Transformative Leadership to Confront White Supremacist Discipline Practices During Turnaround School Reform

This article explores how a White principal might employ transformative school leadership practices to challenge White supremacist discipline. Transformative leadership in this study derives from Shields’(2018) framework. Identifying Whiteness as it manifests institutionally and personally for me grows from three intertwined roots of critical theory: (1) critical race theory (CRT) in education (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; López, 2016; Parker & Villalpando, 2007), (2) critical Whiteness studies in education (Allen, 2004; Andersen, 2003; Hytten & Warren, 2003; Leonardo, 2009; Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, & Galindo, 2014), and (3) disability studies in education (DSE) and DisCrit theory (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2016; Baglieri, Valle, Connor, & Gallagher, 2010; Bell, 2017; Gabel & Danforth, 2008; Smith, 2004). Furthermore in this article, I define “discipline” both in the narrow conventional sense of how schools address behavior they deem to be disruptive and disorderly, and more broadly in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault, 1979, 1980, 1991; Hall, 2001) of how discourses of power bring individuals and institutions to discipline their own conduct.

Shields’ (2018) most recent iteration of the characteristics of transformative leadership has an overarching focus on changing school structures and practices to highlight equity. Equity must provide learners what they need, fully aware of the historical and systemic oppression that minoritized students have endured. To that end, transformative leaders are required to challenge, analyze, and disrupt discourses and power relations that produce deficit views of students as truthful ways of knowing them. Disruption alone is insufficient, however.

The transformative leader is obliged to construct empowering and liberatory knowledge frameworks, power relations, and the systems that will enact them. Holding the difficult conversations among educators and others in the educational community is a necessary component of this facet of transformative leadership (Anello et al., 2014; Shields, 2018). Capper and Young (2007) and Theoharis (2007) frame those same tenets as social justice leadership that builds inclusive schools for all students with respect to race, class, gender, first language, and disability.

Historically and presently, students are excluded from classrooms and schools by the twin systems of discipline and special education. Racial disproportionality in suspension has been thoroughly documented (Losen & Gillespie, 2012; Skiba et al., 2014; Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002). Likewise, the vastly racially disproportionate disability classification in general (Hosp & Reschly, 2004; Losen & Orfield, 2002; Skiba et al., 2008), is even more pronounced with the diagnosis of emotional and behavioral disorder (Harry & Klingner, 2014), with which schools exclude students to special classrooms, programs, and facilities (Artiles, Bal, Trent, & Thorius, 2012).

For this article, the change in school structure and knowledge frameworks centers on the substitution of trauma-informed inclusive practices for punitive discipline, specifically in-school and out-of-school suspension. Trauma-informed practices (Abramovitz & Mingus, 2016; Blitz, Yull, & Clauhs, 2016; Brendtro et al., 2002; Crosby, 2016; Love, 2016) begin from a presumption that all behaviors happen for a reason, and that behaviors that educators may interpret as willful defiance and disruption may result from triggers of deeply seated traumas. Brendtro et al. (2002) argue that young people strive in four dimensions—mastery, belonging, independence, and generosity—and that unwanted behaviors can be expressions of an absence of those qualities or a twisted avenue for manifesting them. Thus, trauma-informed practices emphasize safe school spaces that can accommodate a breadth of student emotions, and employ therapeutic rather than punitive responses to disruptive, disorderly, and destructive actions. However, as described in the following sections of this theoretical framework, these benevolent intentions ought also to be critically examined regarding ableism and racism.

To that end, DisCrit theory (Annamma et al., 2016; Bell, 2017) builds from CRT and DSE (Gabel & Danforth, 2008) to explore how ableism and White supremacy mesh as an engine of systemic oppression in schools. DSE captures how normalcy (Davis, 2006) and ableism (Hehir, 2002) are regarded as common sense ideologies in school. Normalcy as ideology (Davis, 2006) posits that we can describe such a thing as a normal or typical student to be desired, and against whom all others can be measured. Hehir (2002) describes ableism as normalcy’s partner, resulting in attitudes that “uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than roll, speak than sign, read print, then read braille, spell independently than use a spell check, etc.” (p. 3). Students who exhibit these normal abilities thus belong in class and in school, whereas students who do differently are regarded as deviant, and need either to be fixed or removed. Brantlinger (2006) analyzes the special education system as thereby operating to “fix” students, both in the sense of trying to cure them of their disabilities and in the sense of assigning them a permanent identity. Youdell (2006) likewise illuminates how these structures make minoritized students into “impossible bodies” to include.

