Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear

Acknowledgements

xi Acknowledgements Ireceived a great deal of help with this book. Most important, I want to thank Nicole L. Bracy and Olivia Salcido for their tremendous assistance. While graduate students at the University of Delaware and Arizona State University, respectively, each spent hundreds of hours collecting data through observations and interviews. Nicole is also a coauthor of chapters 1 and 3, though her insights into how to interpret the data were an important contribution to the entire book. Nicole’s and Olivia’s judgment and professionalism were amazing, and I am indebted to each of them. A number of other graduate students also contributed to my data collection, data analysis, and writing: Greg Broberg, Megan Denver, Terry Lilley, and Sheruni Ratnabalasuriar. Several other colleagues and friends helped me develop my thinking about school discipline through conversations and debates, and by reading and commenting on various portions of the draft: Richard Arum, Thomas Catlaw, Jeff Fagan, Aaron Fichtelberg, Ben Fleury-Steiner, LaDawn Haglund, Santhi Leon, Torin Monahan, Michael Mushenow, Yasser Payne, Laura Peck, Caroline Persell, Antonia Randolph, Jonathan Simon, Brad Snyder, and Franklin Zimring. I want to thank Steve Martin for resurrecting what was a project in crisis, and Roberta Gealt for her help with my survey data and analysis. While I was first getting underway with my research, Kerry Clark, Dan Combs, Marcus England, Eugene Garcia, Denise Griffin, and Debi Neat each took time to help direct me. Thanks, as well, to Ilene Kalish, Aiden Amos, Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, Nicholas Taylor, and others at NYU Press for lending their expertise to this book—but in a gentle way, of course. I have presented pieces of this book at various times over the past few years, but two stand out as particularly helpful in shaping my work. One was in my own department, where my colleagues in the University of Delaware’s Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice offered excellent advice for my manuscript; the other was at the Ohio State University’s Criminal Justice Research Center, where Ruth Peterson, Laurie Krivo, and their colleagues offered very helpful feedback. xii | Acknowledgements The National Science Foundation supported the research on which this book is based (grant SES-550208). All errors, opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. I also received research support from Arizona State University’s School of Justice Studies while beginning my work, and then from the University of Delaware as I continued it. I especially want to thank Ronet Bachman and Marie Provine for access to this material support , as well as for their advice and encouragement. Throughout the course of my research I was hosted by school districts, school administrators, teachers, security staff, police officers, and other school employees at four schools, as well as by students and their parents. To these people who trusted me and took the time to educate me, I sincerely thank you. I wish I could thank you by name, but my promise of anonymity prevents me from doing so. I truly hope you feel that my interpretations of what I observed are fair, and also that my work might even be helpful. I also want to express my admiration for how well most of you do at such very difficult jobs. The school employees I interacted with are generous, thoughtful, and kind to students, almost without exception. Though many of our current school discipline policies may be counterproductive, they are enforced by good people who sincerely try to do right by the children in their charge. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Elena. I am very fortunate to have such a loving and supporting partner, and one who doesn’t seem to mind hearing me talk incessantly about the same subject for years on end. xiii The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was. —Will Rogers ...