Race in education policy: school safety and the discursive legitimation of disproportionate punishment

ABSTRACT

Interventions instated to disrupt the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color were repealed as a result of the US Education Department’s 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report. Using a critical policy and critical discourse framework, this paper examines how the language used in the report facilitated the process of repeal while concealing the insidious effects that the repeal could have on students of color and especially black students. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that education policy discourse is influenced by and supports the covert operation of white supremacist ideological structures that hinder the struggle for equity and justice in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse analysis
• policy analysis
• discipline policy
• race
• school safety
• educational policy

Ten years ago, the Obama administration launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative, a coordinated effort between the US departments of education and justice, to mitigate the destructive effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on students of color.¹ This effort prompted, among other things, the development of a ‘legal guidance’ that cautioned schools to avoid violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disproportionately punishing students of color (US Department of Justice and US Department of Education 2014b). On March 2018, the Trump administration formed the Federal Commission on School Safety (FCSS) to ‘review safety practices and make meaningful and actionable recommendations of best practices to keep students safe’ (DeVos et al. 2018, 6). Nine months later, the FCSS issued a report recommending (and eventually leading to) the repeal of the Obama-era guidance. Repeal of the guidance was one policy recommendation, among many, for increasing school safety in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and other school shootings in the US.²

The repeal prompted a backlash from various educational organizations which articulated concerns about severe consequences, including the criminalization and push-out of students of color (Educators for Excellence 2018). The repeal would also likely fail to reduce school shootings as suggested by the lack of empirical evidence linking school discipline policies and school shootings (US Government Accountability Office 2020), empirical evidence disconfirming the assumption that harsh discipline policies make schools safer (APA Zero Tolerance Task Force 2008), and the fact that more than half of school shooters (51%) are not students (US Government Accountability Office 2020).

The ease with which this decision was made and enforced despite the backlash and lack of evidence is testament to the fact that education policy is significantly influenced by white supremacist ideology (Diem and Welton 2021; Dumas 2016; Kohli, Pizarro, and Nevárez 2017; Parker 2003). Understanding how this influence is exerted and facilitates the legitimation of unjust policies that disproportionately burden students of color is crucial for uprooting white supremacy from education policy.³ To this end, this paper analyzes the FCSS report which, arguably, is significantly influenced by white supremacist ideology.⁴ In doing so, it examines the white supremacist underpinnings of education policy – particularly school discipline policy – and the discursive mechanisms that support them.

Context and rationale

White supremacy in education policy

For almost three decades, educational researchers have been discussing the racialized dimensions of US education policy as well as manifestations of white supremacist ideology therein. Scholars have shown that a variety of K–12 policies harm students of color by compromising their ability to succeed academically and diminishing their life prospects. Well-known examples of racialized policies include: (1) school choice and other forms of privatization that facilitate public school disinvestment and school closures that disrupt communities and disproportionately harm the most vulnerable students; (2) court-sanctioned residential racial segregation and localized school funding policies that together enable vast funding discrepancies between white and nonwhite students and keep majority black schools under-resourced; (3) standardized testing, curriculum tracking, and other sorting mechanisms that consistently advantage white students at the expense of students of color; and (4) exclusionary discipline policies that in conjunction with a predominantly white and racially biased teaching workforce diminish the academic and life prospects of students of color (Diem and Welton 2021; Ledesma and Calderón 2015).

In addition to their broad scope and far-reaching implications, scholars have shown that such discriminatory and harmful policies are couched in racialized discourse that allows them to evade scrutiny and be accepted as legitimate solutions to educational problems (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Kohli, Pizarro, and Nevárez 2017). By evoking deficit thinking to justify harsh policies that target marginalized students (Valencia 1997), evading references to race and race-based explanations of systematic racial inequalities (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Frankenberg 1993), or providing meritocratic justifications for persistent race-based outcome inequalities (Au 2016), education policy discourse facilitates the coordinated use of seemingly race-neutral policies that harm students of color and lends public legitimacy to policy ideas that systematically produce racial inequality (Schmidt 2008).

The racialized impact of education policy materializes at all levels of the policy process. At the implementation level, street-level bureaucrats enact policies in a discriminatory fashion. For instance, racially biased schoolteachers and administrators overly punish students of color and disproportionately refer them to special education, while disproportionately referring white students to gifted programs (Staats 2014; Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007; Whitford, Katsiyannis, and Counts 2016). At the formulation level, white supremacy is embedded in policies and laws (Ledesma and Calderón 2015; Lynn and Parker 2006; Parker 2003). For instance, the segregation we observe in contemporary US schools is largely the result of past government interventions that enforced housing policies stipulating separate neighborhoods for whites and nonwhites (Rothstein 2017). Such policies facilitated the establishment of segregated schools and, in doing so, denied students of color access to educational opportunities (Orfield et al. 2014). Importantly, desegregation efforts that began after the US Supreme Court declared legally sanctioned racial segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education have been thwarted by post-Brown court decisions, even when desegregation has been voluntarily undertaken (McNeal 2009; Orfield and Frankenberg 2014).

White supremacy in school discipline policy

Racial disproportionality in school discipline rates is typically assumed to be attributable to biased implementation (Girvan et al. 2017; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Okonofua and Eberhardt 2015; Skiba et al. 2014), and often is as can be inferred by the subjective nature of the infractions students of color are disproportionately punished for (Girvan et al. 2017; Okonofua, Walton, and Eberhardt 2016; Skiba et al. 2002). However, scholars have shown that disproportionate punishment is also facilitated through policy formulation (Curran 2019; Kennedy-Lewis 2014; Skiba, Eckes, and Brown 2009; Skiba, Eaton, and Sotoo 2004). For instance, Curran’s (2019) examination of federal and state statutes and district policy documents demonstrates that expulsions are stipulated more extensively at the local level and are used for a wider range of infractions in districts serving primarily marginalized populations. Skiba, Eckes, and Brown (2009) also found that US court decisions have enabled the disproportionate punishment of students of color by dismissing racial disparities as proof of discrimination in the absence of proof of discriminatory intent and deferring to school officials’ disciplinary authority.

