De facto school discipline and the maintenance of inequality
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Like many American institutions, K-12 schools are attempting to shift away from punitive measures and embracing a rhetoric of restorative justice. In this dissertation, I draw on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in a racially and economically diverse public school, Northwest High, to answer the following question: how does the institutional shift towards non-punitiveness unfold in practice? I highlight how this shift corresponds with a shift in governance strategy. Amidst the non-punitive turn, institutions increasingly seek to govern by connecting their constituents with resources rather than enacting harsh punishment. At Northwest High, staff address challenges by connecting students and their families to goods and services in attempt to reduce their use of exclusionary discipline like suspensions and expulsions. As such, the school becomes a crucial site for the distribution of social services. This resource brokering can have many benefits. It can also maintain inequality. I show how resource brokering is intertwined with surveillance and discipline. Importantly, school staff lack the capacity to successfully serve as brokers for all their constituents. Staff therefore navigate the constraint of limited resources by strategically managing the boundaries of the institution, redefining which children get to remain a member and thus who they will continue brokering for. I then explain why these forced removals -- which I call de facto expulsions -- typically occur through informal rather than formal means. I argue that informal methods of exclusion become favored in the non-punitive turn because organizational leaders seek to submit low official counts of discipline to the state accountability system. These processes sustain discipline inequality. Students who depend more on the school to access goods and services - many of whom are poor or recent immigrants - are more likely to become perceived as a burden and be expelled. Because these removals often occur informally, punishment becomes invisibilized and official data undercount the number of students forcibly removed from their schools. Finally, I document that even absent institutional consequences, informal discipline can harm young people and their families by challenging their self-concept and altering their social ties. I conclude by considering how we might maximize the positive benefits of school resource brokering while minimizing the negative, often unintended consequences.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gleit, Rebecca Diane |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jackson, Michelle Victoria |
| Degree supervisor | Stuart, Forrest |
| Thesis advisor | Jackson, Michelle Victoria |
| Thesis advisor | Stuart, Forrest |
| Thesis advisor | Torche, Florencia |
| Thesis advisor | Reardon, Sean F |
| Degree committee member | Torche, Florencia |
| Degree committee member | Reardon, Sean F |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rebecca D. Gleit. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jv511zp9717 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Rebecca Diane Gleit
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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