Infrastructure of social control: A multi-level counterfactual analysis of surveillance and Black education
Introduction
In response to the continued reoccurrence of school shootings, policymakers have increased surveillance measures to ensure safer learning environments (Johnson Jr., Jabbari, Williams, & Marcucci, 2019; Muschert, Henry, Bracy, & Peguero, 2014). These measures can include detection mechanisms (e.g. metal detectors and drug sniffing dogs), security personnel (e.g. school resource officers), visual monitors (e.g. security cameras), and even restrictions on cultural expressions (e.g. strict dress codes) (Addington, 2009; Muschert et al., 2014). While public dialogue has questioned whether these additional measures of surveillance make schools safer (Price & Khubchandani, 2019; Skiba & Rausch, 2006), it is also important to know the impact of surveillance measures on the academic wellbeing of students—especially when considering educational outcomes are powerful social determinants of incarceration risks (Couloute, 2018), high-risk health behaviors (CDC, 2020), and life-course health outcomes (Jones et al., 2019; Olshansky et al., 2012; Ross & Wu, 1995). Yet, research has focused more on punishment's impact on students (Peguero, Portillos, & Gonzalez, 2015), including which students are more likely to be punished and by what means (e.g. exclusion, arrest, etc.), rather than how a school's surveillance apparatus may influence student outcomes—both through detection and punishment and independent of punishment. As some policymakers are now implementing artificial intelligence (AI) systems within schools that collect biometric information and profess to have emotion recognition capabilities for predictive care (Ascione, 2019; Ropke, 2019), there is an urgent need for research that can demonstrate not only the impact of the surveillance systems currently in use, but also the mechanisms through which they affect education, a key life-course determinant.
To fill this gap in research, we explore the degree to which surveillance apparatuses relate to a range of student outcomes. We refine our interests in surveillance with a focus on the intersectional social locations of race and gender for Black adolescents for a few reasons. First, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that, in 2022, 38.3% of federal inmates were Black (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2022). At the state level, Black Americans were incarcerated at a state average of 1240 per 100,000 residents in that same year, and Latinx and White non-Latinx Americans at a rate of 349 and 261 per 100,000, respectively (Mendel, 2022). Second, Black students are not only impacted via the disproportionate rates at which their parents are incarcerated, but also by parallel systems of disproportionate surveillance, punishment, and arrest in their neighborhoods (Brunson, 2007; Brunson & Miller, 2006) and schools (Ferguson, 2001; Office for Civil Rights, 2021; Shedd, 2015; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Furthermore, punishment is often applied differently across gender (Annamma et al., 2019; Ferguson, 2001; Noguera, 2009; Wun, 2018), potentially leading to differences within race.
Rather than focusing exclusively on individual level determinants of these racial and gender disparities, this analysis considers whether the school's surveillance infrastructure has an impact on suspension rates, math test scores, and college attendance independent of student behavior and their experiences with discipline. We do so using the Educational Longitudinal Survey of 2002 (ELS) collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, and a research methodology that features a counterfactual and multi-level modeling approach. The ELS is ideal for an analysis of this type since it is one of the only federal datasets that has both school-level surveillance measures and student-level outcomes. Using these data, we demonstrate that with the infrastructure of surveillance in place, students are more likely to be suspended even when controlling for school social disorder and student misbehavior. In addition to placing more students on the discipline track, spillover effects occur within high surveillance high schools, resulting in reduced mathematics performances and college enrollment for suspended and non-suspended students alike. In sum, students in high surveillance high schools pay a safety tax, which is compounded once they receive the punishment for behavior that the surveillance detected. This is most true for Black students, who were four times more likely than not to attend high surveillance high schools. Revisiting Ditton's (1979) control wave theory, this article concludes with a discussion of implications for practices and policies in relation to the intersectional experiences and wellbeing of Black adolescents.