Disciplinary disproportionality is especially problematic in the US because in recent decades it has rapidly increased. To illustrate, in 1972–1973 the suspension rate for white and Latinx students was 3% and that of black students was 6%. By 2011–2012, while the punishment rate for white students reached 5% (a 70% increase), that of Latinx students more than doubled reaching 7% and that of black students almost tripled reaching 16%. While black students were only twice as likely to be suspended in the 1970s, they now are three to four times as likely (Losen et al. 2015). Starkly, the disparities for girls are even worse with black girl suspension rates being six times those of white girls in 2011–2012 (Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda 2015). Similar discipline gaps have been observed outside the US, including in the UK (Carlile 2018; Gillborn 2005), Canada (Gebhard 2013; Salole and Abdulle 2015), Australia, and New Zealand (O’Brien and Trudgett 2020; Taylor and Kearney 2018). These patterns are concerning because increased rates of exclusionary punishment are associated with decreased academic performance (Fabelo et al. 2011; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Morris and Perry 2016) and involvement in the juvenile justice system (Fabelo et al. 2011; Mallett 2016; Skiba, Arredondo, and Williams 2014).

The disproportionate funneling of students of color, and especially black students, into the juvenile (and eventually criminal) justice system is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. In the US, this funneling is the result of severe disciplinary measures, known as ‘zero tolerance.’ Originating in the criminal justice system, zero tolerance policies operate under the assumption that severe punishment of small infractions will prevent big infractions (Hanson 2005). Zero tolerance policies were firmly established in schools with the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994 and were intensified over the next two decades due to media narratives about increasing school violence and extensive media coverage of school shootings, despite a great decrease in adolescent violence (Mallett 2016). Schools with zero tolerance policies increasingly hired in-school police officers (School Resource Officers or SROs) and authorized discretionary enforcement of severe disciplinary sanctions to avoid infractions that compromise student safety (Hanson 2005). As a result, minor infractions that merited minimal, if any, reprimand were increasingly likely to lead to student arrests and involvement in the juvenile justice system (Bleakley and Bleakley 2018; Javdani 2019; Mallett 2016; Nolan 2011). The school-to-prison pipeline is intricately tied to white supremacy by feeding mass incarceration and maintaining the racial status quo (Alexander 2012; Pettit and Gutierrez 2018).

The FCSS report as exemplar of racialized education policy discourse

This is the context in which the Obama administration’s Supportive School Discipline Initiative was developed. As part of the initiative, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) took measures to limit unlawful discrimination, investigated reports of discriminatory punishment, and disseminated the aforementioned guidance to inform schools that discrimination includes different treatment as well as disparate impact (Lewis, Garces, and Frankenberg 2018). The OCR policy compelled schools to avoid overly punishing students of color, on grounds that such punishment violates antidiscrimination laws (US Department of Justice and US Department of Education 2014a).

In response, the Trump appointed Federal Commission on School Safety (FCSS) published a report recommending the repeal of the Obama-era guidance arguing that it made schools unsafe (DeVos et al. 2018). Three days after the report’s publication the Trump administration rescinded the guidance (Vara-Orta 2018). Given that the FCSS was commissioned to solve the problem of mass school shootings (DeVos et al. 2018, 5–6) predominantly committed by white students (Shahid and Duzor n. d.), the recommendation to rescind a policy protecting students of color from harsh punishment falsely associated school shootings with students of color. In doing so, it justified discipline policies that target students of color – especially black students – and sustain the school-to-prison pipeline.

The Trump administration’s association of school safety with severe discipline policies is, of course, not surprising. A close look at education policies that stipulate severe disciplinary measures, like zero tolerance, reveals that school safety has historically served as the primary justification for their enactment (Hanson 2005). As a ‘discourse of safety’ pervades school discipline policy and is used to justify disproportionate punishment (Kennedy-Lewis 2014), further inquiry into how school safety facilitates the legitimation of discriminatory discipline policy becomes necessary.

The FCSS report exemplifies how the discourse of safety facilitates the legitimation of discriminatory discipline policy. Not only does it stipulate the permissibility of racially disproportionate punishment, but it also articulates a comprehensive argument to delegitimize and provide grounds for rescinding policy enacted to protect students of color. The FCSS report is, therefore, a blueprint for how white supremacist ideology pervades policy discourse, legitimizing discriminatory policy and delegitimizing equitable policy. Given the recency of its publication, limited research critically evaluates the report’s implications for school discipline. Extant research merely discusses the unsubstantiated link between school discipline and school shootings that the FCSS postulates and the perverse incentives that the FCSS provides for diverting school funding from important educational resources, like teacher salaries and support services, toward security and policing (Losen and Martinez 2020a, 2020b). However, there is much to be gleaned from the report about the relation between white supremacist ideology and the discourse of safety, the ways in which the discourse of safety legitimizes racially disproportionate punishment, and the ways in which education policy discourse justifies the enactment of racist policy and the reversal of racially just policy.

Methodology

The paper uses the FCSS report as a case study to examine how education policy discourse (1) constructs white and nonwhite students and (2) promotes and/or conceals white supremacy. The main focus is Chapter 8 which discusses the Obama-era guidance and addresses discipline policy and the role of race therein. However, reference is made to other relevant chapters. The analysis combines critical policy, critical discourse, and social constructionist frameworks.

Ball (1993) conceptualizes policy as text and discourse: the product of (1) communicative processes related to politics and power and (2) social processes that are interpreted, constructed, and acted upon in ways that affect the world. Policy, so conceived, is discursive in nature and a contested field of meaning where power manifests in language and legitimizes one worldview over another (Watts 1992; Yeatman 1990). Critical policy analysis emphasizes language and power manifestations therein, critiques ideologies that legitimize hegemonic culture, is explicitly political, exposes inequities along lines of race, class, and gender (among others), and prioritizes advocacy and praxis (Ball 1990; Diem et al. 2014; Grace 1998; Prunty 1985). Critical discourse analysis complements critical policy analysis by examining how linguistic functions in policy texts relate to power or reinforce power relations (Taylor 2004). It bridges micro level (discourse, language structure, etc.) and macro level (power structures, ideological apparatus, etc.) (van Dijk 2001) by connecting policy to power structures and revealing how discourse bolsters ideology (Titscher et al. 2000).

