central and interlinked functions. Deterrence, made possible by making clear the expectations within the educational context, and consequence, which takes place when those expectations are not met. But to ensure that these goals are met, we have to implement approaches to school discipline that are responsive and restorative in their enactment, prioritising teaching and care as we should with all aspects of schooling.
Teachers are often faced with a million split-second decisions to make, with many of them involving when to intervene and when to ignore student behaviour. Influencing these decisions are the social identities students and their teachers hold, with common examples being the extra leeway boys are given to be aggressive with their peers, and the stricter ways in which we push girls to be neat and proper. Teachers many times fall in to the trap of either over-correcting or under-correcting behaviours, when what might be most effective is responding directly to the intention. I saw this time and time again with my teachers in middle and high school, who never labelled me as rude or disrespectful — even when I was — and chose instead to deal with my moments of frustration as an opportunity to help me address underlying stresses and anxiety, though always after letting me know when I had gone too far and drawing that line in the sand. This to me was a sign of a good teacher and that responsive approach happened most often with Black educators and staff, but also other adults who saw my humanity and my childishness and were intent on pushing me to grow.
Furthermore, as important as it is to address behaviours in that moment, follow-up must be made too, with the objective not being to exclude, make an example, or punish, but to restore harm, provide alternative positive behaviours, and affirm to students their place in the community. When students violate boundaries put in place to promote the safety of themselves and others, removal should be the absolute final option. Not only do we send a message to others on the conditionality of their existence, but we deny all involved the opportunity to right wrongs and try better next time. In my K-12 experience, the suspensions and even the expulsions that I saw always rocked the school community, and even in the minor incidents prior to that, staff were intentional of checking-in and building and strengthening relationships. When students did have to leave in accordance to the boundaries set forth by the school, the adults always tried to support those transitions into other educational contexts and beyond. This responsiveness and restorative approach modelled to me an approach to school discipline that was firm and loving, both of which are essential to ensuring students experience the safety without which learning is impossible.
I met a six-year-old who had been asked to leave his school before the year was up. On his first day, he began shouting during a story and then threw a chair when asked to do work. He would get up at different points of the day, walk over to the door, and keep turning back to see who was watching. If you called him back, he would leave out without a word. If you said nothing, he would still leave, but upset.
The first time I saw the behaviours, I immediately told him to stop. No narration, no question, no negotiation, I told him to stop. He huffed and puffed and he did. I complimented him repeatedly and gave him a hug and told him how proud I was. Soon after, we were back again, albeit it with less huffs and puffs. Months of this song and dance, until we would eventually go hours and then days without incident. Most of the time. Some of the time.
School discipline is hard because it feels like we’re always doing it wrong. There is always more we could do and less we should have done. We should have responded earlier or we tried a restorative approach too late. But learning in public, trying to do better, and articulating to our students how we are struggling and inviting them to be a part of finding solutions is how we can start. Seeing myself grow from the examples set before me, I want to make sure that I am doing my best to keep all of my students safe. My best might not always be right, but it gets better every time. My students do too.