Zero tolerance, social control, and marginalized youth in U.S. schools: a critical reappraisal of neoliberalism’s theoretical foundations and epistemological assumptions

Abstract

This article critically examines the socio-historical currents and the political economic forces that shaped neoliberalism’s underlying theory and presumptive epistemology. One example of this theory and epistemology that coalesces in the form of neoliberal practice is the expansion of social controls in American public schools. One exemplar of this expansion is zero tolerance policy prescription. We first recount the socio-historical backdrop of neoliberal capitalism’s restructuring in the U.S., emphasizing the political economic fall-out of deindustrialization and mass incarceration. Next, we contextualize this history within the rhetoric of the child-saving movement. These observations explain why economic marginalization of the poor and class conflict among stratified segments of society are endemic to youth culture. We then explain how these currents and forces have been linked to several media-hyped causal meta-narratives regarding the need for school-based zero tolerance reforms. We conclude by explaining how the state’s neoliberal restructuring of public schools is legitimated by the court system in which full citizenship and equal opportunity for all are problematically forestalled or foreclosed.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• child-saving
• zero tolerance
• American schools
• Foucault

Notes

1. We note that the use of school-based sanctions in the United States (U.S.) has risen dramatically over the past decade. In particular, current trends reveal that suspension and expulsion rates in American elementary and secondary schools are increasing annually. For example, in 2006, over 3 million students were suspended and over 100,000 were expelled (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). Moreover, recent data collected from the United States Department of Education (USDOE) found that African-American students comprised 35% of students suspended once, 46% of students suspended more than once, and 39% of students expelled from school (USDOE, 2012). The Department of Education study also reported that compared to their White counterparts, African-American students are over three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled, especially due to enhanced use of zero-tolerance policies (USDOE, 2012).

2. Contemporary, neoliberal restructuring of capitalism in the U.S. began in the late 1970s, and it continues to greatly reduce the welfare state, while privatizing public enterprises and eliminating public regulations on the economy (Kotz, 2003, 2008, 2009; Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b). The consequence of this restructuring has led to restrictions on public services that would otherwise redistribute state resources more equitably in response to evidence of injustice (Kotz, 2008, 2009; Wacquant, 2009b). Ironically, in order for the markets to enjoy such freedom from regulatory controls, it is also necessary to undermine working class power because this destabilization facilitates the expansion of social control over workers and the economically marginalized (Kotz, 2009; Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b). Thus, neoliberal capitalism frees the mobility of capital across markets from government regulations, while also increasing formal social controls over marginal populations to manipulate the labor market and to perpetuate the existing class structure (Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b). The social controls which are exerted tend to be punitive and carceral in nature (Wacquant, 2009b). And, in the case of zero tolerance’s harshness, its reach and application to disenfranchised groups, including minorities and those living in concentrated disadvantage, is expected to increase (Hirschfield & Celinska, 2011; Wacquant, 2009a).

3. Central to Foucault’s (2007, 2008) critique of power are the discursive formations (e.g. the discourses of citizenship) and the regimes of truth (e.g. zero tolerance policy) through which power (education as a body of knowledge; as a system of thought) is appropriated and reproduced. Consistent with this orientation, our commentary is ‘homogenous in its concern with citizenship as a realm of discursive practice … and [is] general in its potential to explore the discursive and material conditions that support situated discourses of citizenship and citizenship activity’ (Nicoll, Fejes, Olson, Dahlstedt, and Biesta (2013, p. 829). These renditions of citizenship extend to assaults on the personhood of undocumented youth.

4. Our attention to the insights of Foucault will principally be for purposes of theoretical amplification. A more systematic and robust Foucauldian analysis of neoliberal capitalism’s restructuring of public education through policies such as zero tolerance is decidedly beyond the scope of the present article (cf. Hope, 2016). Instead, the ensuing commentary will suggest how the hermeneutics of suspicion, govern-mentality, and the microphysics of power ‘de-vitalize’ (i.e. reduce/repress) the humanity of already disenfranchised youth (the kept), and in the process, ‘finalize’ the humanity (and the relational ontology) of their keepers (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009, pp. 69–97).

5. The neoliberal principles of individualism and personal responsibility were rhetorically used to reinforce the movement to deregulate industry and to promote competition among individuals and companies (Harvey, 2005; Kotz, 2003; Lynch, 2007). In the neoliberal state, the individual is ‘responsibilized’ (see Garland, 1997). The individual is heralded for success or blamed for failure, while economic, racial, and social inequalities are ignored or unexamined because neoliberal capitalism assumes that everyone has equal access and opportunity (Harvey, 2005). This is what is meant by a ‘market-embedded’ morality (Shamir, 2008, p. 1).