The present analysis applies Fairclough’s (1989, 1992) three-dimensional framework which describes the linguistic properties of a text, interprets these properties vis-à-vis the processes of production and interpretation the text undergoes, and explains how these processes reflect and inform social structures and practices. The framework also underscores interdiscursivity: how ‘instances of language use’ combine multiple genres – ‘uses of language associated with particular socially ratified activity types’ and discourses – ‘ways of signifying experience from a particular perspective’ (Fairclough 1993, 135). In applying the framework, the analysis describes what the FCSS’s language use accomplishes, interprets the text considering the white supremacist context in which it is embedded to show what the report communicates, and explains how the report’s discourse reflects and affirms the dominance of white supremacist political structures. Moreover, it demonstrates how FCSS policy discourse combines hegemonic genres (policy report, case law, and scientific article) and discourses (formalist and positivist).

The analysis builds on social constructionist accounts of policy problems and target populations. For social constructionism, what constitutes a policy problem depends on what political actors portray as such and the stories they craft to describe harms inflicted, determine who deserves blame, and establish with whom lies responsibility for redress. ‘Causal stories’ advanced by political actors purport to explain the mechanism by which a problem is created, provide solutions, and assign blame justifying punitive action (Stone 1989). In addressing school shootings, the FCSS report crafts a causal story that associates the problem with students of color – a powerless policy target-population – by stereotyping them, ascribing them negative meanings, and presenting them as ‘deviant’ and deserving of burdens imposed on them (Schneider and Ingram 1993). To examine the implications of this causal story, the paper situates race ‘at the center of policy analysis’ (Parker 2003, 156), challenging ahistorical interpretations and showing how neutrality conceals racist underpinnings (Parker 2003; Tate 1997).

The report was coded using a framework based on both external theoretical lenses and the intrinsic features of the text analyzed (Adair and Pastori 2011). Excerpts selected for analysis included instantiations of racist tropes (normalization Young 2006), color-evasiveness and frameworks thereof (Bonilla-Silva 2014),⁵ deficit thinking (Valencia 1997), racial markedness (Urciuoli 2009, 2011), dichotomous thinking (Collins 1986, etc.), which, in combination with linguistic forms (word choice, grammar patterns, intertextuality, etc.) and functions (making assumptions, opposing or prioritizing choices, legitimizing or delegitimizing actions, enhancing or concealing agency, etc.) used in the report, demonstrate how the FCSS policy discourse is influenced by and supports white supremacist ideology (Fairclough 2003; Gee 2004).

Data analysis

Racial neutrality and the normalization of whiteness

The accumulation of research on the ineffectiveness of zero tolerance discipline policies and the catastrophic effects that such policies have for students of color (Skiba, Eckes, and Brown 2009), renders the FCSS’s support of zero tolerance vulnerable to accusations of, at the very least, racial insensitivity. However, the FCSS insulates itself from such accusations by maintaining its purported neutrality and circumventing these two difficulties.

First, the FCSS circumvents the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of zero tolerance by ignoring questions of whether its policy recommendations solve the problem of school shootings and instead focusing on implementation. This is evident from the first paragraph of Chapter 8:

Teachers are often best positioned to identify and address disorderly conduct at school. … Teachers can help correct—and where necessary, discipline—those behaviors that are unwelcome or unsafe for the school community. Maintaining order in schools is a key to keeping schools safe. Federal policies that adversely impact maintaining order in schools should be corrected. (DeVos et al. 2018, 67)

This paragraph reveals a series of assumptions: the first sentence establishes that the only question under consideration is ‘who can deal with disorderly conduct?’; the existence of ‘disorderly conduct’ in schools is taken for granted, and so questions such as ‘what constitutes (dis)orderly conduct?’ or ‘who gets to decide what counts as (dis)orderly?’ are sidestepped. Similarly taken for granted is the need for disorderly conduct to be ‘identified,’ ‘addressed,’ ‘corrected,’ and even ‘disciplined,’ which is also predicated on the taken-for-granted assumptions that ‘keeping schools safe’ requires ‘maintaining order’ and that ‘disorderly conduct’ includes ‘unwelcome or unsafe’ behaviors. While the FCSS’s aim is school safety, the conjunctive relation between ‘unsafe’ and ‘unwelcome’ behavior postulates these different types of behaviors as equivalent and equally problematic even though unwelcome behaviors need not be unsafe. These assumptions prompt readers, who like the authors are immersed in white supremacist ideology, to accept the reality and problematic nature of disorderly conduct in schools and to associate such conduct with both unsafe behaviors and behaviors that diverge from safety-independent standards often associated with whiteness (Khalifa 2010).

Second, the FCSS circumvents accusations of racial bias by establishing its alignment with nondiscrimination, declaring its commitment to justice, embracing neutrality, and disassociating disparate impact from discrimination. These discursive strategies are important because Chapter 8 makes recommendations that are likely to produce racial disparities and challenges the legitimacy of a policy intended to protect students of color from discrimination.

One of these strategies involves declaring a commitment to justice by invoking liberal values such as fairness, equity, and racial neutrality:

This Administration is committed to ensuring that educational programs and policies are administered in a fair, equitable, and racially neutral manner that does not result in unlawful discrimination. (67)

Taken out of context, these values appear compatible with one another and with social justice. However, when existing social institutions are racially biased and systematically reproduce racial inequalities, neutrality maintains those inequalities and therefore fairness and equity require rejecting neutrality for compensatory measures that prioritize the benefit of those who have been systematically disadvantaged. Neutrality, then, masks relevant inequities and legitimizes policies that align with white supremacy. Moreover, these values are narrowly conceived by the FCSS which is committed to ensuring that ‘educational programs and policies are administered in a fair, equitable, and racially neutral manner,’ not that they are fair. This qualification is also observable in the subordinate clause, where the FCSS establishes that fair, equitable, and racially neutral policy implementation ‘does not result in unlawful discrimination.’ By implication, any treatment deemed lawful is considered by the FCSS to be fair, equitable, and neutral, even if in practice it is discriminatory and the law is influenced by white supremacist ideology.

