Disciplining Our Own? Politicizing the Image of the Strict Black Principals 1970–1985

• In Event: Pushing the Boundaries of Education Policy: The Political Economy of Racialized Punishment, Privatization, and Resistance

Abstract

Between the 1970s and 80s a bipartisan group of philanthropists, educational researchers and eventually the Ronald Reagan administration politicized the image of the strict school disciplinarian as the key to urban school turnaround. While Black communities saw Black leaders as part of a broader project of racial and economic justice, researchers and policymakers reduced Black urban communities' demands of self-determinism to the disciplinarian strategies of strict Black leaders. This critical policy essay draws on histories of the carceral state to provide historic background to inform what scholars and activists refer to as “the school to prison nexus.” I demonstrate that educational policy elites “selectively drew” (Hinton et al. 2019) from Black communities’ demands for self determination, and narrowed definitions of “urban school effectiveness” to rationalize reforms that ultimately made urban schools more disciplined and punitive spaces.
I employ historical analysis of presidential memorandums and reports, congressional testimonies, National and local news articles, reports from philanthropies, and educational studies to examine how national groups of actors advanced Black school leaders’ disciplinarian strategies as a necessary component of “effective schooling.” I collected these archival records from the Rockefeller Archive Center that houses the Ford Foundation records; The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California and News Paper sources from Proquest Historical Newspapers, is a digital archive of more than 60 historical titles.
My historical analysis finds that both liberal and conservative policy elites promoted school discipline as a substitute for structural reforms that may have worked to alleviate the political and economic conditions that constrained urban schools. This “idea of the strict Black disciplinarian” clarifies how both discipline and strict Black leaders became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970. In doing so, it deepens understandings of the educationalization of social problems, clarifies how and why discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970, and illuminates the consequences of the neoliberal carceral turn in education.

Author

• Mahasan Violet Chaney, Brown University
  Presenting Author