Professors Muhammad Khalifa and Felecia Briscoe Met Opposition while Trying to Obtain Student Discipline Numbers by Race in Texas — and My Related Comment about Academicians’ Mission-Defeating Jargon

20 July 2015

When bigots are in charge, they are inclined to conceal their wrongdoing

From Michigan State University:

Nationally, black students are three times more likely to be suspended than white students, according to a 2014 report from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights.

[Professor] Muhammad Khalifa set out to collect student discipline information from a handful of large school districts in Texas but said he was met with resistance from district administrators who viewed his efforts as a threat.

Khalifa, in attempting to examine whether individual school districts are addressing the issue, said he was met with roadblock after roadblock during his research, which took more than two years.

Two school districts repeatedly blocked his requests for student discipline data under the Freedom of Information Act, and then charged prohibitive fees of as much as $10,000 to obtain the information.

Another district gave him unusable data.

Administrators from a fourth district provided the data and met with researchers, but then were defensive about the problem in their schools.

“Essentially, district administrators were not comfortable engaging in discussions about race,” the study says. “They interpreted it as a threat, and this likely prevented them from actually addressing the problem.”

More specifically:

This study was conducted in large urban school districts in Texas. The profiled districts were predominantly Latino; however one district was over 90% Latino and the other just slightly more than half with sizable White and Black student populations in some schools and areas.

In addition to our own self-interviews, we base our [report] on the examination of 11 phone calls and 35 email exchanges with district administration, and on field-notes taken during seven site visits.

The initial phase was our attempt to obtain disciplinary data from various school districts in Texas. Only two school districts made the data accessible to us, despite being legally obligated to do so.

[W]e theorize three bureaucratic administrative responses contributed to the maintenance of racism in school—

(1) the administrators discursive avoidance of issues of racial marginalization;

(2) the tendency of bureaucratic systems to protect their own interests and ways of operating, even those ways of operating that are racist;

and

(3), the (perhaps inadvertent) protection of leadership practices that have resulted in such racial marginalization.

© 2015 Muhammad A. Khalifa and Felecia M. Briscoe, A Counternarrative Autoethnography Exploring School Districts’ Role in Reproducing Racism: Willful Blindness to Racial Inequities, Teachers College Record 117(8): 17975 (June 2015) (at Abstract) (extracts)

Mission-defeating jargon

The paper’s unnecessary use of jargon works against lay people’s understanding.

That presents a problem because the authors presumably would like to rectify racial injustice. Yet, without informed public support, turning tables on bigots will not happen:

Our autoethnography is counternarrative, as it counters bureaucratic narratives of impartiality, colorblindness, and objectivity espoused by school districts.

Pertinent definitions:

Wikipedia describes authoethnography as “a form of self-reflection and writing that explores the researcher's personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.

A “counternarrative” is (by my definition) a rebuttal or rejection of something someone said.

Therefore, the authors could more understandably have written:

Our personal investigative experience with these school districts rejected their claims of impartiality with regard to race.

Almost anyone would understand what that means.

Unnecessarily weakened credibility

The professors’ explanation of their analysis is semantically obtuse and quantitatively deficient — my italicized comments are in brackets:

Our research encompasses three phases. The initial phase was our attempt to obtain disciplinary data from various school districts in Texas.

[How many districts? How could a credible research team overlook providing this most basic bit of data?

Second, the idea of phases, in this context, is fluff. Phase generally refers a time-limited sequence contained within the evolution of something large or complicated. What the authors are referring to here are the research steps they took to get their results. Most teams would not have mentioned these with regard to such a simple investigation. In this case, the team’s summarized findings necessarily imply the steps taken to get to them.]

Only two school districts made the data accessible to us, despite being legally obligated to do so.

[The proportional significance of these 2 districts depends upon the unmentioned total number of districts.]

For the second phase of our study we calculated risk ratios . . . from those two school districts to determine how many more times African Americans and Latinos are suspended than Whites in all of the schools of TXD1 and TXD2.

The third phase was the district administrators’ reactions to our presentation of our findings in regards to their district schools with the most egregious disciplinary gaps.

[The third phase, methodologically speaking, cannot be “reactions” but instead must be the act of summarizing those bureaucrats’ reactions.

In view of this sloppy writing, how much credibility do the authors think that their “counternarrative” will ultimately carry — especially with influential people already hostile to its findings?]

From our qualitative data analysis we theorize three bureaucratic administrative responses contributed to the maintenance of racism in school—

(1) the administrators discursive avoidance of issues of racial marginalization;

[Was using the word “discursive” necessary? Most people will not understand what it means. Instead, say that school district bureaucrats frequently tried to change the subject when racial discrimination came up.]

(2) the tendency of bureaucratic systems to protect their own interests and ways of operating, even those ways of operating that are racist;

and

(3), the (perhaps inadvertent) protection of leadership practices that have resulted in such racial marginalization.

These responses were enacted through four technical–rational/bureaucratic administrative practices:

subversive,

defensive,

ambiguous,

and

negligent.

[The phrase — “enacted through four technical–rational/bureaucratic administrative practices” — is blithering. The authors seem to be trying to sound more impressively analytical than they were.

“Subversive, defensive, ambiguous and negligent” mean little, without first providing readers with a theoretical framework in which these would comprise obvious conceptual elements.

It would have been more persuasively concise to say that:

The school bureaucrats we communicated with: (a) actively obstructed our efforts to obtain disciplinary data, (b) became overtly defensive when we raised the subject of racial discrimination, (c) sometimes made vague and noncommittal comments that had little to do with the subject, and/or (d) were (or had been) legally negligent when it came down to actually rooting out discriminatory practices.]

The moral? — The White Educational Establishment undoubtedly conceals its bigotry and mistreatment of non-whites, but . . .

If we are going to attack Establishment practices with facts, let’s do it comprehensibly and without reducing our credibility by trying to sound as if we did something more complicated than we actually did.

I wish that Professors Khalifa and Briscoe had filtered their socially valuable drafts through a competent editor before publishing. Looking snobby to lay eyes — or pretentiously foolish to scientifically minded ones — gets us nowhere substantively useful.

PeteFree.com

Professors Muhammad Khalifa and Felecia Briscoe Met Opposition while Trying to Obtain Student Discipline Numbers by Race in Texas — and My Related Comment about Academicians’ Mission-Defeating Jargon