Another discursive strategy for maintaining neutrality in the face of evidence to the contrary involves setting a high standard of proof for what constitutes discrimination such that only intentional discrimination is considered discriminatory while non-intentional discrimination in the form of disparate impact remains compatible with fairness, equity, and racial neutrality:

Title VI protects all students … from being treated differently based on their race, color, or national origin. … The Guidance relies, however, … upon an implementing regulation of questionable validity to argue that Title VI prohibits … evenhandedly implemented policies that may nevertheless have a racially disparate impact. (70)

Indeed, the Guidance told schools that even ‘neutral,’ ‘evenhanded’ application of school discipline policies—the administration of policies without racial animus or discriminatory intent—can potentially violate this regulation. (71)

The use of terms like ‘evenhanded’ and ‘neutral’ to describe policy implementation in the above excerpts signals the FCSS’s commitment to neutrality and by implication the Obama administration’s partiality. By stating that evenhanded implementation of discipline policies ‘may nevertheless have a racially disparate impact,’ the FCSS distances itself and the policy process that it is charged with overseeing from the impact of this policy. The disparate impact is produced not because of but in spite of evenhanded policy implementation. As white supremacy and its impact remain invisible to, and thus unaccounted for by, the FCSS, neutrality is implicitly assumed to be the gold standard of policy and so could not possibly be the problem. The legitimacy of neutrality in policy implementation is further established through the language used to describe Title VI, which is framed as protection from ‘being treated differently’ instead of protection from being discriminated against.

Nonetheless, in an education system where whiteness is ‘normalized’ (Young 2006), decisions regarding what behaviors are ‘disruptive of the educational process’ (DeVos et al. 2018, 71) and merit punishment are inevitably informed by white norms that determine what the educational process ought to look like and what constitutes disruptive behavior. When policy ignores race, the white norms that guide seemingly neutral evaluations are concealed and students of color who are unable or unwilling to conform are constructed as deviant and deserving of punishment. Their cultural backgrounds and experiences are devalued and they become alienated or are altogether excluded from the educational process (Khalifa 2010). Instead of increasing the objective status of education policy, failure to take race into account allows the white supremacist ideology that influences ‘social cognition’ – the shared knowledge, beliefs, representations, ideologies, norms, attitudes, etc. that permeate and control social imagination and the public mind (van Dijk 1993) – to legitimize punishment that disproportionately impacts students of color who are less likely to conform with white norms and whose behavior, for this reason, is more likely to be perceived as being disorderly, unwelcome, and unsafe. This prospect is heightened in US public schools, as those with disciplinary power are more likely to adhere to white norms than students – most public-school students are nonwhite (52%) and most public-school teachers (79%) and principals (78%) are white (National Center for Education Statistics 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). In a society characterized by power imbalances and racial hierarchies, then, a commitment to neutrality inevitably supports white supremacy by allowing it to function uninterrupted and concealing its effects, making it difficult to identify and challenge.

Racial markedness and the invisibility of whiteness

Another discursive feature through which the contradiction between the FCSS’s professed neutrality and its endorsement of a discriminatory ineffective policy remains concealed is the racially marked status of people of color, which stands in stark contrast with the unmarked status of white people (Urciuoli 2009, 2011). Markedness prompts interpretations of the report that associate white students, whose race remains invisible, with anything inconspicuous (commonsensical, normal, safe, etc.) and nonwhite students, whose race is highly visible, with anything conspicuous (unreasonable, deficient, dangerous, etc.). The unmarked status of whiteness combined with the use of color-evasive discourse conceals the predominant role of white students in school shootings and exaggerates the marginal role of students of color. This ‘inversion of social reality’ (Frankenberg 1993) is accomplished through the evocation of ‘deviance’ as a characteristic of students of color and especially black students in the public mind, which leads to the implicit association of problematic or dangerous student behavior with students of color. In the FCSS report, markedness distorts reality through ‘manipulative silences’ (Huckin 2002) and ‘deficit thinking’ (Valencia 1997).

Manipulative silences

Manipulative silences ‘conceal relevant information from the reader or listener, to the advantage of the writer or speaker’ (Huckin 2002, 351). One salient example of manipulative silence in the FCSS report concerns the characteristics of school shooters and shootings. School shooters are mostly white with limited disciplinary problems. School shootings are most likely to occur in schools located in rural and suburban, white, low poverty, and low crime areas (Bushman et al. 2016; Livingston, Rossheim, and Hall 2019). Instead of disclosing this relevant information, the FCSS quotes a government report, suggesting that ‘there is no accurate or useful “profile” of students who engaged in targeted school violence’ (DeVos et al. 2018, 49, citing Vossekuil et al. 2004) – the report cited does mention that 76% of attackers were white and 63% had never or rarely been in trouble in school (Vossekuil et al. 2004). This selective reproduction of the report is misleading because, even though there may be no universally useful profile of school shooters, the fact that school shooters are mostly white is at least useful with regard to their racial profile (Shahid and Duzor n. d.). More pertinently, the whiteness of school shooters may itself be a contributing factor in school shootings as suggested by the fact that, although white and nonwhite students have similar access to guns, rates of mental illness, and rates of victimization and bullying (factors to which school shootings are usually attributed), white students are much more likely to be school shooters (Gregory 2020).

The selective use of intertextuality – the incorporation of one text into another – in combination with the evasion of school shooter demographics it facilitates, enables the FCSS to influence the way in which the report (including Chapter 8) is interpreted as regards their policy’s target population. If the only information about school shooters that government experts confirm is that there is no accurate or useful profile for school shooters, then the target population of proposed policies is irrelevant. Silence regarding school shooter demographics, therefore, allows the FCSS to include recommendations that disproportionately target poor students of color from urban schools who are less likely to be perpetrators. Such manipulative silences can be found in other policies that disadvantage students of color. Scholars, for example, have noted silences regarding the consequences of being tracked in special education that enable the avoidance of resistance to tracking from parents of color (Rogers 2011) and regarding the interests of Latinx populations that enable the tailoring of dual language education programs to the interests of white Anglo populations (Freire, Valdez, and Delavan 2017).

