Sean Darling-Hammond, JD, PhD | Old Disparities, New Dimensions: Sonifying Inequity, Escalation by Association, and the Student Mental Health Ramifications of “Bad Cop” Surveillance

Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium

Inclusion is a prerequisite for psychological safety, yet schools routinely exclude and punish students—often for developmentally appropriate behaviors where more educative responses might be both more effective and less harmful. A growing body of research shows that exclusionary practices such as suspension can inflict psychological, behavioral, educational, and even carceral harms. These harms fall disproportionately on students of color: racial disparities in school discipline are stark, enduring, and evident across every form of scholastic punishment and every subpopulation of students.

This talk surfaces new dimensions of these old and seemingly intransigent inequities.

First, we ask: How do disciplinary disparities shape the lived experiences of youth? Using a method called sonification, we translate disaggregated daily discipline rates into sound, simulating how Black students may rapidly perceive inequity in their schools during the first weeks of the year.

Second, we examine how racial bias drives inequity in teachers' responses to student misbehavior. Building on the landmark study Two Strikes (Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015, cited over 1,000 times), our team—including the original authors and Dr. Shoshana Jarvis (a Cal alum and influential scholar)—first replicated the study's findings: teachers exposed to two misbehaviors by a Black student, compared to those reviewing identical misbehaviors by a White student, judged the behavior more troubling, recommended harsher discipline, and were more likely to label the student a "troublemaker." We then extended these findings by identifying a phenomenon we term "Escalation by Association": when teachers reviewed misbehaviors by two different Black students, they treated the second student more harshly—as if bias and escalation transferred from one target to another.

Third, while much research has explored the effects of exposure to teacher bias, far less has examined the impact of school police bias. Drawing on data from thousands of California students, we investigate whether Black students attending schools where police officers are perceived as racially biased experience higher levels of psychological distress.