Why is classroom management so vexing to urban teachers?

Why is classroom management especially problematic for urban teachers, and why has research yielded so few helpful answers to this question? In this article l take up both questions, suggesting that the answer to both emanates from the same source: the reliance on deficit paradigms to explain underachievement of students who have historically not been served well by urban schools. I explain why teachers who create orderly classrooms that are academically demanding must establish and reinforce social norms in their classrooms that contravene the deficit paradigm, the dominant ideology of most urban schools. The article concludes with an examination of how my theory is illustrated by refraining, a technique for changing problem behavior in schools.

WHY IS CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT especially problematic for urban teachers? And why has research yielded so few helpful answers to this question? In this article I investigate both questions and suggest that a tendency to focus on decontextualized characteristics of individuals, especially those considered negative, has limited our ability to understand why classroom management is a significant challenge for urban teachers.

Rejecting the Deficit Paradigms for a Contextual Analysis

Historically, two paradigms, or frameworks, have been used to analyze academic underachievement of students in urban schools (Weiner, 1993). The dominant framework, called the "deficit paradigm," explains lack of school success as being due to problems in students, their families, their culture, or their communities. Underachievement is viewed as stemming from deficiencies in the students, so policies and practices to help students succeed attempt to correct their deficiencies. This approach has frequently been challenged with another explanation that shifts attention away from student deficiencies and instead scrutinizes deficiencies of individual teachers (see Weiner, 1993, for a fuller discussion).

The explanatory power of theories that arise from both of these deficit paradigms is sharply limited by their shared emphasis on decontextualized characteristics of individuals. Although characteristics of individual students and teachers do influence academic achievement, I argue that contextual factors are equally important. For this reason, theoretical work about urban schools and urban teaching must move beyond one-dimensional descriptions of student or teacher characteristics to take up a range of issues that influence how students and teachers act in schools. To understand why urban teaching is different and why classroom management is problematic, we need to adopt what Knapp terms "a relational view" of learners and teachers within an institutional setting (Knapp & Associates, 1995, p. 3). In addition, we need to understand how factors outside the school walls influence teachers and students' perceptions of and actions in schools. All of these issues comprise the social context of urban schools, and it is within this social context that student and teacher characteristics should be analyzed.

Barriers to Understanding Classroom Management in Urban Schools

One of the most serious obstacles to understanding anything about urban schools is the lack of reliable data. Even seemingly straightforward information such as the number of newly hired teachers or whether they are certified to teach in the areas in which they are teaching is often difficult to obtain. However, we do know that after prospective teachers leave education programs in colleges and universities for jobs in urban classrooms, they rank classroom management as one of the main challenges. For example, a study of reasons teachers cited for leaving the Milwaukee school system found three issues amenable to improved teacher education: problems with discipline, problems working with underachieving students, and difficulties working with students of varying backgrounds (Haberman & Rickards, 1990).

Another obstacle to understanding why classroom management is so challenging in urban schools is agreeing on a definition of "urban schools." What makes a school or school system "urban"? I explain elsewhere (Weiner, 1993) why the need for a more scientific definition of urban schools has been obscured by the prevalence of synonyms for urban (e.g., inner city, poor, minority) that make student characteristics synonymous with systemic characteristics. While city school systems generally enroll high concentrations of students who are members of oppressed groups as well as new immigrants who may be victims of discrimination (Ogbu, 1995a, 1995b), other key characteristics distinguish urban school systems.

Urban schools and systems are notable for their size, their structure, and the influences of the school bureaucracy and were consciously organized to insulate school people from the communities they serve, in an effort to "take politics out of education" (Kaestle, 1973; Tyack, 1974). Standardized practices, designed to treat all students fairly, make the schools impersonal and undercut efforts to individualize learning. Also, city schools have been underfunded since they were formed, a factor that has had far-reaching effects that deserve investigation (Weiner, 2000). Another factor distinguishing urban schools may be that city children often live in neighborhoods that are "relatively small in size but densely populated, self-contained, and strongly bounded, resulting in high degrees of territorial behavior" (Howey, 1999).