The insidious effects of manipulative silence on school shooter demographics are underscored when the implications of the recommendations most likely to affect students of color are compared to the implications of the recommendations most likely to affect white students, such as increasing mental health services or decreasing cyberbullying (DeVos et al. 2018, chapters 2–4). The implication of emphasizing mental health conditions and bullying victimization as contributing factors of school shootings is that school shooters may not be fully responsible for their actions. This may induce alternative causal stories for readers cognizant of school shooter demographics that downplay the agency of and reduce blame attributions toward white shooters (DeLeon 2012). The more reasonable measures for preventing school shootings that are recommended in chapters not targeting students of color, strikingly stand in stark contrast with the zero-tolerance approach supported in Chapter 8 that is used to address even trivial misbehaviors of students of color. This contrast implies that while ‘problem’ behaviors of white students can be ameliorated through constructive measures, ‘problem’ behaviors of black students are beyond repair and merit severe punishment. For instance, while in Chapter 3 which addresses mental health the FCSS suggests that schools should ‘minimize lost class time’ and ‘keep students out of juvenile justice systems,’ in Chapter 8 which addresses racially discriminatory punishment they suggest increasing the ability of schools to administer ‘out-of-school suspensions and expulsions’ or ‘refer matters to law enforcement’ (DeVos et al. 2018, 29, 32, 68). Here, again, we observe the operation of white supremacist ideology which justifies the harsh treatment of racially marked, and presumably dangerous, students, while affirming the need to support ‘regular’ (unmarked) students in need.

Deficit thinking

The marked status of students of color, and especially black students, is further accentuated through deficit thinking. Deficit thinking (Valencia 1997, 2010), or deficit ideology (Sleeter 2004), involves stereotypical deficit-ascriptive language and postulates that the reason why marginalized groups like students of color are disadvantaged is their inherent deficiency (Gorski 2011). Deficit thinking has been found to influence teachers’ disciplinary practices (Gregory and Mosely 2004), so it is not surprising that it appears in the FCSS’s discussion on school discipline. The report primarily includes student-centered deficit discourse which attributes discipline gaps to problematic student behavior. This form of deficit thinking appears in references to students with ‘behavioral patterns’ of ‘disorderly conduct,’ ‘mentally or emotionally unstable children,’ ‘disruptive or violent students,’ and ‘problem behaviors’ of students which compromise student safety (DeVos et al. 2018, 67–70). The report also includes community-centered deficit discourse which attributes discipline gaps to deficient communities: ‘students come from distressed communities’ (68). This deficit depiction of students as ‘unstable,’ ‘disruptive,’ and ‘violent’ evokes images of nonwhite students – who in the public mind are associated with inherent deviance, delinquency, and danger – and legitimizes harsh disciplinary approaches as necessary for preserving student safety.

Deficit thinking further allows the FCSS to explain away discrimination in ways that cohere with white supremacist narratives that dominate social cognition:

There may be other [i.e., nondiscriminatory] reasons for disparities in behavior if students come from distressed communities and face significant trauma. (DeVos et al. 2018, 68)

The color-evasive language of the above excerpt invites the reader, whose conceptions of race are shaped by hegemonic white standards and corresponding deficit narratives about people of color, to interpret the behaviors of students of color as objective misbehaviors that are a natural outcome of living in ‘distressed communities’ and facing ‘significant trauma.’ If the behaviors of students of color are objectively problematic, those students must be removed to protect the educational process. It is no surprise, then, that students of color are punished at higher rates than white students. Disproportionate punishment is assumed to be a ‘natural’ outcome of ‘natural’ – albeit regrettable – circumstances (Bonilla-Silva 2014). Notice also how the FCSS in the above excerpt moves the locus of disparity from punishment to behavior, reframing the problem of disciplinary disparity from a systemic problem of public education to an individual problem of students exercising their agency inappropriately. The problem is not one of disparities in punishment that are the result of a school system that incentivizes punishment, privileges white behavioral norms, and gives often racially biased white schoolteachers and administrators too much disciplinary discretion. Rather it is a problem of disparities in behavior between white students whose behaviors are appropriate (i.e. adhere to white behavioral norms) and students of color whose behaviors are inappropriate (i.e. fail to adhere).

The assumption that all problems are attributable to individuals rather than systems, permeates the entire argument advanced by the FCSS in Chapter 8. The point is not only that students misbehave and that their misbehavior is attributable to being raised in distressed communities, but also that the logical solution is punishing the wrongdoers to correct their behavior. The possibility that we ought to make structural changes to the unjust social system that imposes unacceptable and distressing living conditions on certain populations, is not congruous with the FCSS’s white supremacist individualistic and naturalizing assumptions of what a functional social system looks like – namely, that it is shaped by the individual choices that people make and naturally generates outcomes that validate the white supremacist status quo (Bonilla-Silva 2014). This is the reason why deficit discourse targets individuals rather than systems. The problem is distressed communities and unstable, disruptive, and violent students, not distressing social institutions and a biased education system that sets up students for failure.

Silencing evidence while amplifying deficit

Importantly, the legitimation of deficit interpretations of student behavior in the FCSS report is accompanied by relative silence regarding well-known and extensively researched implicit racial biases (Staats 2014). Insofar as bias is mentioned, its significance and magnitude are downplayed as causes of observable patterns of racial inequality:

[The concern to avoid scrutiny] can lead to school administrators closely scrutinizing individual teachers’ disciplinary practices for real or imagined evidence of racial bias, while ignoring the underlying causes of student misbehavior. (DeVos et al. 2018, 69)

The use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued. (70, citing Wright et al. 2014)

Without negating the presence of racial bias on the part of teachers, the conjunctive ‘or’ in the first excerpt that connects ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ evidence depicts the presence of evidence that there is bias, on one hand, and lack of evidence, on the other, as being equivalent and so equally unimportant. What is important is established in the subordinate clause which contrasts what school administrators are doing to what they are not, though they should be, doing. Through the negatively charged term ‘ignoring,’ the FCSS presents inattention to the causes of student misbehavior as problematic and in doing so assumes the existence of student misbehavior. This assumption centers nonwhite student misbehavior as the main object of concern and downplays the role of racial bias in diagnoses of misbehavior. The second excerpt moreover attenuates the force of racial bias by suggesting that it may be exaggerated, further concealing the white supremacist ideology that often influences disciplinary decisions.

