Prof. Jayanti Owens Wins Two Awards for Research on Racial Disparity in School Discipline
In a 2022 study, Owens found that Black boys tend to face harsher punishment than their White counterparts.
Jayanti Owens, assistant professor of organizational behavior, won two awards at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) this month for her paper “Double Jeopardy: Teacher Biases, Racialized Organizations, and the Production of Racial/Ethnic Disparities in School Discipline.”
Owens won the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the ASA, and the James Coleman Award for Best Article from the Sociology of Education section.
“Double Jeopardy,” published in the American Sociological Review in 2022, finds that teachers tend to punish Black boys more harshly than White boys for the same infraction, and that Black boys are also more likely to attend a school where the culture is more punitive.
Presenting the Scott Award, Adilia James of Endicott College said that Owens “adopted an innovative experimental approach to pinpoint sources of racial and ethnic bias in educational organizations.” She added that the article “adds empirical evidence as well as theoretical depth to the growing discussion of racialized organizations, and it also clarifies the social processes that we must address in order to improve racial and ethnic equity in K-to-12 schools.”
Jordan Conwell of the University of Texas, presenting the Coleman Award, said that “the study powerfully disentangles a thorny issue in race and education, and also sheds light on the functioning of racialized organizations more broadly. A runaway winner of this year’s Coleman Award.”
Owens, who joined the Yale SOM faculty in 2022 and is an affiliate of The Broad Center at Yale SOM, studies how organizations negotiate diversity and difference, with a focus on education, using social experiments as well as analysis of large-scale data from surveys and administrative records.