Data-Driven Toward the Panopticon: With Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, Leaders Restore Order Rather Than Establish Justice

• In Event: The Politics of Equity and Social Justice in Student Achievement

Abstract

Addressing disproportionate and excessive suspension is a crucial endeavor of inclusive leaders. PBIS is a significant tool in shifting from punitive measures to more presumably therapeutic ones. This multicase study unpacks the discourses of order and medicalization that leaders used in data collection and analysis while attempting include students regarded as disorderly. As it was implemented, PBIS evoked the panopticon, infamously used in prisons. The study concludes that PBIS aimed to reinstate order rather than establish justice as the fundamental premise of inclusion.

Author

• Joshua Bornstein, Felician College