Who decides what “appropriate” looks like in school?

“Take your hat off when you enter the building.”

I have heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count during my career in education.  And I have had some surprisingly intense conversations with people who believed strongly that students should not be allowed to wear hats in school.

My question was always pretty simple: 

Why?

Now there are legitimate safety concerns when clothing prevents us or our security cameras from identifying a student.  But outside of that, what educational purpose does removing a hat actually serve?  At some point, “take your hat off inside” became synonymous with respect and appropriate behavior in school.  But who decided that?

During one of my recent doctoral classes, I found myself thinking about these experiences while reading bell hooks’ “Confronting Class in the Classroom.”  hooks challenges the idea that schools are culturally neutral spaces.  We may want to believe that when students walk through our doors, everyone enters the same environment with the same opportunity to succeed.  But schools have their own expectations about how students should speak, behave, and interact.  Those expectations did not just appear.  They were created by people, shaped by culture, and passed down over time (hooks, n.d.).  And once something has been around long enough, we tend to stop asking why it is there.

The hat debate?  It is honestly a relatively harmless example.  School discipline, on the other hand, can carry much greater consequences.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with a colleague who was an elementary lead principal in my school district.  That year, he had hired several male special education associates, including a couple of Black male associates in a predominantly white suburban school district.  As part of his building’s structure, associates frequently supervised recess on the playground.  About two or three months into the school year, he noticed something interesting: his playground referrals had dropped significantly from previous years.

The students had not suddenly changed.  What had changed were the adults supervising them.  In previous years, he knew that boys, particularly students of color, had made up a much larger share of his playground referrals.  The disparity involving boys was not unique to his school.  Research has found that similar behavioral problems can result in greater educational consequences for boys than girls (Camera, 2016).  As he dug a little deeper into why this seemed to be different that year, he noticed that the new associates seemed more willing to teach students what was expected before resorting to a referral for behavior they felt was “inappropriate.”

Who defines appropriate behavior in school?

Before we discipline behavior, someone has to decide that the behavior is inappropriate. That sounds obvious, but I am not sure we spend enough time thinking about it.  Two adults can watch the same interaction on a playground and see two different things.  One may see disrespect or aggression.  Another may see a student who needs redirection, a conversation, or simply a chance to reset.

The rule may be the same.  The behavior may be the same.  The interpretation can be very different.  This is also why the question is bigger than discipline.  Schools are filled with expectations we inherited from the people who came before us.  Some exist for very good reasons.  Others exist because that is simply how school has always been done.  

Sit this way.  Speak this way.  Dress this way.  Show respect this way.  

Take your hat off when you enter the building.

Over time, those expectations can stop looking like cultural choices and start looking like universal definitions of appropriate behavior.  That was one of the connections I made between hooks and Iris Marion Young’s discussion of cultural imperialism.  Young (1988) describes cultural imperialism as the “universalization of one group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm” (p. 285).  Once that happens, people whose behaviors or experiences differ from that norm can easily be viewed as the problem.

In schools, I think that should make us uncomfortable enough to ask some questions.  None of this means schools should stop having expectations.  In fact, I think it is quite the opposite.  Personally, I am a firm believer in systems and consistency.  Students deserve to know what is expected of them, and they should not have to navigate completely different standards depending on which adult happens to be standing in front of them.

But by itself, consistency does not create equity.  We can consistently enforce a bad rule.  We can consistently apply a standard that no longer serves an educational purpose.  We can consistently interpret behavior through a cultural lens without ever realizing we are doing it.

Perhaps there is a question that needs to be asked before worrying about whether our expectations are being consistently enforced.

Has this expectation earned the right to exist?

Does it protect safety?  Does it improve learning?  Does it help students grow?  Are we teaching something important?

Or are we enforcing a tradition simply because generations of educators before us decided that this is what “appropriate” looks like?

That distinction matters.  I think back to those conversations about hats.  For some students, that hat may provide a little dignity on a day when a haircut was not affordable or the resources needed to care for their hair were just not in the cards.  In those moments, I was far more concerned that the student had made it through our doors than whether or not the hat came off once they got there.

That does not mean every expectation is wrong.  It means every expectation should be able to answer a pretty basic question.

Why?

As educational leaders, our responsibility is not simply to inherit systems and enforce them consistently.  It is also to examine the assumptions underneath them.  We need standards that genuinely help students learn, grow, and remain safe.

And we should probably be willing to admit that some of the others may have just been pulled out of a hat.

References

• Camera, L. (2016, June 22). Boys bear the brunt of school discipline. U.S. News & World Report. Boys Bear the Brunt of School Discipline

• hooks, b. (n.d.). Confronting class in the classroom. In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed., pp. 135–143). Routledge.

• Young, I. M. (1988). Five faces of oppression. The Philosophical Forum, 19(4), 270–290.