Administering New Anti-Bullying Law: The Organizational Field and School Variation During Initial Implementation

Abstract

A 2011 New Jersey anti-bullying law required school personnel to make nuanced determinations about student violations, take on multiple new roles, and assume a high administrative burden. We examine how the state’s middle schools responded to the law during a period when standards for implementation among schools were unclear. We observe substantial variation between schools in their implementation approach and we identify two sources of this variation. First, parents, school district administrators and lawyers, state Department of Education staff, and private companies disseminated multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of the law and of bullying, to which school personnel were differentially exposed. Second, school personnel crafted their own implementation approach out of the varied interpretations from these organization field actors. In periods when legal standards are relatively settled, field actors often encourage conformity among organizations; in this case, by contrast, they contributed to variation in implementation. We argue that examining the on-the-ground interpretation of organization field meanings during unsettled periods may be particularly useful for understanding the trajectory of laws, as early variation provides the context in which organizational practices can become legal requirements.

Outside the brackets: Why school administrators fail to see gendered harassment within an antibullying law

“…In the face of legal ambiguity about what constitutes compliance, organizational actors use discretion to demonstrate compliance (often by instituting formal organizational roles and structures); courts later affirmed these practices for demonstrating EEO compliance as indications of compliance, producing “legal endogeneity.” Here we observe that the informal organizational practices among school personnel—driven largely by gender stereotypes—were later legally codified: case law affirmed the practice of excluding incidents from HIB if there was mutual participation or ongoing conflict (Anti‐Bullying Task Force Report, 2016). Further, later administrative law changes required district policies to include a definition of bullying that highlighted a possible power imbalance between students (see a discussion of the implications of administrative legal changes for legal endogeneity in Shepherd & Fast, 2022). While these codifications of informal organizational practices likely resulted from shared nonlegal definitions of bullying between commissioners and school personnel (as opposed to the creation of new structures to signal compliance, as described in legal endogeneity), the effect was to legally support practices that normalized gendered forms of harassment.…”

“…First, the common definition of bullying as involving an imbalance of social power between parties that many teachers and administrators referred to (Olweus, 1994) was not part of the legal criteria for determining a HIB. Second, while the legal criteria for a HIB event requires motivation by an "actual or perceived characteristic" (which includes gender), the inclusion of extremely broad guidance about what constituted such a characteristic made pinpointing the specific characteristic far less important or relevant to decisionmaking for most administrators (Shepherd & Fast, 2022). Often, when discussing their decisionmaking about a particular case, administrators do not explicitly refer to the presence or absence of a characteristic at all, even though the criteria is core to the legal definition.…”

“…The intervention program was a grassroots campaign led by a randomly selected group of students who developed ideas and materials for addressing peer harassment in their schools. This was the second year of the new law, as schools were developing their practices in response to the law (see Shepherd & Fast, 2022 for a discussion of the implementation of the law during this period). All public middle schools in New Jersey Schools were invited to apply for the program; schools that applied were selected for participation based on demonstrated commitment and logistical considerations.…”

“…In making HIB determinations, administrators often feel they are ill-equipped to make accurate decisions. The legal direction they are provided is vague or they are too inexperienced at enforcing the HIB law to follow it precisely (Shepherd & Fast, 2022). Consequently, administrators need to establish principles with which to make decisions.…”