White culture defines the normative construction of academic performance (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011) and social and emotional behavior (Bornstein, 2015; Broderick & Leonardo, 2016). Whiteness then becomes the desirable state on a continuum of normal and abnormal, desirable and loathed (Campbell, 2008). In this way, ableism becomes the acceptable discourse for White supremacy. Educators do not explicitly write discipline referrals or suspend students for race, neither do they refer them for disability classification or recommend more restrictive placements down the hall or out of the building because of their racial identity. Rather, schools exclude Black and brown students by casting them as impossible to keep in the room or the building based on normative discourses of acceptable and unacceptable performance (Youdell,

2006).

Similarly, while trauma-informed practices are aimed at inclusion, a DSE and DisCrit analysis troubles their assumptions about disability and therapy. Brantlinger’s (2006) caveat about “fixing” students is apropos here. Likewise, by focusing their gaze on diagnosing students and fixing what may be wrong with them, school holds them in the place of a powerless object, and implicitly validates the power of adults and the institution of the system (Bornstein, 2015, 2017; Foucault, 1975). Furthermore, an uncritical application of the trauma-informed construct could presume that all student traumas are caused by experiences and forces outside of school, ignoring the ways that school itself can traumatize students through humiliation and dehumanization (Broderick & Leonardo, 2016; Love, 2016; Smith & Geroski, 2015). This DisCrit analysis, as mentioned above, builds on CRT in education, summarized below.

CRT in education posits that racism is so deeply woven into U.S. educational institutions that a cogent analysis must go well beyond attitudes and utterances to examine structures, policies, and practices. Those structures, policies, and practices systematically consign White students to success and minori-tized students to failure (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Gillborn, 2008). The ostensibly meritocratic constructions of hierarchical school structures, rewards, and deficits are racialized and entrench White supremacy thoroughly, despite late-20th Century attempts to undo them (Bonilla-Silva, 2001).

CRT’s origins lie in legal scholarship (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). For this article, Harris’s (1995) analysis of Whiteness as property is especially apt in looking at punitive and exclusionary school discipline. Harris notes that whereas the concept of property encompasses the exclusive right to use something or someplace, it thereby discursively permits the owner to exclude using that thing or being in that place. Thus, when schools use typically White behavioral characteristics to define who belongs and who must go, they institutionalize White supremacy.

López (2016) challenges educational leaders to contend with the CRT analysis that neither good intentions, nominally progressive vision statements, nor strategically aimed policies will suffice to deeply impact institutional racism because “racism cannot be remedied without substantially recognizing and altering White privilege” (p. 86). In addition to describing institutional racism, critical Whiteness studies (CWS) extends these analyses to the social construction of Whiteness as hegemonic (Allen, 2004; 2003Andersen, ; Leonardo, 2004; Warren, 1999).

In an educational context, Allen and Liou (2018) discuss White hegemony in the hidden curriculum of school—the lessons of power that are taught implicitly, masked by the explicit curriculum and pedagogy.

Whites deny their complicity in supremacist structures and history through two powerful strategies: willful ignorance (Applebaum, 2010; Mills, 2007) and color blindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Leonardo, 2009). In the

metaphor of color blindness, blindness notably connotes ignorance, indeed innocent ignorance. In this trope, the blind person is held blameless and is perhaps even pitied for their impairment. Hence, color blindness appeals to Whites who attempt to position themselves as opponents of racism (Parker & Villalpando, 2007).

To that end, a number of recent studies of educators and educational leaders describe the strategies that Whites employ in attempting antiracist work (Bornstein, 2017; McMahon, 2007; Patton & Bondi, 2015; Swanson & Welton, 2018; Theoharis & Haddix, 2011).

Swanson and Welton (2018) portray leaders whose attempts at leading antiracist discussions among their faculty were stymied by resistance and claims of race-neutrality. Patton and Bondi (2015) find that White male administrators were able to conceive of themselves as allies only in situations of personal racism, but not structural racism. The White principals in McMahon’s (2007) study could not acknowledge Whiteness in any dimension. By contrast to McMahon (2007) and Patton and Bondi (2015), Theoharis and Haddix (2011) find that White principals conducting antiracist conversations with their school communities had mixed results, but that those who had most success had delved into their own racial identities before attempting to lead others in those discussions.

The CWS and CRT analyses of color blindness extend beyond individual praxis into policy, and particularly into neoliberal reform policy. From Reagan’s A Nation at Risk (Tom-linson, 1987) through Bush’s No Child Left Behind (Apple, 2005; Leonardo, 2009) to Obama’s Race to the Top (Gillborn, 2014; López, 2016; Slater, 2015), public schools have been cast as persistently in crisis by virtue of failing rates on standardized test scores. More specifically the racialized achievement gap between White majority and minoritized students has been used as a rationale to control schools in those communities through voluminous audits, strategic plans, and structural reforms (Apple, 2005; Gillborn, 2008; Leonardo, 2009; Slater, 2015).