6. The gap between the rich and poor has never been as wide as it currently is in the U.S., and the social insecurity stemming from mounting economic inequality has created conditions in which social safety nets can be retracted and punitive penal practices can be extended, while the state benefits from popular public support that is driven by fear (Harvey, 2005; Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b).

7. In order for prison to remain a viable financial investment, a mechanism must be in place to continually expand the types and numbers of people who are defined as ‘dangerous’ and in need of social control (De Giorgi, 2007; Lynch, 2007, p. 133). In the U.S., incarceration becomes the ideal strategy to overcome problems stemming from discarded workers and marginalized populations (Harvey, 2005; Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b). In addition, zero tolerance policies and strategies are expected to be increasingly applied to marginalized groups, such as impoverished minorities (Hellett, 2006; Lynch, 2007; Wacquant, 2009a, 2009b).

8. According to Foucault (2008), neoliberalism does not merely entail the relinquishment of state or institutional power to the individual or to the free market. It also involves the way that market freedoms and forms of govern-mentality function through these freedoms and through forms of surveillance that infuse market principles of competition into all spheres of social and cultural life. Thus, the neoliberal state must promote competition within its institutions (education included) via new regimes of accountability that justify the market’s reliance on capital logic (Gane, 2012).

9. In control society, education’s re-constitutive purpose is to service the economy through the production of human capital in the form of workers with the skills and dispositions necessary to compete in the global economy (Gray & Block, 2012); thus, producing responsiblized and competitive individuals compliant to the whims of the neoliberal state and willing to discount or dismiss collective responsibility for society’s vulnerable and marginalized populations.

10. In Discipline and Punish (1977, p. 205), Foucault’s panopticon ‘is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of centers and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, and prisons.’ Schools are pedagogical systems that function as mechanisms of and distribution sites for biopower. In this epistemological system, the training of bodies and the machinery of control exercised through the gaze of continuous educational surveillance, exposes bodies (i.e. students) to the disciplinary/disciplining politics of ontological obedience, conformity, and docility (Foucault, 1977).

11. This accountability and quality surveillance in education fosters a competitive logic that benefits the market and allows the state to justify its legitimacy under this new form of neoliberal govern-mentality (Gane, 2012). Governmentality requires forms of surveillance technologies to accomplish discipline, control, interactivity, and competition within postmodernity’s control society (Deleuze, 1995).

12. Foucault (1977, p. 170) stated, ‘The success of disciplinary power derives no doubt from the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination.’ The examination of both student and teacher performance, through an enhanced culture of accountability, has widened the gaze of the vigilant neoliberal state and altered the role of education in an effort to mold compliant bodies for the neoliberal workplace that awaits them (Perryman, 2006). Thus, this panoptic performative culture in schools connects inspection with disciplinary and social control mechanisms as a form of ambitious bio-political processes aimed at managing populations in order to ensure a viable workforce for the neoliberal state (Hope, 2016; Perryman, 2006).

13. Banoptic surveillance (Bigo, 2008) utilizes profiling techniques to determine who, based on problematized behaviors, warrants further surveillance and/or exclusion, as well as who merits inclusion.

14. Two structural realities emerged from the neoliberal transformation, which include the following: (1) that prison awaits African American youth who fail or dropout of school, and (2) that schools do not possess the necessary resources to reverse the wayward paths of problematic students without also detracting from the quality of teaching and services meant for those youth perceived as more deserving and promising (Hirschfield, 2008). These structural realities are produced by unregulated neoliberal capitalism (Harvey, 2005; Kotz, 2003, 2008, 2009; Wacquant, 2001, 2009a, 2009b). Regardless of the potentially numerous sources for troublesome behavior – which likely stems from the polarizing social conditions of the neoliberal state – chronically disobedient African American boys are consistently viewed by school authorities as ‘bound for jail’ and ‘unsalvageable’ (Ferguson, 2000). As a result, poor, urban minority youth are disproportionately suspended and expelled, which further perpetuates their marginalization in society (APA Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008; Casella, 2003, Fenning & Rose, 2007; Giroux, 2003; Skiba & Rausch, 2006; USDOE, 2012; Wacquant, 2001).