Schools criminalize student behavior problems through punishments that imitate or involve penalties in the criminal justice system. This includes exclusionary punishments such as suspension or expulsion and the use of police officers through referrals and arrests. At the same time, schools medicalize misbehavior by implementing individualized behavior plans mandated by either the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Despite the common use of both punishment and medicalization in schools, there is limited research on the structural forces underlying these different approaches. Drawing on social reproduction perspectives and research on inequalities in criminal justice and health care, I use a large data set containing information on almost 60,000 schools in over 6,000 districts consider the association between school- and district-level racial/ethnic and socioeconomic compositions and schools’ disciplinary environments.
Findings reveal a complex relationship between race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and discipline in U.S. schools that, in many ways, reflects larger inequalities observed in other institutions of social control. Predominately African-American schools and districts had higher rates of suspension/expulsion and arrest and lower rates of enrollment in IDEA or Section 504 plans. Schools and districts with greater levels of economic disadvantage had higher rates of punishment and arrest than less disadvantaged schools and districts. While more disadvantaged schools and districts had lower rates of enrollment under Section 504, they had higher rates of students using IDEA plans. Importantly, the school-level Black-White gap in criminalized and medicalized school discipline differs across affluent and disadvantaged districts. In high-disadvantage districts, the punishment gap between predominately Black and predominately White schools is smaller than predominately Black and predominately White schools in more affluent districts. While the school-level Black/White gap in IDEA enrollment is smaller in more disadvantaged districts than in less disadvantaged districts, that is not the case with enrollment in Section 504 plans. The gap in enrollment in Section 504 behavior plans between predominately Black and predominately White schools in high-disadvantage districts is significantly larger than it is in less disadvantaged districts. These findings suggest that, although predominately minority schools and districts have high rates of criminalization and low rates of medicalization, there are important racial gaps across different types of school districts that may contribute to an overreliance on criminal justice strategies and an underutilization of important services and resources among minority school children. These disparities have important implications for the “school to prison pipeline,” in which children with behavior problems, particularly minorities, are tracked from the education system into the legal system.
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Ramey, David M. 2015. “The Social Structure of Criminalized and Medicalized School Discipline.” Sociology of Education 88(3):181-201