Silencing empirical research on racial bias in punishment further allows the FCSS to counter extensive empirical evidence with school faculty and staff testimonies, as if these disprove decades of research:

Students who are allowed to stay in school after gross offenses amp up their behavior in order to see how much they’ll get away with without consequence.

There is a feeling that by keeping some students in school, we are risking the safety of students.

Without proper additional staffing and facilities to keep these students in school, staff do experience a perceived (sometimes real) safety concern.

Schools are not equipped to provide supports to mentally or emotionally unstable children. We need help. (DeVos et al. 2018, 68, citing AASA 2018)

Here, again, one observes the use of intertextuality to increase the legitimacy of the FCSS’s policy recommendations through supporting evidence. The above quotes make extensive use of deficit discourse referring to ‘unstable children’ who are presumably so criminally predisposed that when unpunished they ‘amp up their behavior,’ as if minor misbehavior is destined to lead to criminality if left unchecked (the premise of zero tolerance). This amplification, moreover, is assumed to be intentional. By suggesting that students ‘amp up their behavior in order to see how much they’ll get away with’ the speaker here ascribes epistemic purposefulness to the misbehaviors in question – the students engage in increasing misbehavior to learn how forgiving the system is for the purpose of abusing it. This statement implies that the students are fully responsible agents with knowledge and control of their actions, whose misbehavior deserves harsh punishment. The deficit discourse of the above quotes is also used in conjunction with alarmist language about ‘gross offenses’ and ‘risking the safety of students,’ once again evoking a connection between students of color and danger. This appeal to white supremacist tropes not only perpetuates false stereotypes but more problematically can lead to their confirmation by justifying the actual criminalization and push-out of students of color.

Racial oppression and dichotomous thinking

White supremacist ideology maintains its oppressive status through ‘the construct of dichotomous oppositional difference’ which categorizes ‘people, things, and ideas in terms of their difference from one another’ and presents them as mutually exclusive and hierarchically related (Collins 1986, S20). In the FCSS report, the dichotomy and normative hierarchy between white and nonwhite students mirrors that between safety and equity. In the name of safety – a value associated with whiteness – the FCSS argues for the need to repeal the Obama-era guidance which was intended to protect students of color from inequitable treatment. Through invocations of dichotomous oppositional difference, the FCSS presents the two values as incompatible and, in line with white supremacist ideology, supports the one associated with whiteness.

This false binary is accentuated by placing ‘school safety’ at the center of attention in both the name of the FCSS commission and the title of the FCSS report (DeVos et al. 2018). Given that Chapter 8 is a response to the Obama-era guidance on ‘nondiscriminatory administration of school discipline’ (US Department of Justice and US Department of Education 2014a), the emphasis on safety is set in opposition to nondiscrimination. Moreover, the report includes remarks that linguistically structure safety and equity as competing values:

Instead of focusing on safety concerns … some school leaders have chosen to avoid potential OCR investigations by eliminating the use of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, without considering the adverse impact that such practices have on school safety. (DeVos et al. 2018, 68)

Districts respond to the Guidance in whatever manner is most likely to avoid a lawsuit or federal investigation. In other words, avoiding legal jeopardy rather than achieving school safety drives decision-making. (69)

Those who spoke in support of the Guidance focused on reducing racial disparities in the discipline numbers without addressing the adverse consequences of the guidance on school safety. (69)

Discipline decisions may be based on race rather than student safety. (71)

In these excerpts, the use of oppositional terms like ‘instead of,’ ‘rather than,’ and ‘adverse’ postulates a relationship of conflict between the opposed elements of the sentence, such that they appear to be mutually exclusive. One must focus on one or the other but cannot focus on both; any improvement on one necessarily comes at the cost of the other.

The last example is the most telling as it explicitly opposes ‘race’ and ‘student safety.’ The use of the all-inclusive and unqualified term ‘student’ to describe whose safety the report writes of, portrays safety as being in the interest of all students regardless of race or ethnicity and thus as being a race-independent universal value – i.e. a value associated with whiteness which is racially unmarked. In opposition to race-neutral safety policy stands race-conscious equity policy which, as the term ‘race’ suggests, only benefits racially marked students. It follows that, since we can only enact one of the two policies, we ought to select the one that benefits all students, namely, safety. The value associated with whiteness therefore becomes the obvious policy priority.

When the policy is contextualized and its consequences accounted for, the priority of whiteness becomes even more explicit as it becomes apparent that universal student safety is in fact white student safety. Since school shootings occur mostly in white schools, white students are more likely to be the victims and so avoiding school shootings primarily increases the safety of white students. More importantly, some of the supported safety measures like SROs or surveillance systems render the school environment less safe for students of color (Mallett 2016; Nance 2017; Pentek and Eisenberg 2018; Theriot and Orme 2016), and with no conclusive evidence that SROs and surveillance systems increase school safety overall (Borum et al. 2010; Cornell 2015; Livingston, Rossheim, and Hall 2019; Reingle Gonzalez and Jetelina 2016). As such, in schools serving predominantly students of color ‘safety’ policies decrease school safety.

Interdiscursivity and appeals to authority

Another facet of the FCSS report’s discursive legitimation of disproportionate punishment is its interdiscursive nature, particularly in Chapter 8 where the FCSS combines multiple genres and discourses. The primary genre of the text is policy report and manifests in the presentation of findings and testimonies from hearings that the FCSS held with experts and stakeholders (DeVos et al. 2018, 6). In addition to the authoritative appeal of the FCSS’s investigation as a political agent, however, the report uses genres that are considered to be apolitical – namely, case law and scientific articles – and which establish the legitimacy of the report on grounds that exceed the political authority of the FCSS and compensate for any perceived lack of legitimacy that the FCSS might face as a partisan political agent (Weiler 1983). Along with multiple genres the FCSS report uses discourses associated with those genres – namely, formalism and positivism – to establish the validity of its position in apolitical, and implicitly incontestable, terms. In other words, interdiscursivity enables the FCSS to construct an argument that delegitimizes the premises of the Obama-era guidance on multiple levels and affirms the authoritativeness and legitimacy of the FCSS report.

