Trouble at School: Understanding School Discipline Systems as Nets of Social Control

Abstract

Getting in trouble at school is often a student's first point of entry into the school-to-prison pipeline. What trouble entails is shaped by underlying and complex notions of justice that operate in a given school setting. These notions of justice shape the range of responses social actors use to address students who break school rules. These include, as is the case in society at large, establishing strategies to stop rule violations or repeat offenses, punishing wrongdoers for their offenses, removing offenders from the community, teaching wrongdoers a lesson, and helping offenders to help themselves (Daly, 2001). In this article, I argue that improving school discipline is a matter of balancing and managing complex, differentiated, systems of trouble. To advance this understanding, I use a social constructionist perspective to theorize school discipline systems as nets of social control that, if too expansive and overly punitive, can be counterproductive to the educational mission of schools.

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Decoteau J. Irby

Decoteau J. Irby is an assistant professor in the Urban Education Doctoral and School Leadership programs at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. His research, teaching, and service explores cultural-politics in urban education; school safety and discipline policies; urban school leadership; and schooling and labor experiences of black males.