Arrested Education: The Racist and Racialized Relationship Between School Resource Officers and High School Student Academic and Discipline Outcomes in the Context of a White Supremacist, Settler Colonial Racial State

Abstract

This three-article dissertation investigates the fundamentally racist and racialized nature of police and the relationship between police and racist and racialized outcomes for students when police are stationed in schools. The first article historically and theoretically contextualizes police as agents of a hegemonic, settler colonial White racial state called the United States by tracing police and the racial state itself from their origins in the mid 1600s to the present. The second and third articles utilize a dataset of more than 415,000 students in the four largest metropolitan areas in Texas to understand the relationship between police and student-level academic and discipline outcomes. The second article utilizes robust Hierarchical Linear Modeling to demonstrate that police have strong negative associations with student standardized test scores in mathematics and English for all students but that this negative association is larger for Black and Latinx students compared to White students. The second article utilizes robust mixed logistic regression to demonstrate that police are associated with considerably higher odds of students being suspended but that police are associated with considerably higher odds of suspension for Black and Latinx students compared to White students. In each article, policy implication are discussed, but all address the need to abolish police as they are currently known.