Staying in Class: Representative Bureaucracy and Student Praise and Punishment

Abstract

Our project investigates the impact of minority bureaucratic and political representation on the distribution of disciplinary measures in public schools, in contrast with its impact on gifted and talented class placement. It is motivated by the contrast in accumulating research on the consequences of minority bureaucratic representation between findings that minority teacher representation yields beneficial outcomes for minority students while minority representation on police forces does not yield beneficial outcomes for minority residents. Similarly, we note that public school teaching involves two kinds of organizational roles: one involving distribution of benefits (such as placement in gifted and talented programs) which is consistent with an educator role, while the other, involving the distribution of discipline, approximates a policing role, which could be less consistent with an educator role. In short, the educator role benefits the client and the policing role regulates the client. We theorize that (a) modeling the impact of greater minority representation on teaching staffs will yield contrasting results for these two roles, (b) that there will also be differences based on type of discipline at issue, and that (c) the role of minority representation on the school board must also be taken into account. We examine these issues by employing merged data from several data sources ranging from 2007 to 2010 for our analyses. Our results suggest that higher minority teacher representation does increase minority student placement in gifted programs, but does not significantly reduce punishment of minority students. Our analyses also suggest that future research needs to more fully incorporate contextual variables, such as school board representation and state policy. Scholars of representative bureaucracy should also consider the multiple organizational roles that many bureaucrats have.