Crisis has been used as a massive lever for overhauling public schools—prominently in promoting the rise of charter schools as happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina—with a paternalistic savior rhetoric (Gillborn, 2010; Slater, 2015). Mandatory audits, curriculum reforms, wholesale personnel transfers or termination, and institutional restructuring follow capitalist corporate models and squeeze out other paradigms for school transformation (Apple, 2005; Slater, 2015). In this sense, neoliberal discourse disciplines educators to toe the line of a narrow set of prescriptions. Leonardo (2009) regards NCLB as the educational analog of the Patriot Act following the 9/11 attacks in its use of a logic of crisis to create a sense of urgency and impose a nationalized mission for schools.

When these neoliberal mandates pose as race-neutral, they reify Whiteness as the de facto common-sense standard for educational success (Leonardo, 2009; López, 2016). The achievement gap discourse appears race-sensitive by at least mentioning race as worthy of attention. However, it fails to identify the causes of those disparities such as legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow. Leonardo (2009) deconstructs color blindness evident in neoliberal policy. He notes that when neoliberal policy ignores racist roots of present disparate educational outcomes, it effectively denies that (1) race and racism are waning as significant institutional factors, (2) racism fundamentally manifests in the acts or judgments of individuals, (3) economic stratification is more important than racial oppression (ignoring how they are historically coconstructed), and (4) minori-tized students, families, and communities are thereby held responsible for student failure.

While this autoethnography is not a policy study, the turnaround reform mandate provides the backdrop for this case. CWS/CRT analyses are especially useful here to deconstruct the rhetoric of reform and transformation that have been co-opted by educational neoliberalism precisely because Shields (2018) has used some of the same vocabulary in pressing transformative leaders to pull apart oppressive knowledge structures and build new ones in their place. This study explores that potential confusion and exemplifies how antiracist leaders might demystify the rhetoric of reform.

This article is the result of my employing autoethnographic techniques to revisit a professional chapter in my life that I had previously recounted as autobiographical story, but not interrogated with the rigors of a more thorough analysis. Spry (2001) and Denzin (2003, 2006) describe autoethnography as a performative methodology in which the text of remembrances, documents, and other artifacts as well as the body of the author establish dialectics that can lend them epistemic impact. As a branch of ethnography, it should also apply the rigors of that larger methodological genre.

For my analytical construct, I have borrowed from Kincheloe’s (2005) critical brico-lage and Khalifa and Briscoe’s (2015) theory on the sensemaking performed by critical scholars. The bricolage technique (Kincheloe, 2005) helps to collate a series of episodes— broadly conceived—within a critical theory framework, in this case the interplay of transformative leadership, CRT, and CWS. The episodes differ in duration but hold together in their explication of the dynamics of power, policy, and identity.

Khalifa and Briscoe’s (2015) work on emerging critical consciousness among scholars is also applicable, insofar as the episodes related here reflect my own emerging work in both CRT, DSE, and the dynamically growing intersection of the two in DisCrit theory. This article is a case study of one year of my work as a principal. I had been a principal in other districts, then had completed a doctoral program, and returned to the principalship for the year studied here. Following this year, I moved into academia as a professor of educational leadership. I did not plan that back and forth, but Khalifa and Briscoe’s (2015) work validates weaving them together as autoethnogra-phy to develop one’s racial critical consciousness.

This case takes place over the course of a single school year. The most conventional texts in the data set are my personal journals, and the memos, emails, professional development materials, and other documents I composed and received as principal. The textual documentation also includes publicly available demographic information on the school and district as a second data source. The texts do not include any observations, reports, or letters pertaining to individual faculty, staff, or students.

The less conventional texts for this study are my memories that were not committed to journals. Rather, they have lived in my retelling them as stories in the years since. The critical sensemaking I do here in authorship also had roots in the political performativity of my storytelling between that year and now (Den-zin, 2003). Furthermore in the context of CWS, I have interrogated those stories and memories to examine to what degree I am valorizing myself as a social justice warrior, a White good-guy activist (Boyd, 2008; Patton & Bondi, 2015; Thompson, 2003).

The analytic process was first writing down the stories, then coding them for emergent discourses as per critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2005, 2012; van Dijk, 1993). To explicate themes of discursive power, I also applied Foucauldian discourse analysis (Hall, 2001). As a secondary step, I used NVivo software (Welsh, 2002) to do the same with the collected written texts from the year itself.

These findings are organized into three sections. The first section establishes the context for the overall study. Here, as an applicant for a principal’s job, I positioned myself as a leader who would take a transformative stance toward a turnaround reform effort. The second section explores my attempts to unmask White supremacist discourses among district principals. That section contrasts two regularly scheduled leadership academies, one on instructional leadership and one on discipline. The third section examines my attempts to design the turnaround plan focused on replacing the school’s extensive and disproportionate use of suspension with restorative and trauma-informed practices.

