School Removal, Isolation, and Punishment in Texas

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The poster will report on the most salient findings of my dissertation project, a three year-long ethnography of a public Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas, and their significance to the field of education research. DAEPs are a product of punitive zero-tolerance school policies and emblematic of the growing carceral reach of the juvenile justice system into the institution of public education (Rios 2011; Simmons 2009). Unlike regular public schools, DAEPs are designed first to discipline students and secondly to provide them with an education. The current study of the daily operation and accomplishment of discipline in a DAEP, which is the first ethnography of a single 6th – 12th grade public DAEP in the state of Texas, illuminates the practices and processes in place at a deregulated public school environment that serves the most vulnerable youth populations in (Texas Fowler and Lightsey 2007). Moreover, it offers an examination of the micro effects of education policy reform enacted at the height of zero-tolerance initiatives and scrutinizes the extension of the punitive arm of the state into nurturing institutions of “care,” such as public education (Reyes 2006; Valenzuela 1999).
Eighteen years after the legal mandate in 1996 to establish of DAEPs in every public school district in the state of Texas, significant negative outcomes associated with DAEP enrollment have emerged. Although originally designed to remove violent offenders from mainstream school environments for temporary remediation, 80% of students currently enrolled in DAEPs have been removed for nonviolent, discretionary reasons (Cortez and Danini 2009). Black and Latino boys, low-income, and alter-abled children are disproportionately removed to DAEPs; the dropout rate from DAEPs is five times higher than it is for mainstream public schools in Texas, and a recent study shows that children face harsher discipline and penalties for transgressing school rules in a DAEP than they would in mainstream public schools in Texas (Cortez and Danini 2009; Fabelo et al. 2011). Combined, this has led some researchers to claim that DAEPs now serve as an integral link in the “school-to-prison-pipeline” (Simmons 2009; Fowler and Lightsey 2007; Reyes 2006).
The poster will include my original research questions: 1) How does the penetration of the carceral arm of the criminal justice system into public schools affect the quality of education children receive in DAEPs? 2) How is discipline accomplished in this program, specifically, what are its forms, how does it vary, what is the extent of its operation, and what are its effects? 3) How does discipline and the way it is experienced vary by the multiple categories of race, gender, class, and citizenship status that youths occupy? And 4) How do these disciplinary practices impact the teachers, students and the families of the children who attend them?

Author

• Jessica Dunning-Lozano, The University of Texas - Austin