This study compared student-teacher perception of discipline; inquired if it were interpersonal, procedural, or substantive; and examined how ethnicity, achievement, gender, and position influenced practice. Gay's (1981) theory about interethnic group interactions, combined with perceptual disparity and cultural discontinuity, provided the conceptual framework. Data sources were interviews, classroom observations, and school records. Students (N = 16), African American, Chicano, European American, and Filipino, and teachers (N = 9) from an urban high school participated. The data analysis revealed that interpersonal conflicts were more consequential for students of color. Evidence of disparate perceptions among ethnically diverse students and teachers surfaced. The attitudes, beliefs, and values of students and teachers differed and were associated with ethnicity, gender, and level of academic achievement.Administrators, teachers, and the public identify discipline as one of the highest-priority concerns in public schools today. Yet, it continues largely unabated, misunderstood, and unresolved. Disciplinary problems have been documented, described, and categorized by frequency, type, and severity. Intervention models, handbooks, and training programs to improve classroom management skills of teachers have been developed and implemented. Schunk and Meece (1992) state that a weakness of past research is the limited attention given to student perception. They maintain that, although teachers play a key role in establishing classroom climate, students contribute substantially to classroom order by either cooperating or resisting. They influence classroom events as much as they are affected by them. Students also cling to their value orientations, set rules for social relationships, make decisions to preserve their ethnic integrity, create spaces of resistance, and forge bonds of solidarity within the structure of schooling (Sheets, 1995a). Consequently, classroom practices and school policies of regimentation designed to homogenize diverse student populations into "well-behaved" students may inadvertently cause behavioral conflict.