In 2013, I applied for a P-5 principal position in a Northeastern small city that had one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the African American and Latinx communities of any city in the United States (Jargowsky, 2015). Thirty-two schools served approximately 20,000 students, who were diverse in every measure, as were the students of the P-5 school I would come to lead. Table 1 shows student enrollment data for the district and school.

The district had been through numerous efforts at school reform and revision over the past decade, most of which had failed to produce any results in student achievement on standardized tests. Those multiple failures had brought the district to a crisis point, which they used to leverage sweeping changes to time spent in school, curriculum, personnel assignments, and labor agreements. The district had secured a large grant from state and federal Race to the Top funds with which they intended to add 300 hours to the school year (the equivalent of 10 weeks of school) for five schools. The expanded time would include enrichment for students, professional development for faculty, and collaborative data-driven planning by faculty (National Center on Time and Learning, 2013). The expanded time could be allotted as extra time on traditional school days, more days and weeks in a year-round schooling model, Saturday school, or any combination thereof, as long as the major programmatic components were in place.

The district had hired external consultants to guide the planning process. The consultants laid out mandatory program components for the turnaround plans: (1) high quality instruction, (2) targeted academic intervention and acceleration opportunities, (3) regularly scheduled enrichment activities, (4) common times for teacher data analysis, professional development, and planning times, (5) attention to climate, culture, and (6) clear school priorities (, National Center on Time and Learning 2013). Each team had flexibility on time allocation, guiding themes and vision, and the specific content of those mandatory components. As the new principal, I would have a year to work with a team and external consultants on a turnaround plan. Implementation would begin the following academic year.

However, the funds came with major strings attached. First, each turnaround school would establish its own grievance procedure outside of existing collective bargaining contracts. Second and more profoundly, half the existing faculty of each turnaround school would be transferred to other schools before the new plan was implemented.

Although I could see the sword of Damocles hanging over the faculty’s heads as part of this neoliberal bargain, I thought that the overall effort could be an opportunity to bring my leadership style to bear, rooted in community organizing models of democratic empowerment, and Freirean and CRT pedagogy. I presented those credentials clearly in my cover letter and in responses to essay prompts that reflected neoliberal color-blind tropes such as leading “all stakeholders in creating and implementing [my] vision” for the school, and ensuring that students “of all racial/ethnic, language, academic, and economic backgrounds” could succeed. I invoked Ladson-Billings (2006) in one answer:

Likewise, I brought conclusions from my dissertation research to bear in the application process. I had learned that conventional applications of positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) as a one-size-fits-all system for remediation and support reified White middle-class models of compliance. Thus, it would systematically swap one set of deficit label for another with respect to racially minoritized children—exchanging “bad” kid for “sick” kid—when employed to reduce excessive suspension (Bornstein, 2014). In my prior analysis, PBIS, special education, and exclusionary discipline were inseparable parts of the school-to-prison pipeline. Thus, when an application essay prompt asked how I would establish “a safe, productive, respectful, and positive learning atmosphere,” I argued for restorative justice practices and culturally responsive PBIS that reflected the values of the diverse communities served by the city’s schools.

A one-on-one interview with the superintendent was the final stage of the hiring process. I knew the superintendent had been trained at the neoliberal Broad Academy for educational leadership (Saltman, 2009). For our interview, I prepared my single end-of-interview question strategically to explore how she framed the reform process. I asked, “Will this turnaround effort be done by us, with us, for us, or to us?” Without missing a beat, the superintendent answered, “It’s being done to you.” I saw then that they wielded the rhetoric of reform as an instrument of control.

Throughout the hiring process, I presented myself as a White school leader willing to identify systemic racism. I chose to push beyond the neutrality of neoliberal concepts where I met them. Although my final exchange with the superintendent crystallized the neoliberal crisis reform contract, I took the job anyway, thinking that I might find affordances in the process to build a more liberatory option.

Central administration and building principals met twice a month in leadership academies. The first session dealt with management issues and the second with instructional leadership. In October, the state attorney general opened an investigation on the district’s excessive and disproportionate suspension of students with disabilities, African American, and Latinx students (Office of the State Attorney General, 2014). Immediately, the management-oriented academies’ agendas were dominated by protocols for answering the attorney general’s subpoenas and ensuring due process for suspension. In those sessions, veteran, White-male principals dominated the conversation, complaining that the subpoenas were unduly burdensome, that due process protocols for suspension impeded their judgment and tied their hands, and that the real issue was student disruption. African American and Latinx principals validated their White peers’ objections to the onerous workload, but they did not comment on due process or judgment.

At the instructional leadership academies, principals took exception to the state scrutiny of student achievement scores. They did not want their schools to be held responsible for the failings they saw in families and the community’s economic condition. In my journal, I took note of these common deficit narratives about students and their families. From what I could see, those narratives were pervasive among principals, without regard to the principal’s own racial identity.