Legal discourse

Legal discourse complements the FCSS’s aforementioned invocation of ‘lawfulness’ as a standard of fairness, equity, and neutrality, establishing both the lawfulness (and thus legitimacy) of the FCSS recommendations and the unlawfulness (and thus illegitimacy) of the Obama-era guidance. Referring to Supreme Court cases that challenge the standing of ‘disparate impact’ as an adequate ground for proof of discrimination, the FCSS argues that the Obama-era OCR’s reliance on disparate impact without proof of discriminatory intent is legally unsound, echoing the formalistic discourse used by courts to sidestep the contextual implications and real-world effects of their rulings (Greene 1989-1990):

The Supreme Court also held that the Equal Protection Clause requires proof of intentional discrimination and that disproportionate or disparate impact alone does not constitute a violation. (DeVos et al. 2018, 70)

Despite the Supreme Court’s case law in this area, the Guidance opted to interpret Title VI’s implementing regulation as sufficient to establish a disparate impact theory for certain racial groups in the discipline area. (71)

In excerpts such as these the FCSS establishes the legitimacy of its claims by appealing to the authority of the judiciary, a presumably independent and nonpartisan branch of government that, unlike the partisan legislative and executive branches, epitomizes neutrality and objectivity in the public mind. By demonstrating the Obama administration’s rejection of ostensibly objective and impartial court decisions (‘despite the Supreme Court’s case law’), the FCSS presents the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law as ‘questionable’ and ‘dubious, at best.’ The Obama administration’s interpretation of the law is further delegitimized through language that indicates the unequivocal validity and finality of Supreme Court interpretations in opposition to the questionable validity of Obama administration interpretations. The court ‘determined’ and ‘held’ while the Obama administration ‘opted to interpret.’ The court made firm decisions based on the Rule of Law while the Obama administration chose to disregard these decisions on account of interpretations of ‘questionable validity’ (70–71). Appealing to case law further enables the FCSS to affirm the legal standard of ‘proof of intentional discrimination’ that opponents of exclusionary punishment ought to meet before legitimately restricting discipline policy.

By addressing legal implications of the Obama-era guidance, the FCSS also alludes to its embrace of formalist standards to justify its race-neutral approach to legislation over the race-conscious approach espoused by the Obama administration. This argument reflects a familiar movement to stifle efforts to curb racial discrimination. Since disparate impact was articulated as a legitimate ground for determining whether a racial group has suffered discriminatory treatment in the absence of intent (or proof of intent), there has been pushback against its race-conscious nature (Greene 1989-1990; Kennedy 2013). This pushback has directly interfered with efforts to decrease racial inequality by restricting affirmative action (Kennedy 2013) and enabling mass incarceration (Alexander 2012). The FCSS’s rejection of disparate impact as a standard for evaluating school discipline policy creates a similar impediment for racial equality that manifests in a reluctance to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Furthermore, the FCSS’s interdiscursive use of legal discourse when opposing policy that challenges white supremacy, demonstrates that education policy is part of a broader network of social institutions that are ideologically shaped by white supremacy and operate in conjunction with one another maintaining the racial status quo.

Scientific discourse

As evidence-based policymaking is increasingly becoming the norm and setting the standard for good policy, the FCSS uses scientific positivist discourse to legitimize its position. This discourse is used both directly to describe policy and indirectly by referencing scientific articles. Constant reference to ‘best practices’ and ‘evidence-based’ research, policies, and practices portray FCSS claims as being objective, valid, and legitimate.

Given the evidence belying its position, the FCSS relies on selective intertextual references to expert knowledge and scientific evidence, disregarding questions of whether a policy should be implemented and focusing instead on how it should be implemented.

The school personnel best positioned to respond to acts of violence are those with specialized training such as school resource officers … In the years since Columbine, school leaders have increased the number of specially trained school security staff as part of their strategies to combat school violence. … However, these changes are not enough. … Effective training is critical. (DeVos et al. 2018, 101)

By presenting SROs as those who are ‘best positioned’ to deal with threats to school safety and using militaristic language such as ‘combat,’ the FCSS takes for granted the indispensability and fitness of SROs. It also disregards relevant facts such as their increased likelihood to be present in schools serving students of color (Javdani 2019) – which are less likely to be targets of school shootings – or the fact that no evidence shows that the presence of SROs increases school security (APA Zero Tolerance Task Force 2008; Javdani 2019) or decreases school shootings’ severity (Livingston, Rossheim, and Hall 2019). Nonetheless, the FCSS presupposes that it does and appeals to the epistemic authority of ‘subject matter experts’ – who are themselves SROs – suggesting that these officers need to be well trained (DeVos et al. 2018, 101–102).

Evidentiary legitimation is further accomplished by referencing select scientific articles that validate the FCSS’s causal story:

There are also concerns about the underlying premise that African-American students are overrepresented in disciplinary matters due to racial discrimination. Research indicates that disparities in discipline that fall along racial lines may be due to societal factors other than race. (DeVos et al. 2018, 70)

Researchers … discovered that ‘the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student—a finding never before reported in the literature.’ (70, citing Wright et al. 2014)

In the above excerpts, the FCSS discusses new findings that challenge the attribution of disciplinary disproportionality to discrimination. The report uses abstractions and nominalizations that conceal the agency of some and enhance the agency of others with respect to the phenomena under consideration. The FCSS states that ‘disparities in discipline … may be due to societal factors’ and ‘the racial gap in suspensions’ is explained by ‘prior problem behavior of the student.’ Here the agency of (potentially biased) school faculty and staff who administer punishments is concealed and the agency of students who misbehave is on display, enabling once again the problem to be framed as one of misbehavior rather than bias.

