The Role of Teachers In Social Inequality

As the Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said, “All students deserve access to safe, supportive schools and classrooms.” Today, these privileges remain out of reach for many. Since the 1990s, disciplinary action and exclusionary policies have widened racial gaps in school environments as they have increased in popularity over recent decades. Moreover, the resulting punishment culture was found to be disproportionately applied to lower income and racial minority students.

According to the School Survey on Crime and Safety data, in 2018, 94% of principals said their schools had locked or monitored doors, 89% said they installed school cameras, and 46% said they conducted random metal checks on their students to prevent student violence, as the below graph shows.  Coupled with the use of zero-tolerance, suspensions, and exclusion, these policies did little to ensure real school safety or help students correct mistakes. They did, however, foster multiple detrimental life outcomes for students. Many studies show that surveillance cameras, an overwhelmingly used strategy, did not improve student safety. Rather, there is robust evidence that school cameras as well as other strategies construct a prison-like environment, invade student privacy, and are related to various socio-psychological problems.

The consequences of these policies fell unequally along racial and socioeconomic lines. A 2017-2018 data report by the U.S. Department of Education found Black boys, only 7.7% of the national student body, received 20% of in-school suspensions and over 25% of expulsions.

While discipline is the most direct manifestation of this surveillance culture, it is not the only way that the school punishment system works. Dr. Heidi M Gansen at Northwestern University noted that teachers often construct an invisible discrimination classroom environment by giving positive feedback to selected students while being unreasonably harsh or strict on others. In a recent research paper, she argued that differential treatments, which have received comparatively little attention from media and researchers, are just as pernicious as the aforementioned punishment-oriented policies.

Dr. Gansen’s research aimed to describe the role that preschool teachers’ different positive or punitive reactions to “misbehaving” students played in perpetuating learning inequalities. Specifically, if they were sending the wrong message and how that might affect students across gender, socioeconomic, and other social groups.

To answer these questions, Gansen went to three Michigan preschools for roughly a year. During that time, she interacted with a total of 116 kids and 22 teachers across 9 classes—5 at “Imagination Center” (IC), 2 at “Kids Company” (KC), and 2 at “Early Achievers” (EA).

The student demographics varied greatly between the three schools. KC served all middle-class students, who were nearly two-thirds White and one-third Black as well as some Asian and MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) students. EA served only students from low-income backgrounds, who were primarily Black or Hispanic. At IC, the majority of student body came from middle-class backgrounds (87%) and were White (84%), with the remaining split between Blacks and Indians.

During her fieldwork, Dr. Gansen noted that teachers were often selective with whom to be more punitive. Teachers at IC used punitive disciplinary policies on girls possessing low-socioeconomic status, a group that was less than 10% of its student population. Boys at IC, however, were not impartially treated by their socioeconomic status. At the all-middle-class KC, teachers disproportionately adopted punitive policies on Black boys, a group that accounted for less than 20% of students. Compared to the other two, teachers at the low-income, primarily Black and Hispanic EA engaged in positive, encouraging-style disciplinary policies unbiasedly with all its children.

For example, at IC, when kids didn’t clean up after themselves after meals, one teacher, Ms. Brittany, in response to lower socioeconomic girls’ misbehaviors, would stop them in the middle of their play and require them to finish cleaning by themselves, threaten them by saying she would wait until orders were followed, and refer to them as “troublemakers”. When other students offered to help the low socioeconomic girls in these situations, Ms. Brittany would also verbally reject their peers’ help, thereby creating an exclusionary environment. Instead for higher socioeconomic girls, Ms. Brittany would allow them to receive assistance with cleaning from other kids, and sometimes even cleaned up for them.

Gansen found that teachers’ varied level of discipline shaped students’ perceptions of themselves and their peers. Labeling some kids as “troublemakers” and using targeted discipline expanded divisions among students, and those divisions may reinforce existing racial and socioeconomic inequalities. Dr. Gansen interpreted teachers treating girls differently as viewing the lower socioeconomic girls’ conduct as “violating standards of white, middle-class femininity, and therefore warranting of disciplinary sanctions as a form of gender normative accountability” (p.747). In this view, teachers were using the school accountability systems as a mechanism directed towards racial and socioeconomic differences – giving students different social life experiences and depriving some students of equal education opportunities.