Furthermore, principals worried about the effect of low student scores on teacher evaluations. To comply with the Race to the Top funding mandates from the state, 40% of teacher evaluation scores were calculated from student achievement scores. Student scores were low enough to make it likely that most teachers would earn a subpar “developing” rating, despite the scores from classroom observations. Adding fuel to the fire, the governor had threatened to fire teachers with 2 consecutive years of subpar ratings in a row.

Race neutral curriculum reform and colorblind denial characterized the March leadership academy session that focused on the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) skill of composing and supporting a compelling argument. District curriculum supervisors emphasized that students would develop solid written arguments when given the opportunity to rehearse their arguments orally. Thus, principals role-played sample lessons on composing oral arguments, so that we would know what to look for in our teacher observations.

Throughout that session, I had the February leadership academy meeting on the law suit ringing in my ears. Reviews of the discipline data as per the subpoena had shown undeniably that principals disproportionately suspended racially minoritized students and students with disabilities, often for insubordination. Although the present meeting was about instruction rather than discipline, I felt that I had to point out a connection between the two academies. As we debriefed the simulation on oral argument, I said that we had evidence from February that our students were extremely adept at arguing, but that as a district we were suspending them for it at alarming rates. I was trying to flip the implicit deficit narrative of the February management meeting into an asset view in the March instructional meeting. Nobody picked up the point, and we moved on to other comments about the steps of solid instruction to translate oral rehearsal into argumentative writing.

I had made a contrast about conduct but failed to identify race explicitly. I had highlighted that we identified oral argument as a hallmark of academically appropriate conduct in generic descriptions of CCLS but labeled as disorderly conduct otherwise. I thought that the data on disproportionate discipline would make that contrast on its own, but that was not sufficient. In February, the race-specific data analysis had merely reified a dominant discourse of minoritized students as noncompli-ant and excludable. Leaders in the February meeting questioned neither hegemonic White codes of conduct nor White educators’ judgment. In March, the same hegemony showed in curriculum mandates, this time validating implicitly White conduct. I tried to point out that implicit paradox. However, without naming race, my point was lost.

Nonetheless, the weight does not fall entirely on me for that failure. The overall discourses on both curriculum and behavior were ostensibly race-neutral. Leonardo (2009) describes this dynamic as color-blind, color-mute, and color-deaf in the context of policies and practices that are willfully ignorant of how Whiteness is inscribed in the common definitions of academic and social behavior.

Developing the turnaround plan was the major project of the year. The first phase was conducting my own qualitative research on strengths and challenges of the school. The second phase was planting seeds that could grow into the structures and practices that could enhance the challenges and meet the challenges over the long term, while simultaneously developing the official turnaround plan with a design team of stakeholders. Although the final plan our team submitted authentically responded to deep racialized challenges, the district administration rejected it and substituted one based on neoliberal formulas.

Informal Qualitative Research. From August through October, I collected data on the school’s strengths and challenges through interviews observations, and documents. By Thanksgiving, I reported my findings to the school and my district superiors with conclusions I wanted to foreshadow the turnaround plan. I deliberately used a funds of knowledge framework (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 2005) to interpret perceived deficits as assets. For example, the majority of the 96% White faculty used implicitly racist and classist deficit language about students and families. They were nostalgic about the school’s better days when the students were more racially homogeneous and their test scores were higher. With the funds of knowledge approach, I identified the school’s diversity as a strength. In a school assembly on the theme of belonging, I stated that 17% of our students (English language learners) were so smart that they were already learning their second language.

A major finding from interviews was that faculty and staff saw too much disorder and disruption in classes. Almost universally, teachers cited the need for better discipline in their interviews. In the several years prior, the principal routinely placed 20 students in an in-school suspension room, and held another 20 more in the main office. That principal’s aim was pacification: pacifying students with board games and video games, and pacifying teachers by removing the students they identified as disruptive or insubordinate.

In preparing the school’s report for the attorney general’s subpoena of discipline data, I found that office discipline referrals corroborated what I heard in the interviews. Teachers and staff authored both the discipline referrals and the anecdotes about disorder and insubordination. I suspected that the adults contributed a good deal to the situation, particularly in abdicating their responsibility for creating a safe, vibrant, and inclusive school.

For example, as part of my observational research in the fall, I noted how the school was implementing positive behavioral interventions and supports by posting a slogan— ROARS, Respectful, Optimistic, Always Responsible, and Safe—around the school. I first reacted to the slogan as an artifact of White hegemony—apparently neutral language that was code for compliance as typically exhibited by Whites.

