Calling out public schools on racism is not enough. Abolition is the solution.
Social Welfare research seminar project from Nick Azevedo, Deb Griffith, Tatiana DeLeon, and Michelle Gonzalez
Our team is conducting this research to say confidently that calling out schools that use punitive practices is not enough to disrupt the school-to-prison nexus. Our goal is to center marginalized student voices through the co-design process. We will further reference Critical Race Theory (CRT) specifically to ground our study approach. CRT and existing research validate our research question and provide a lens through which we can conceptualize ways to dismantle the racist and punitive top-down decision-making processes within schools. To narrow our application of CRT, we are using Ortiz and Jani’s (2010) definition of CRT that focuses on two mezzo pillars that uphold racism; that racism is socially constructed and built into the fabric of school institutions.
In application to our hypothesis, we envision a co-designed approach to harm and repair by centering the voices of marginalized students (DSC Model Code, 2019). In order to do so, we have to first analyze why this process has not fully been conceived and implemented. The first reason is because of the social construction of race. This first tenant of CRT explains how race definitions change aesthetically and intellectually to benefit the ruling class, blurring into leftovers from the tough on crime era by labeling behavior with words like “criminal,” “expulsion,” “ostracism,” and “severity.” (Simmons, 2016). When schools feed from publicly defined, socially constructed values that are political in nature, the enforcement of punishment will favor the larger fiscal and political powers of school administration. Detention, which is often later followed by increased punitive responses like suspension and expulsion, is at the heart of these punishment tactics.
Additionally, our hypothesis states that detention rates will decline if a co-designed approach to harm and repair is integrated into the fabric of the school. This mirrors the second tenant of CRT that examines why racism is first socially constructed and then built into the fabric of school institutions. The carceral logic of punitive school practices is a one-two-punch of surveillance and compliance. Institutions (schools) that identify and label issues to fix or punish anyone who does not fit into what the ruling class (school administration) deems as “normal” is a racist practice. As soon as a student is deemed outside of that “normal” categorization, this carceral logic turns into a correctional foundation that can permanently degrade a student to “second-class” status (Alexander, 2010). Our research will address this school-based youth criminalization and aim to eradicate this carceral logic through a co-designed approach to harm and repair.
These tenets of CRT demonstrate that school-based youth criminalization is systemic.
A student’s behavior, including the labeling of that behavior, cannot be separated from the institutional arrangements of its school community (Ortiz and Jani, 2010). In order to achieve transformative justice for students, this micro-mezzo gap needs to be addressed. Our research and theoretical anchors are aimed at highlighting the need for environments that allow students to try, fail, experiment, and engage in respectful dissent without fear of punitive discipline or arrest (Simmons, 2016).