A few scenarios at KC demonstrated this point. When a White boy asked if and why Ms. Monique, the teacher, was keeping extra watch on one Black boy, Ms. Monique replied she was and, in front of that Black student, stated that some students just needed to be watched by a teacher more than others. On a few other occasions, Ms.Monique also identified Black boys in front of the whole class as non-listeners and non-conformers. Under Dr. Gansen’s view, in confrontation with the label, Black boys would categorize themselves as troublemakers and bad boys, therefore behaving accordingly.

Dr. Gansen’s study reinforced the creation of inequalities through different teacher-student interactions, including along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines. These interactions could be traditional punishment, but more often they were non-punitive and achieved the disciplining effect by treating kids differently. By categorizing some students as “good” and others as “bad,” the impacts of these practices could be long-lasting and far-reaching, cultivating gaps in students’ socioemotional and relational skills, communicating the wrongful messages that some people are better than others, and contributing to contrasting life courses as those students go into adulthood.

However, Dr. Gansen’s study is not without its limitations. For one, the use of case studies mean it might not be applicable to a broader population beyond some Michigan preschools. Dr. Gansen successfully illustrated cases about what happened in those three schools in her account and showcased invisible discriminations that teachers disseminated through nonpunitive behaviors, yet readers cannot presume that the findings extrapolate to other schools in other states. On this aspect, existing research primarily focuses on how the personal preferences of teachers contribute to socioemotional outcomes, such as the feeling of loneliness and exclusions, in the disfavored students and their declining academic performance. What is missing is how common it is for teachers nationwide to treat students differently based on certain characteristics. For example, is such preference a prevailing strategy used across schools in the country, or are they only applicable to some teachers in certain states?

Moreover, the paper concludes with the open question of why teachers behave in this manner. In her study, Dr. Gansen focused more on narrating what happened in teacher-student interactions in these three schools and explaining from a theoretical approach. She did not, however, conduct further interviews with these teachers to understand why, from the teachers’ perspective, they differentially treated their students. Teachers may adopt non-punitive strategies to punish certain students subconsciously without realizing the impacts of their behaviors, or they may do so out of purely personal preferences. Understanding the reasons behind the invisible discriminations she described in the papers through the lens of teachers could shed light on what policymakers can do to avert the myriad negative consequences mentioned above.

By examining student experiences in schools as the result of punitive and non-punitive discipline, policymakers can mitigate the effects of differential behavior management by doing the reverse. Although implicit bias is hard to eliminate, school districts could provide relevant training to teachers in order to help them understand the potential consequences of their biases. For example, schools across the country could require teachers to receive lessons on labeling, trauma-informed care, and anti-racism strategies. This kind of training will help teachers understand their roles in the socioemotional growth of their students as well as offer them solutions on how to correctly interact with young people.

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Boudreau, Emily. 2019. “School Discipline Linked to Later Consequences.” Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/09/school-discipline-linked-later-consequences#:~:text=Education%20professionals%20should%20be%20cautious,for%20the%20overall%20student%20body.

Gansen, Heidi M. 2021. “Disciplining Difference(s): Reproducing Inequalities through Disciplinary Interactions in Preschool.” Social Problems 68 (3): 740–760. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa011.

Kang-Brown, Jacob, Jennifer Trone, Jennifer Fratello, and Tarika Daftary-Kapur. “A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools.” Vera Institute of Justice, December 2013. https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/zero-tolerance-in-schools-policy-brief.pdf.

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National Center for Education Statistics. “School Survey on Crime and Safety.” Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Education, 2020. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ssocs/.

Ozer, Nicole A. 2009. “San Francisco Surveillance Cameras Don’t Reduce Violent Crime, Study Finds.” ACLU Northern California. https://www.aclunc.org/blog/san-francisco-surveillance-cameras-don%E2%80%99t-reduce-violent-crime-study-finds.  

Sparks, Sarah D. 2021. “‘High-Surveillance’ Schools Lead to More Suspensions, Lower Achievement.” Education Week, April 21, 2021. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/high-surveillance-schools-lead-to-more-suspensions-lower-achievement/2021/04.

U.S. Department of Education O­ffice for Civil Rights. Focus on Student Discipline: Discipline Practices in Preschool. U.S. Department of Education O­ffice for Civil Rights: Accessed February 15, 2023. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-DOE-Discipline-Practices-in-Preschool-part1.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education O­ffice for Civil Rights. Focus on Student Discipline: Suspensions and Expulsions in Public Schools. U.S. Department of Education O­ffice for Civil Rights: Accessed February 15, 2023. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/suspensions-and-expulsion-part-2.pdf.