Faculty surprised me by the way they spoke about ROARS in their interviews. They connected it to a notable strength of the current school: the building’s recent $25 million renovation. Faculty pointed out that in reopening the building, administrators escorted every class around the new facility, emphasizing how ROARS applied in classrooms, library, cafeteria, pool, et cetera. First, I noted that teachers relinquished to administrators their role in setting ROARS expectations. Second, I heard that repeated story as a tale of Whiteness as property. It spoke of pride and abundance for spectacular facilities, and caution and trepidation that our minoritized students would destroy them. It fit with the 96% White faculty excessively writing office discipline referrals.

Another apparent although misused asset of the school was a robust mental health team, including full-time social workers and counselors from two community agencies supplementing two district social workers and an in-house medical and dental clinic for the children. Our school population included children living with domestic violence and community crime at notably high levels, and children from active war zones around the world—Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, and Central America. A shorthand description from our school’s mental health team meetings was that if you were not one of these traumatized children, you were sitting next to one in class. The trauma manifested in classic fear responses of fight and flight on a nearly constant basis.

Teachers excluded these students from their classrooms with either school discipline or disability classification protocols. First, calls came in to the office for discipline support every twenty minutes. Second, referrals for mental health support overwhelmed our considerable mental health resources. Rather than build classrooms that could handle a range of emotion and behavior, teachers expected someone to take disruptive or disorderly students from the room and return them when cured. Furthermore, so many teachers regularly escalated confrontations with their students and humiliated them that the school itself was a traumatizing place to be, regardless of any student’s experience outside our walls.

When I reported my findings at Thanksgiving, I proposed that our students should feel safe in every classroom. Teachers heard that as, “Josh thinks we’re threatening our kids.” I thought it without tact and poor strategy to acknowledge that interpretation, but it was not wrong. If we were going to address the needs of so many students, ROARS would be wholly inadequate. With a narrow White standard of compliance as our fundamental behavioral expectation, we would never address the roots of conflict in the school.

When reporting the conclusions, I laid out a broad 3-year plan that I hoped would shape the formal turnaround planning. In Year 1 we would build a functioning PBIS system and restorative justice practices. In Year 2, we would implement trauma-sensitive schooling practices and policies. Those years would establish baselines for understanding the roots of children’s behavior and creating safe spaces. In Year 3 we would take on the more politically charged work of creating a culturally responsive PBIS and trauma-informed system.

At that time, I was mindful of putting med-icalized discourses ahead of cultural responsiveness. I journaled that

Medicalized analyses of student behaviors would have the imprimatur of science, contrasting with culturally responsive analyses and practices seeming nice, but less substantial. With trepidation, I thought the proposal was strategically smarter, taking stock of the landscape in which medicalized supports were being pushed as the most promising and best resourced remedies to excessive racist punishment. I maintained a faith in my own ability to make the pivot in Year 3 from medicalization to cultural responsiveness.

Planting While Planning. While the plan was coming together, I sought to have the school experiment with three promising practices. First was instituting a new school vision statement. Second was establishing the rudiments of restorative justice practices in place of the prior principal’s use of in-school suspension to warehouse students whom teachers had kicked out. Third was introducing teachers to the connection between CCLS questioning techniques and trauma-informed restorative practices. Nonetheless, I expected that faculty morale might thwart those practices. Teachers loved the school as a place to work together, despite their stance toward students and their families. Because of their loyalty to each other, they were terrified of the neoliberal turnaround threat of involuntary transfer.

New Vision Statement. State audit reports of the school strongly recommended composing a new vision statement. With the school leadership team, I used that mandate to frame the school’s pedagogy as child centered and inclusive, as in Table 2. By November, it was official.

The new vision was actually twin vision statements, one for adults and one for children, to be recited as a call and response. From November onward, every school gathering opened with the call and response between adults and students. It showed that they had complimentary roles in the success of our community. Furthermore, the two identical lines—ROARS and being unconditionally encouraging—demonstrated a shared and equal responsibility toward each other. Especially in the case of the ROARS slogan, this shift echoed my early question to the superintendent insofar as behavior expectations were to be done less to the students than by both adults and children together. Throughout the year, teachers and families said that they preferred this accessible version to the old one. Students showed they liked it too, playing their parts with gusto.

RestorativePractices. I saw experimenting with restorative practices as pivotal to the overall reform project. First, we changed the function of the in-school suspension room to a “reflection room” to respond differently in the moment to acute disruption. Second, we tried to establish classroom morning meetings as a way to build a culture of safety and acceptance. Third, we introduced the concept of trauma-informed schooling as appropriate to the experiences of our students and an effective way to create safe classrooms.

Changing the in-school suspension room to the reflection room meant stopping the warehousing and mollification my predecessor had made standard operating procedure. More importantly, it indicated how restorative practices could build justice, rather than maintain a veneer of order. The reflection room was meant to (1) deescalate conflict, (2) emphasize that students had legitimate reasons driving their disruptive and confrontational behaviors, and (3) develop new strategies they could use to meet their needs and repair whatever relationships had been damaged.

It took several months to reset the expectations and behaviors of faculty, staff, and students to this new model. By the end of the year, it still did function well, nor had teachers and students consistently adopted new ways to handle difficult situations. However, two statistics indicated a shift, if not a success. Out-of-school suspensions dropped by 45% from the previous year, in-school suspensions that kept students out of class for the majority of any school day dropped by 80%.

In February, we made time for the restorative baseline practices for social/emotional and group building exercises with a daily morning meeting in each class. Teachers said they were eager to get back to a practice they had done in the past, but they wanted my assurance that they would be allowed the time to do so. They said that in recent years the administration required them to account for every minute as core instructional time. Administrators before me deemed morning meeting to be trivial and wasteful. I remember saying emphatically, “PLEASE do morning meeting. We’re getting killed out here with all these referrals!” I hoped that this social/emotional engagement could center student experiences in our classrooms and thereby challenge the power of White codes of academic and social behavior. Simultaneously, it could cut against neoliberal policing via time-on-task accounting.

Unfortunately, few teachers implemented morning meetings. When I asked why not, they apparently had little experience doing it despite what they had said before. A first, I felt duped by this development. I thought that they would rather blame administrative mandates for prohibiting them from adopting social/ emotional practices than take personal responsibility for their choices. However, on further reflection in my journal I came to see this as more evidence of the oppressive fear they had in the overall context of accountability and turnaround. That fear made it impossible for them to see their classrooms transformed.

Connecting Trauma-Informed Schooling to Common Core. The district actively promoted the neoliberal Common Core Learning Standards as the heart of instructional reform. The March Leadership Academy recounted above was emblematic of that work. The pedagogy of Common Core Learning Standards built ambiguity and frustration into the curriculum on purpose, expecting that they would catalyze deep and sustained learning. This in turn required classrooms to provide safety and channel frustration into problem solving rather than fight or flight. Thus, I thought our plan could use this pedagogical necessity as an affordance to infuse trauma-informed schooling practices in the turnaround plan.

Trauma-informed schooling proposed that powerfully disruptive behaviors were often expressions of survival strategies triggered by previous traumas (Dorado, Martinez, McAr-thur, & Leibovitz, 2016). I was familiar with restorative and trauma-informed programs such as Circle of Courage (Brendtro et al., 2002). These programs validated school’s ability to be a healing sanctuary in the eye of whatever external emotional hurricanes students might face.

The turnaround team settled on Circle of Courage (Brendtro et al., 2002) as the core trauma-informed practice of the new plan. During a professional development day, the team led sessions on how Circle of Courage might be a vehicle to connect the school’s existing instructional work on questioning techniques and data-informed decision making with social/emotional learning. For example, the district’s CCLS-aligned teacher evaluation rubric guided ongoing work on questioning techniques. Table 3 shows the year’s focus for professional development, derived from the prior year’s state audit.

The Circle of Courage (Brendtro et al., 2002) posited that youth strive in four dimensions: mastery, belonging, independence, and generosity. For the purposes of our turnaround plan, the team pointed out that teachers who created opportunities for generosity distinguished their questioning and facilitation as highly effective, since it was an act of intellectual generosity to take a peer’s evidence seriously enough to either argue with it or build on it. Thus, we tied CCLS mandates and neoliberal teacher assessment to the trauma-informed framework at the heart of the turnaround.

Final Plan. Our school’s stakeholders— faculty, parents, and community agencies— were cautiously optimistic about the turnaround plan. The team had paid careful attention through the year to gathering teachers’ opinions and priorities, working with new initiatives, and getting meaningful feedback on how the initiatives could meet the concerns. The team had strong parent and community representatives from racially minoritized communities. They all endorsed the plan. The other four teams in our cohort of turnaround schools were likewise enthusiastic about our school’s plan, especially in light of the attention brought to refiguring discipline practices by the attorney general’s law suit.

The overall thrust of our final turnaround plan was clear and strong—trauma-informed and restorative practices at the core, with documented expression in professional development, data analysis, scheduling, and pedagogical techniques aligned with CCLS. The district’s chief academic officer, who oversaw the turnaround cohorts, was appalled when they received our proposal, though. They wanted to know where the writing-across-the-curriculum strand was. I explained that it was there, though subordinate to trauma-informed and restorative practices. In the end, the chief academic officer rewrote the final proposal to advance their mandates over the team’s design, promoting writing and demoting trauma-informed practices.

