Cloaking Inequity

 

 

A young female student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina was assaulted in her classroom by a police office on October  26, 2015. She was asked to leave a classroom by a teacher after allegedly using her phone during a math class. She refused and was later confronted by Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields, who asked her to leave. When the student ignored him, the officer proceeded to grab her by the neck, slam her desk to the floor and then drag her out of the desk. The footage went viral, and the masses began to react on social media.

Many academics were horrified by what we saw, knowing that the forces that undergird such harsh treatment are similar to the ones that fuel disproportionate suspensions and expulsions and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. In response, the faculty director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University, Professor Prudence Carter, with the assistance of Dr. Travis Bristol, a research and policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), and doctoral student, Kia Darling-Hammond, spearheaded an effort to put together a list of research that addresses the marginalization and treatment of youth of color in our schools.

The call as educational researchers and other social scientists “to make informative research more widely known to educators, parents, students, activists, community-based organizations and many others, as they continue to eradicate disparate treatment in discipline, suspensions, and expulsions in schools.”

The response was immediate. Educational researchers and other social scientists connected via social media to offer their suggestions for a crowdsourced list of books and research-based articles. This is an offering in service of our youth, who are often subjected to discriminatory treatment, racism, gender and sexual violence, class bias, and other forms of dehumanization.  

While all of these works are in the public sphere, generally many are not as visible to the general public. Therefore, they aim to make them more widely known to educators, parents, students, activists, community-based organizations and many others, as they continue to eradicate social injustice in schools and education.  

They hope that the included works will provide some strong bases to help seek fairness and justice on behalf of our youth, build interventions, change policies and practices, frame analyses, build curricula, and facilitate dialogue school boards, policy makers (local, state, and national), parent organizations, teachers unions, and others.

They are pleased to release the resulting collective effort of many around the nation–an annotated reading list on authority and the marginalization of youth in schools and education–and encourage you to share it broadly.

How to use this resource

This reading list contains several scholarly articles for which they do not have copyright privileges. For those, they have included a link to Google Scholar search results, some of which contain .pdf formats of the article. You can request a copy of an article from its author.  Most scholars are more than happy to share their work if you email them. Wherever possible, they have also included contact information for the first or second author of the article.  Clicking on their name will lead to their professional page or email.  Some hyperlinks in this list lead directly to a document or to a webpage where this does not conflict with copyright law. For the books, most of the titles included in this list are available on Amazon.com.  A very small number may require purchase directly through the publishing house.

Click here to go directly to this exciting new and comprehensive resource.

This blog post was drawn from language provided by the researchers.

See also:

California NAACP takes stand on limiting role of School Resource Officers #AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh

Justice in action: How we can address the school-to-prison pipeline

See all of Cloaking Inequity posts on school discipline here.

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