"Talking out of Both Sides": An Analysis of How Street-Level Discretion Reshaped Racially-Conscious Policy

Introduction

The processes through which practitioners interpret and perceive racially-consciousness policy, policy explicitly designed to improve the conditions and outcomes for racialized groups, remains under explored. Street-level theory has traditionally foregrounded individual actors delivering services or implementing policy in public systems. As public systems increasingly contend with their role in the production of racial inequity, it is imperative to understand how practitioners assign meaning to and implement racially-conscious policy. To better explore these dynamics I examine the implementation of a district-wide racially-conscious policy designed to prevent school pushout, a well-documented racialized phenomenon in the education system. I address the following questions: “How do school personnel interpret the district-wide policy? What shapes school personnel’s mobilization of the new policy?”

Method

Findings are derived from 31 narrative interviews with school personnel collected across two public high schools. Across the interviews, school personnel recounted how preexisting district policy shaped how they interpreted and enacted the new policy. After investigating this finding more closely using the flexible coding method, I recognized that school personnel’s’ interpretation and enactment of the transfer policy was shaped by a previous history of racialized policy making within the district and the constraints that previous policies had placed on school personnel. In this paper, I leverage analysis across two high schools to extend existing theoretical insights about street-level discretion as well as describe new dimensions of school pushout.

Results

Between the cases, four findings emerged. School personnel: 1) blamed district administrators for constructing an inequitable system, 2) reconceptualized transfer trajectories in ways that did not align with policy, 3) negotiated competing priorities, and 4) enacted discretion based on school culture. School personnel considered the history of policy making within the district to be a top-down process that created racialized outcomes. Rather than responding to the issue of school pushout, school personnel interpreted the policy based on preexisting accountability policies within the district. Thus, school personnel interpreted the pushout policy to be insincere, unimportant, and another way of targeting schools or individual school personnel. Ultimately, school personnel wielded discretion to address pre-existing policy agendas within the district and undermined the original intention of the new policy. Discretion was articulated differently between the cases. In a historically Black high school, discretion was used to safeguard the school while, in a high school associated with white affluence, school personnel utilized discretion to protect themselves.

Discussion

This analysis extends social work scholarship on street-level discretion by identifying the role of pre-existing policy agendas in constraining new system-wide, racially-conscious reform. While administrators in public systems design racially-conscious mission statements, policies, and set new goals, it is imperative to remember that those efforts are interpreted at the street-level by practitioners. The degree to which practitioners evaluate racially conscious policy as performative or meaningful as well as how they assess new expectations against previously set expectations will constrain or expand the equity impact of system-wide reforms.