Structuring Order, Safety, and Control in an Era of Market-Based School Reform

• In Event: Latina/o Criminology Panel 2: Schools and Social Control

Abstract

This article examines how school personnel understand what it means to structure safety for Black and Latino high school students in a schooling context undergoing transformation from public to charter. Using ethnographic research methods, I find that because school personnel perceived the community as dangerous and violent due to gangs and gang activity, policies and practices implemented at the school were meant to deter gang affiliation to protect students from each other, and from the community at large. Due to this problem-based approach, school personnel defined order as assuring safety (i.e., order as safety), and therefore, adopted punitive practices, as well as collaborated with more school and local law enforcement. Additionally, school personnel defined order through their understanding of control (i.e., order as control). By viewing the gangs through a problem-based lens, I argue that the same policies and practices that initially brought order to West Gate Charter High became a way to punish the behavior of students. This punitive approach reflects an institutional failing, wherein some students continued to experience physical violence and did not feel emotionally safe in their school or community. I consider the context of WGCH and delineate evidence-based ideas on how working collaboratively with the community—one of the school’s newer objectives—would have represented a more proactive and preventative form of order. I argue that such an approach, of which some evidence exists, may have promised a more effective alternative to addressing the real problem—the students’ need to associate with gangs in the first place, as well as the racial tension undergirding some of the violence. Consequently, I consider the missed opportunities for proactive approaches to working in concert with community stakeholders and the community itself to achieve safety for students at WGCH.

Author

• Alma Zaragoza-Petty, University of California, Irvine