The Third R of the Grammar of School Discipline: Reform

• In Event: The Grammar of School Discipline in Alabama

Abstract

Purpose. Alabama is no doubt home to oppressive policies; egregious poverty and institutional, interpersonal, and environmental racism; private, for-profit prisons that house many of the state’s residents. It’s also the home of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization; the Montgomery bus boycott and Selma marches; centers working towards civil rights and justice; and grassroots organizing around voting rights, abolition, and environmental justice. In many ways, Alabama is ground zero in some of the toughest, longest running fights for civil rights and justice in the U.S. Here, we take up the ways this legacy shows up in the third aspect of the grammar of school discipline: reform.

Perspectives. We position reform as part of the grammar school discipline because it is taken-for-granted and oft-engaged even as discipline outcomes remain largely unchanged. Reform takes place in institutions that are inherently anti-Black. Educational systems are designed to benefit some at the expense of others. These same systems determine the (inadequate and ineffective) strategies available to reformers. Thus, although education reformers make heroic efforts to better their schools, communities, and lives, their efforts are intentionally constrained so that they do not result in significant shifts in educational policy or practice. The tools available to reformers are designed to fail in the name of preserving and sustaining the racial hierarchy.

Modes of inquiry and data sources. We offer a case study of a reform effort undertaken in a school system in Alabama, Timber County Schools. This reform featured collaboration between a legal advocacy group and a group of community stakeholders. Data are first-personal accounts, media reports, and state department of education discipline reports for the years leading up to and the years just after the reform effort.

Conclusions. Timber County schools and its students experienced a reform rooted in “the need to provide services… to address the real conditions and the real needs of actual people caught up in the system” (Meiners 2011, 550). This reform, unfortunately, was not able to rectify the broader anti-Black racism that was operating. The discourse of the reform was largely race-evasive. Failure to address the root causes of discriminatory discipline meant that exclusionary practices shifted form, from suspensions to law enforcement referrals and alternative school placements, resulting in the same demographic groups being most affected. These shifts once again reveal the malleability of racism and the ways it affects Black students in particular. That is, reform, as part of the grammar of school discipline, still takes place within a system predicated on white supremacy and anti-Black racism, leaving inequity intact while also perpetuating it.

Significance. As Love (2019) so aptly writes, “reform ain’t justice” (10). Multifaceted strategies are needed, including those aimed at all forms of school policies and practices that dehumanize, brutalize, and exclude, requiring attention to structural and institutionalized white supremacy and racism in educational institutions. Here we encourage practitioners to consider, for example, how mass exclusion of students from schools functions to exacerbate community and social problems, much as mass incarceration does.

Author

• Nanyamka Shukura, Southern Poverty Law Center