From the use of positivist discourse in the above excerpts, it is also apparent that the FCSS ignores the value-laden assumptions that underlie research processes and inform what questions are asked, how problems are defined, and what are acceptable sources of knowledge (Marston and Watts 2003). Positivist discourse allows the FCSS to, seemingly objectively and neutrally, attribute greater validity and credibility to research that invalidates racial bias and is compatible with the white supremacist assumptions that inform its policy choices. Reliance on notions of objectivity allows the FCSS to accept the certainty of the researchers’ ‘discovery’ and ‘complete accounting’ for the phenomenon under consideration and to ignore limitations and the possibility that this new finding can be reconciled with research on discriminatory punishment – that, perhaps, the designation ‘prior problem behavior’ was subjective in nature and itself a result of bias, which could very well be the case since the study at issue uses ‘teacher-reported measures of prior problem behavior’ and includes subjective behaviors such as ‘disturbing ongoing classroom activities’ (Wright et al. 2014, 260).

Conclusion

The analysis provided reveals the underlying causal story of the FCSS report, which, in line with white supremacist ideology, portrays students of color as perpetrators of school violence, including mass shootings. Relatedly, the Obama-era guidance is shown to be a devastating policy that shields violent offenders from punishment and jeopardizes student safety. From this perspective, the only reasonable policy response is to repeal the guidance and allow the uninhibited operation of schools’ disciplinary apparatus (that criminalizes and pushes out students of color) to secure (white) student safety. In recommending, and later pursuing, this course of action, the Trump administration legitimized its position on the grounds that it protected students from harm and delegitimized the Obama administration’s position on the grounds that it put students in harm’s way. This patina of legitimacy, in turn, further entrenched the inequitable and racialized status quo that the policy in question promoted.

The FCSS report exemplifies the deep entanglement between white supremacist ideology and education policy. It demonstrates how white supremacy is ‘black boxed’ (Latour 1994) in education policy such that it is not an individual agent’s racist intentions that lead to destructive outcomes but the countless actions of multiple agents who shape policy from formulation to implementation and whose actions have a compounding effect which cannot be understood by examining these actions in isolation. Various agents associated with or independent from the education system – political agents, policy analysts, law enforcement officers, members of the judiciary, teachers, administrators, surveillance technology lobbyists, mental health professionals, parents, educational researchers, etc. – impact school discipline policy in ways that reinforce the white supremacist foundations of society. This multilateral influence is revealed in the intertextuality of the policy text which invokes a plurality of voices to legitimize its message and enactment. The policy choices these agents contribute to are underpinned by and affirm racist assumptions and are, therefore, poised to benefit whites at the expense of nonwhites by legitimizing and entrenching the social, economic, and political advantages of whiteness.

More significantly, white supremacy extends far beyond discipline and safety. It is embedded in the very core of education policy and informs education’s underlying assumptions, practices, and outcomes (Gillborn 2005). From meritocratic ideals that define academic achievement and assessment in ways that privilege white students to epistemological ideals that structure curriculum in ways that privilege white epistemic resources, education policy structures and preserves an education system in which whiteness is the desired norm and determines the education all students should receive, conduct all students should display, and person all students should become.

This raises the question, what can be done to mitigate the devastating effects of education policy on students of color? Concerning policy research, we must critically analyze policy discourse to determine how it legitimizes and reifies unjust educational structures. While work on implicit bias is crucial, it is equally important to understand how top-down policy mandates limit the possibility of individual and collective resistance. Concerning policy formulation, we must challenge the hegemonic white supremacist discourse that pervades policy, conceals the significance of race, and facilitates the uninterrupted operation of white supremacy. To the extent that education policy does not directly address its white supremacist underpinnings, any attempt to enact equitable policy is bound to be short-lived as powerful actors exert pressure to restore the racial and socioeconomic status quo (Gillborn 2013). The ease with which the Trump administration reversed Obama-era discipline policy attests to this. Rooting out white supremacist discourse from education policy is a necessary step in the broader effort to reform centralized educational structures and facilitate meaningful change at the local level.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to Elaine Richardson for her substantive feedback on previous drafts of this article as well as to my anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Education Policy whose invaluable feedback substantially strengthened my argument. Also, special thanks to Julie Fitz and other Ohio State University colleagues (who are too numerous to mention by name) for their helpful comments and suggestions throughout the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. C. Nikolaidis

A. C. Nikolaidis is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. His primary areas of research are educational justice, education policy, and philosophy of education. His work has been published in scholarly venues, including the Journal of Curriculum Studies, Harvard Educational Review, and Educational Theory.

Notes

1. The term school-to-prison pipeline refers to school policies and practices (primarily related to discipline and punishment) that lead to negative academic and life outcomes for students of color, by pushing them out of the school system and into the juvenile and criminal justice system. The term is used in a variety of contexts, including student advocacy organizing, research, and policymaking (Skiba, Arredondo, and Williams 2014). Throughout the paper, I use the terms students of color and nonwhite students to refer to racially marginalized students who are disproportionately impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline, including, among others, black, Latinx, and Indigenous students. The grouping of diverse student populations under a single term allows for an overarching critique of racialized discipline policies to which all students of color are vulnerable, even though they may not experience racial disadvantage in the same way or be equally impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline.

2. The FCSS report is divided into three sections. The first section (‘prevent’) addresses a variety of factors contributing to school shootings including school climate, mental health, the media, and discipline policy. The second section (‘protect and mitigate’) addresses security measures including personnel training, law enforcement, and security infrastructure. The third section (‘respond and recover’) addresses ways of responding to active shooters including preparedness and mitigation (DeVos et al. 2018).

3. I use the term ‘white supremacy’ to mean a social, political, and economic system that hierarchically divides people along racial lines, places whites at the top of the hierarchy, and confers advantages to whites at the expense of nonwhites (Mills 2003, 2017). White supremacist ideology is any ideology that supports and justifies white supremacy.

4. The focus on the racial dimensions of the report does not imply that this is the report’s only problematic component or that there is no merit to any of the report’s recommendations for increasing school safety.

5. While I refer to Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) framework of colorblind racism, I use the term color-evasiveness instead (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2017). According to Bonilla-Silva (2014), frameworks of colorblind racism include abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism.