Digital Discipline: Online Behavior and School Expulsions

Leggero, Meghan Jo

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2f6s-0b58

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Digital Discipline: Online Behavior and School Expulsions

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ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making. I combine analytic lenses from organizational sensemaking theory, decision-making frameworks, and sociological work on framing to interpret the role of student social media data in school authority discipline decision-making processes. Across three interrelated studies, I use multiple qualitative research methods, including archival content analysis, observation, and in-depth interviewing. In the end, I show when decision-makers perceive student performance as a threat to organizational metrics, school officials strategically label and leverage digital behavior to support cases against students they seek to expel. However, in examining the discipline decision-making process, I find district pressure to meet organizational metrics and lack of support factor prominently in school officials’ decisions to use digital data against students. In study 1, I examine trends in school authority use of surveillance and exclusionary discipline in a large public school district in the Midwest. I use content analysis of archival discipline data (2008-18), media artifacts, and student code of conduct policy handbooks (2008-2018). Findings show how the coupling of safety and surveillance in both discipline policy and practice contributed to the development of a complex school surveillance system over time. The development of a complex school surveillance system was both linked with national education policy fronts and perceived, by school officials, as critical to realize district performance metrics. To show this, I surface the ways in which shifts in organizational performance metrics, pressed through education policy, link to school surveillance monitoring systems and exclusionary discipline decisions. Lastly, I find that schools and student groups targeted by surveillance and exclusionary discipline are identified, by school officials, as underperforming on organizational metrics. While digital surveillance systems were shown to develop overtime, the analysis highlights a gap in the literature which has not previously considered the role of digital behavior surveillance in discipline decision-making processes. In study 2, I expand my analysis through observations and interviews with school officials to surface the school-based process of student social media data mining. In addition, I draw on digital social media content analysis methods to analyze youth social media posts as context for interviews and observations relaying adult interpretations of youth social media culture. I surface the practice of surveillance in a digital era. First, I find school officials’ design digital surveillance tools to notice youth digital behavior surveilling adults preconceive as negative. Second, I show the ways in which surveillance workers use performance metrics and categorization schemas to frame digital behavior in particular ways which contributes to targeting particular students. Finally, I contrast adult interpretations of youth digital behavior with youth interpretations to highlight interpretation errors. In study 3, I directly analyze the impact of student social media behavior on the disciplinary decision-making process by observing and interviewing actors powered to decide student disciplinary outcomes. Data includes observations and interviews with discipline decision-makers at four case-matched high schools. I find when decision-makers perceive student performance as threat to organizational metrics, school officials strategically label and leverage digital data to push-out students under targeted code-of-conduct policies. Second, I highlight the tension created during the discipline decision process, by a high-stakes accountability context, between school officials’ goals of supporting students and metric improvement. Findings, for which I will soon show, highlight a previously unknown role that student digital behavior plays in the discipline decision-making process. Overall, the qualitative evidence produced from this dissertation provides a richer and more complete understanding of the role student social media data plays in the discipline decision-making process. This dissertation highlights important practice and policy implications for school discipline in a digital era and contributes to the study of education policy and school discipline.

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