Disrupting and replacing racist discipline practices are exemplary practices for transformative leadership (Anello et al., 2014; Shields, 2018). This autoethnography explores the depth to which Whiteness and neoliberalism condition that work, however. While the turnaround effort may nominally have been devoted to equitable outcomes through structural change, it effectively centered White norms as the criteria for academic success and social belonging.

The school district had a racist historic record of (1) failing to improve standardized test scores and (2) suspending students with minoritized racial and disability identities. Being accountable to the state education department and the state attorney general, they deployed a crisis scenario to mandate sweeping changes. However, they marginalized any critical race analysis of the structures and practices that had brought them to that point. They promoted allegedly race-neutral instructional practices and discipline procedures, likewise without authentic acknowledgment of how Whiteness functioned within and across those two core systems. The compulsion of crisis discourse pushes CRT/CWS analysis and alternative solutions aside (Leonardo, 2009; Slater, 2015). This case study demonstrates those dynamics in action.

As an autoethnography, this case also examines how an individual leader can navigate that terrain. As a White, antiracist leader, I attempted to expose the hegemonic influence of White codes of academic and social behavior that were embedded in the district’s instructional mandates and punitive discipline practices. I attempted to enact the entreaty that “Whites who are in solidarity with people of color need to appropriate our White power and privilege as a way of subverting that same power and privilege” (Allen, 2004, p. xiv).

I began the year forthrightly declaring an antiracist agenda, knowing that it dovetailed with the neoliberal rhetoric the district was promoting. I used strategies through the year that were less explicitly antiracist but nonetheless tried to destabilize White supremacist discourses. When White principlas defended their right to judge that White versions of argument enhanced CCLS learning but minoritized versions earned suspension, I objected and pointed out the contradiction.

Within the school, I used the neoliberal crisis atmosphere as an affordance to leverage a turnaround plan based on restorative justice and trauma-informed practices (Abramovitz & Mingus, 2016; Brendtro et al., 2002; Crosby, 2016; Dorado et al., 2016). These constituted paradigm shifts from punitive discipline and neoliberal culturally ignorant instruction.

However, teachers resisted. In 1 year, I was not able to diminish White faculty’s fear for their job security. To assuage their anxiety, they maintained the school as a safe place for them: a place of White property, governed by White norms. And finally, although the design team from our school and from sister schools in the turnaround effort supported that paradigm shift, district administration rejected it in favor of neoliberal ostensibly race-neutral curriculum.

Even so, in the reflection provided by autoethnographic methods (Boyd, 2008; Khalifa & Briscoe, 2015; Spry, 2001) I see a profound limitation in the work I did. The limitation I find most disturbing is how our trauma-informed practices could potentially institutionalize a medicalizing of racialized behaviors, and thereby maintain White supremacy. I regarded trauma-informed and restorative practices as significant progress, but the cost may have been that they could simultaneously pathologize typically White norms not just as good behavior (Broderick & Leonardo, 2016), but also as normal behavior (Born-stein, 2015, 2017). Hence, I worry that trauma-informed schooling could be a way for White supremacy to “rebound, finding new ways to reinvent itself’ (Alexander, 2018, p. xiv).

CWS robustly describes how Whiteness is constructed as neutral, invisible, natural, or as the hidden curriculum in schools (Allen & Liou, 2018; Leonardo, 2009; López, 2016). A system that enshrines Whiteness as normal goes a damaging step further, because the ideology of normalcy invokes the logic of medicine and science (Davis, 2006; Harwood, 2003; Youdell, 2006). Discursively, this is an especially powerful construct for using Whiteness as the dominant criterion for inclusion (Annamma et al., 2016; Bell, 2017; Broderick & Leonardo, 2016; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011) and exclusion (Bornstein, 2017; Har-wood, 2003; 2011Skiba et al., ; Skiba et al., 2014; Youdell, 2006), because to be normal is to belong and to be abnormal or deviant is grounds to be suspended or placed in a restrictive learning environment.

This case joins studies finding that antirac-ist leaders should examine their own identities (Theoharis & Haddix, 2011), challenge structural Whiteness (Green & Dantley, 2013; McMahon, 2007), and go beyond limiting themselves to offering personal support rather than disrupting oppressive structures disruption and formulating better alternatives (Patton & Bondi, 2015). It demonstrates the necessity for leaders to navigate and critique neoliberal-ism’s alleged attempts to make radical change for equity. Leaders must be prepared to unmask Whiteness and ableism when they are concealed as race-neutral (Bornstein, 2014, 2017; Gillborn, 2014; Leonardo, 2009; López, 2016; Slater, 2015; Youdell, 2006). Indeed, because Whiteness and ableism validate the identities of educators who themselves feel threatened by crisis scenarios, a transformative leader must be astute about all those complexities. Transformative leaders must remain appropriately vigilant and about the wily reinvention of White supremacy, humble in their complicity with aiding it, and committed to taking the next right step to dismantle it.