The Potential of a Fourth R in the Grammar of School Discipline: Repair

• In Event: The Grammar of School Discipline in Alabama

Abstract

Purpose. We offer a prescriptive (Tyack and Tobin 1994) to the grammar of school discipline directed at the way things should be in schools: reflection and relationship-focused work toward repair. We suggest that the fourth “R” that is thus far absent from the grammar of school discipline, but which has the most potential to disrupt, is repair.

Perspectives. The concept of repair is often rooted in righting the wrongs inflicted by the legacy of enslavement and the theft of Black property, labor, and livelihood through our contemporary societal structures (for treatment of reparations in the 21st century, see Araujo 2017). In the U.S., reparations rectify the anti-Black racism embedded in our society, including the injustices that occur in public education. With regard to reparations in education, the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC 2015) documents the historical wrongs that come with the denial of education to Black people during the period of
enslavement and continuing today:

During enslavement Africans could be punished or even killed for learning to read. Post-emancipation the vast majority of Black young people have been confined to separate and severely under-resourced schools during legal and de facto segregation. These conditions prevail today in what is sometimes called “poor performing schools.” (para. 24)

Added to ongoing segregation of Black students into underfunded, underresourced schools is the denial of education that comes with removal of students in the name of discipline. Acknowledging and atoning for that removal is the first step of repair.

Modes of inquiry and data sources. In an effort to guide school communities’ paths towards repair, we chart the broad principles—restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition (UNCRC 2007)—as they relate to the removal, resistance, and reform that comprise the grammar of school discipline in Alabama.

Conclusions. While economic reparations have garnered attention and are attractive—rightly so—we suggest that school practitioners and researchers also take up a broader ethos of repair in their local contexts, with individual students and families and in their classrooms, schools, and communities. We call for a focus on repair in the nested structures of schooling and encourage teachers and administrators to repair relationships with individual students, engaging student resistance in ways that are productive rather than leaning into removal.

Significance. Reparations are worthwhile so that the benefits of repair are experienced by Black students and families who are adversely affected by the grammar of school discipline. It is also worthwhile to consider how to repair the humanity of school-based practitioners, a humanity which is compromised in the enactment of the white supremacist removal of Black students from education. Indeed, when we enact oppression, we do not just damage the humanities of the oppressed; we also damage our own humanity. In particular, white school-based practitioners must critically examine educative work to “consider whether it brings us closer to humanization or makes us more dehumanized” (Matias and Allen 2016, 49), recognizing that the anti-Black project of school discipline is damaging to all.

Authors

• Hannah Carson Baggett, Auburn University

• Carey E. Andrzejewski, Auburn University