The Weeds: We Need to Rethink Discipline in Schools
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.

Hi, guys. Today, we have an episode of The Weeds, a Vox Media podcast that helps us understand how policy impacts our lives. In this episode, the host, Jonquilin Hill, talks to Frances Pearman, a professor of education at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. They look at school discipline and how discrimination and segregation in our schools leads to achievement gaps between black and white students.

It would be a good listen anytime, but it's a particularly good listen today, Juneteenth. We'll be back on Thursday with a new episode of On with Kara Swisher. I'm Jonquan Hill, 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.

But 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 about 10 more seconds than their white counterparts.

for cars to yield to them at a crosswalk. Wealthy 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 polling precincts. 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 untangle the factors driving the achievement gap, I knew just who to call. My name is Francis Pearman. I'm an assistant professor of education at Stanford University. Not too long ago, Pearman did a study on race and 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 v. Board of Education, which is a landmark Supreme Court case that was about sort of promoting integrated schooling environments. So 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, and that's racial achievement disparities and socioeconomic achievement disparities. There's a number of factors that 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

plague 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, A, 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. I was interested in 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've 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, like, did you get a bad test score because someone called you the N-word at school? Like, how are these biases expressing themselves in ways that impact test scores? That's right. And that's such a good question. And why I find this question really interesting, right, 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, right? Now, the scale of the project that I'm referring to allows us to examine what we might consider

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, right? And you can think about a number of explanations, right?

You know, one might have something to do with like funding disparities, right? School funding has long been a topic of interest for folks who think about and consider kind of 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.

funding disparities between Black and white students, and maybe that's predictive of the achievement gap that we're referring to. Another might have something to do with access to early childhood educational opportunities. We know that test score disparities are identified at kindergarten entry, and in some cases grow in the years following that. So maybe it's something to do with access to early childhood opportunities and maybe 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 black

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, you know, how unprecedented it was. But the person who administered the test said,

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 and the broader structural factors and policies that could be a link between sort of collective 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. In many school districts, they operate as you just mentioned, which is a certain subset of students are tested for services, 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 a group of students who voluntarily or that teachers identify as

for gifted and talented placements. In districts that adopt universal testing, racial disparities in 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. This is The Weeds. We're back and talking with Stanford's Frances Pearman 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, we're

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, where 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, over 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. You know, a student might be sent home. There's also sort of more extreme forms like expulsion where you're sending a student away from the school entirely.

But 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 like school arrests or like law enforcement referrals. Right. 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?

Yeah.

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 is as helpful and promotive 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, are 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 understand

really interrogate instances of exclusionary discipline, understand the ways in which they're being meted out in unfair ways, meted 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, you know, 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 socio-emotional skills that actually do benefit a 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 outcomes.

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 that 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 was

plays some factor, right? Now, how race plays the factor is the next question, right? But we know that race is a part of this story. We also know 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. For instance, we know teachers are more likely to gaze at Black students when they expect

problematic behavior of the classroom overall. So if a teacher is anticipating there 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 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 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 of 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 students

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

or more problematic than others. When 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 rambunctious, 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 behaviors.

characteristics that's necessarily problematic. It's problematic because of our behavioral expectations based on the ways in which we structured schooling, right? You can imagine a situation in which, you know, 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 important, right? Yeah.

The irony there is, you know, any you look sort of as children age, you know, there's no there's very few jobs or careers which require the kinds of things that we expect students to have, you know, from grade K through 12. 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 that

school systems, individual schools, right, vary quite a bit in how they organize the learning environment. There are some schools, for instance, that prioritize the type of rote 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 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. An 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 students

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 content, rather than following along and following a productive trajectory, being based on rich, engaging, innovative teaching, it's fear of getting in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fear of getting out. Yeah, I mean, it's ringing true. Like, yeah, I'm gonna color inside the lines because I'm not trying to get in trouble, right?

Yeah, I'm not trying to get sent home. I want to know. Yeah. Yeah. But again, why that matters, right, JQ? 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 the years, right? And we're talking about innovation. I'm not just talking about it 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 for a better world, 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 sort of 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? So really what we're thinking about, what a lot of folks are thinking about now is, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, especially at the time and even now, I think, OK, I understand where 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 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 going to 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? Or do you say like, hey, this is real life. And like, yeah, you're going to have to be way more on top of it than people who don't look like you.

That's right. And 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 one respect, you can think about schools as preparing students to engage as the world is, right? Equipping 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 type of schooling that we organize is also one in which Black and brown students will be disproportionately exposed to these disciplinary practices.

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. It's The Weeds. I'm Jonquan Helm.

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 many ways to reform or think about school discipline differently. Let's just talk about suspensions, just as a for instance. The easiest way from a policy perspective to address those inequalities is to do away with suspensions, right? If you can't suspend a student, then 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 more extreme in nature, right? Like a student gets suspended or expelled for some big behavioral offense, right?

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 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, right?

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 the criminal justice system, less likely to graduate high school, less likely to go on to 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 an infraction that that student sort of experienced, 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 and 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 use my check to buy school supplies for the class. Like 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 and 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? There are 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 resourced, 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 do a lot. Okay, I see. I understand. Do you think, 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, you know, 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 deeper 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 will, but we also have to have the sufficient knowledge base to draw from in crafting and organizing and moving those agendas forward. And we're sort of in the mix of that 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.

Should you maybe come teach with us at Addington like yesterday? Look, 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. Well, we're all about focusing on the kids who have the best chance of making it out. 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, you

Is your success based on how best you know how to survive and navigate white supremacy? And I mean, I realize 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, OK, like, well, what is the purpose of school? Like, who are we educating and what for? I, too, saw that episode. I'm 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 exist.

is narrowly defined and how it is often defined in relation to existing systems of power. Oftentimes what that means today is sort of success is oftentimes deemed in relation to whiteness, right? Proximity to whiteness, right? How well you can sort of exhibit standards, behavioral standards, cultural standards that align with middle-class white American cultural mores, right?

lead to more opportunities, right? And the backdrop for the conversations you mentioned happening on that show, right? These are white teachers, right? These are white teachers having conversations 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 abhorrent 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 sort of 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 what 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 on...

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 our 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. Now, to be fair, I mean, this is, you know, federal government has been tracking these over time. But my point is there's more that 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 programs.

Pretty extreme outcomes, right? Whether students 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, 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, Francis Pearman, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks, JQ. That's all for us today. Thank you to Francis Pearman for joining me. Our producer is Sophie Lalonde. Krishna Ayala engineered this episode. Anouk Dussault fact-checked it. Our editorial director is A.M. Hall. And I'm your host, Jonquan Hill.

This episode is part of a collaboration between Vox and Capital 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.