Section snippets
Literature review
This analysis builds on three theoretical perspectives and an interdisciplinary body of research that relates student behavior and school practices and policies to intersectional disparities. Beginning with social control, the concept refers to the social forces that allow a society, culture, or organization to internally regulate the behavior of its membership (Hughes, 1946). Social control has been theorized to reduce anti-social behavior, maintain social order, and ultimately, enhance the
Data
This study utilized restricted-use data from the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS). The ELS is an ideal dataset for understanding social control, as it is one of the most recent NCES dataset that collected data using a facilities checklist. We initially considered the High School Longitudinal Study, 2009, to address these questions and learned it did not utilize the NCES facilities checklist to collect data. The facilities checklist,
Results
In addition to the outcomes of variable balancing in the propensity score weighting process, Table 2a also reveals the largest pre- and post-weighted treatment difference is in the proportion of students who attend high surveillance schools who are Black. Prior to propensity score weighting, 24% of students within high surveillance schools (HSS) were Black, despite the population being only 12% of the total sample—this is four times larger than the percent of students in low surveillance
Discussion
The goal of this study was to understand how students' discipline, mathematics, and college attendance outcomes are impacted by attending a high school that has a relatively prominent surveillance infrastructure to achieve formal social control. This study has several key takeaways and implications to consider. First, the study findings demonstrate that with apparatuses of surveillance in place, students are more likely to be suspended—even when controlling for school social disorder and
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [EEC-1619843].
References (76)
- et al.
Dismantling the school to prison pipeline: The Philadelphia police school diversion program
Children and Youth Services Review
(2019) - et al.
Transcriptomic analyses of black women in neighborhoods with high levels of violence
Psychoneuroendocrinology
(2021) Cops and cameras: Public school security as a policy response to Columbine
American Behavioral Scientist
(2009)Surveillance and security approaches across school levels
- et al.
Black girls and school discipline: The complexities of being overrepresented and understudied
Urban Education
(2019) Is facial recognition in schools reassuring–or invasive?
(2019)An introduction to propensity score methods for reducing the effects of confounding in observational studies
Multivariate Behavioral Research
(2011)- et al.
Getting developmental science back into schools: Can what we know about self-regulation help change how we think about “no excuses”?
Frontiers in Psychology
(2019) “Police don’t like black people”: African American young men’s accumulated police experiences
Criminology & Public Policy
(2007)- et al.
Gender, race, and urban policing: The experience of African American youths
Gender & Society
(2006)
Black men on race, gender, and sexuality: a critical reader
Youth risk behavior surveillance - United States, 2019
Imprisoning communities
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Getting Back on Course: Educational exclusion and attainment among formerly incarcerated people
Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color
Stanford Law Review
Controlology: Beyond the new criminology
Effects of Misspecification of the Propensity Score on Estimators of Treatment Effect
Biometrics
Generalizing observational study results: Applying propensity score methods to complex surveys
Health Services Research
Moral education. A study in the theory and application of the sociology of education
Girlhood interrupted: The erasure of black girls’ childhood
Inmate statistics
Bad boys: Public schools in the making of black masculinity
An epidemic of questionable arrests by school police: Soul-searching in San Bernardino county over campus cops' tactics and attitudes. Huffington Post, 12/11/2015
Weighting Regressions by Propensity Scores
Evaluation Review
The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society
Propensity score analysis
Racism and ethnoviolence as trauma: Enhancing professional training
Traumatology
Another way out: the impact of juvenile arrests on high school dropout
Sociology of Education
Causes of delinquency
Institutions
Impact of in-school suspension on black Girls’ math course-taking in high school
Social Sciences
The collateral damage of in-school suspensions: A counterfactual analysis of high-suspension schools, math achievement and college attendance
Urban Education
Veering off track in US high schools? Redirecting student trajectories by disrupting punishment and math course-taking tracks
Children and Youth Services Review
Multiplying Disadvantages in U.S. High Schools: An Intersectional Analysis of the Interactions among Punishment and Achievement Trajectories
The process of ‘pushing out’: Accumulated disadvantage across school punishment and math achievement trajectories
Youth & Society
On social organization and social control
Suspended while black in majority white schools: Implications for math efficacy and equity
The Educational Forum
Cited by (3)
Disrupting White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in Educational Organizations
2023, Educational Researcher