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Discipline, the Achievement Gap and the Law Urban Education, May 2004 CG Education Advisory Board Member Richard Arum's new book, Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority, continues to receive praise from experts in the field of education. A review
in the May 2004 edition of Urban Education (an academic journal) praises the book for avoiding standard ideological positions
to arrive at a groundbreaking analysis:
"Arum's careful analysis of school discipline becomes so focused and revealing
that the ideological boundaries of the debate seem almost to have been suspended.
The result is a rich and original book, bold, important, useful, and--as this
combination of attributes might suggest--surprising."
The reviewer, Steven VanderStaay, a professor at Western Washington University,
points specifically to Arum's analysis of "the relation of African American students'
test scores to school discipline."
"Results suggest that for African-American students, achievement may be provocatively
associated with a disciplinary context perceived as both strict and fair. . .
. [Arum writes,] '[T]hese racial differences in the association between school
discipline and test score results have increased significance owing to related
racial differences in reports of the level of strictness of school discipline.
Specifically, African-American students were more likely than white students to
experience school settings that were either the most lenient or the strictest--settings
often perceived as unfair and thus poorly designed for cognitive development.'"
The reviewer continues:
"I could find no research devoted to this point or to Arum's question of how
achievement may be related to a school's disciplinary climate. In this sense,
although not unexpected, Arum and [co-researcher] Way's finding is nonetheless
remarkable. After all, the Black-White test score gap is widely recognized as
the most important education problem of the age. Given the scores of researchers
who have previously analyzed these data sets, why has no one else noticed that
the gap may disappear under disciplinary settings that Black students recognize
as strict and fair?"
Arum's book, VanderStaay says, explores "how this situation came to be. That
is, inasmuch as an overly lenient school context may be as deleterious as an overly
punitive one, why do we attend to one extreme and not the other? If we've long
known the advantages of a 'warm but firm' disciplinary context, why is it that
firmness in school discipline is more objected to than supported?"
A sociologist, Arum "anchors his study of school discipline in Durkheim."
"[Dukheim] asserted that school rules needed to be internalized by children before
they are followed and that both fairness and punishment have a role to play in
this internalization: fairness because internalization depends on a child's acceptance
of a rule as legitimate, and punishment because it provides the backing that shores
up the rule. Durkheim states, 'It is not punishment that gives discipline its
authority; but it is punishment that prevents discipline from losing this authority
which infractions, if they went unpunished, would progressively erode.'"
How did school discipline lose its authority? To answer this question, Arum turned
to an exploration of the institutional and legal environment surrounding education.
Working with Irenee R. Beattie, he identified and analyzed "'every court case
that made its way to the state and federal appellate courts and involved contestation
of school discipline' between 1946 and 1992"--more than 1,200 in all. From this
analysis, Arum was able to outline "several distinct historic periods of court
climates related to school discipline."
"Relatively few challenges to school disciplinary procedures occurred prior to
1965. . . . [T]he period from 1969 to 1975 saw the greatest increase in legal
challenges to school disciplinary practices. This period, which Arum and Beattie
call 'the students rights contestation period,' was heavily influenced by the
civil rights movement and the broader societal expansion of individual rights.
In the most important case of the period, Goss v. Lopez (1975), the U.S. Court
extended due process guarantees to students facing suspensions. In the authors'
view, the upshot of this period . . . was to take authority for school disciplinary
practices away from the schools and transfer it to the courts. This 'produced
skepticism about the legitimacy of school disciplinary practices' and 'undermined
teachers' willingness to exercise authority' (p. 3), creating an 'organizational
legacy' of weak schools unable to establish safe, orderly, and educative classroom
climates. (Interestingly, Arum notes that this legacy is as much a product of
perception as precedent. In his view, schools, although weakened by the case law
in this period, retain more authority over disciplinary practices than they tend
to assert."
In later chapters of his book, Arum also draws attention to the "counterproductive
nature of zero-tolerance practices and other authoritarian measures that students
recognize as strict but not fair."
"Most importantly," VanderStaay writes, "Arum keeps before the reader the singular
insight that students perform best in school disciplinary contexts that are orderly,
strict, and fair, and that, when asked, students describe the desirability of
such contexts."
The review concludes by briefly exploring some of the implications of Arums book--most
notably, the question of whether rules intended to create fairness in public education
are, today, serving the intended beneficiaries.
"The weight of evidence and argument presented in Judging School Discipline raises
the larger question of whether interventions designed to prevent harm and stop
oppression have reached a point of diminishing return for the students they seek
to serve. . . . Have we reached a point in history where such students are better
served by approaches designed to foster achievement and resilience?"
***
Richard Arum is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Humanities
and Social Sciences in the Professions at New York University. He is the author
of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools
(Harvard, 2003), which examines decades of evidence to uncover how the developing
legal context has shaped school discipline. Mr. Arum has also published in numerous
scholarly journals, including the Annual Review of Sociology, Sociology of Education,
and American Sociological Review. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University
of California, Berkeley, and a M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard
University Graduate School of Education. Mr. Arum worked for six years as a teacher
in the Oakland Public Schools.
Steven L. VanderStaay is an associate professor in the Department of English at Western Washington
University, Bellingham, where he teaches courses in language arts methods, literature,
and linguistics. | |
