20 Years Later: Zero Tolerance, School Policing, and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in School Discipline

• In Event: 72.021 - Learning From Ethnography: How We Make Change in Urban School Discipline

Abstract

It has been over twenty years since the national call for zero tolerance (ZT) school discipline and the popularization of school policing programs. Since that time, numerous studies have provided evidence that these trends increase racial disparities, track youth of color into the criminal justice system (Brown, 2005), and weaken the educative aims of schools (Author, 2011).

In the face of these injustices, communities of color, students, legal organizations, and critical educators have pushed back against ZT and school policing, leading to important reforms. In this paper, I ask, then: Why does racial inequality in school discipline and policing, particularly within poor and working class urban communities, persist to an alarming extent?

This paper draws from and synthesizes my previous critical ethnographic research on school policing in the Bronx, NY (2011), new data from New York on school policing, and a critical review of the school policing literature (2015), in an effort to offer new theoretical insights into the persistence of racial and class inequality in school policing and the ways most of the reform efforts around discipline has not adequately contended with the historical, discursive, and political economic forces that give rise to racialized discipline.

First, I update my earlier findings on school policing with new data that reveal persistent racial and class disparities in New York City despite school discipline reform.
Next, in seeking to provide some explanation for persistent disparities, I present a critical review of the literature used to legitimize racialized school policing. My analysis is based on a comprehensive review of over forty studies and reports frequently found in the bibliographies of school districts’ evaluations of their own policing programs. Drawing on critical discourse theory (Fairclough, 2012), I show how prevailing understandings of evidence-based research and policy (Clegg, 2005) legitimize racialized school policing. I argue that ideologically-driven “common sense” notions of school policing and color-blind discourses (Bonilla-Silva, 2010) work to obscure racial inequality in school discipline and policing. Finally, I extend the analysis to explore how dominant discourses, research, and policy initiatives have fallen short in terms of bringing forth wholly new ways of thinking about and addressing discipline and safety for students of color.

Author

• Kathleen M. Nolan, Princeton University