More Than What’s “Supposed” to Happen: School Discipline Policy as Text and Discourse

• In Event: School Discipline “Matters”: Exploring the Education and Policy Contexts

Abstract

This paper broadens the conceptualization of what constitutes school discipline policy. Rather than frame discipline policy as rules, procedures, and guidelines designed to address student behavior, I re-conceptualize school discipline policy as text (Codd, 1988) and discourse in the Foucauldian sense (see Mills, 2004) that constrain and frame what can and should be done to address the problem of student behavior (Berkhout & Wielemans, 1999; Nudzor, 2009; Trowlder, 1998). Studying policy as text and discourse makes writings, language, social practice (Ball, 1994), and the power and ideologies inscribed within each (Codd, 1988) units of analysis that provide a fuller picture of what policy is and how it works in schools. The purpose of the study is to better understand issues of policy ‘implementation’ (Nudzor, 2009) at the school level.
I draw from in-depth interviews with three school administrators in a large U.S. school district. The informants were part of a larger research study that sought to understand how the district arrived at its current state of discipline by examining policy changes over a 16-year period. I used the school discipline net (SDN) framework (author, 20XX) to guide my analysis of interviews. The framework considers the discursive roles ideology, discourse, and cultural-politics play in shaping school discipline. It conceptualizes school discipline systems as malleable “nets” of social control that become more encompassing based on how policies reshape the system’s disciplinary dimensions which include problems, perceptions, philosophies, policies, practices, personnel, perspectives, places, power and privilege (collectively referred to as Disciplinary Ps) (author, 20XX).
Findings reveal that traditional notions of discipline policy ‘implementation’ and ‘failure’ are misleading. The administrators did not discuss discipline policy as rules and regulations to be implemented. Instead, they described policy in multiple, often contradictory, ways. Their explanations of “what’s supposed to happen” were based on the content and nature of official policies as reflected in codes of student conduct and related policy documents. They also described “what actually happens” in reference to the practices that personnel employ in line with, in lieu of, or in (mis)use of official policies. Finally, the informants talked about “what should happen” to focus on what they believed school discipline should accomplish.
Through juxtaposing what is ‘supposed’ to happen, what ‘actually’ happens, and what ‘should’ happen, the contradictions of the district’s discipline policies emerge. These contradictions expose an invisible “grid of social regularities” (Scheurich, 1994) that the administrators did not know or explicitly acknowledge exist. For example, newer policy initiatives focused primarily on instituting “objectivity in decision-making” as a means to reduce bias in student punishment and secondarily on improving student behavior. By studying policy as text, we can better understand policy as relates to everyday school life. Through these understandings, we might move toward understanding the ways school discipline policies do and do not work in the best interests of youth.

Author

• Decoteau J. Irby, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee