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INTRODUCTION: Studying Urban School Discipline: A Bronx Tale
- University of Minnesota Press
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. 1 . . INTRODUCTION . Studying Urban School Discipline A Bronx Tale One afternoon, I was checking my mailbox in the main office of the high school where I worked in the South Bronx. Suddenly, the quiet that settled upon the school late in the day was shattered as three police officers pushed a small black boy through the office door about ten feet from where I stood. A stocky white male officer pinned the boy, who appeared to be no older than thirteen, against the wall. The officer yelled directly into the boy’s face and pressed on his chest. The boy was letting out loud sobs, unable to speak. A female officer tried unsuccessfully to ease her colleague away from the student. I stood in shock, unable to respond. The only other person in the room, a Latina school aide in her late fifties—a grandmotherly figure—who had been sitting at one of the desks, slowly and calmly stood up and walked over to the commotion. Stepping between the student and the officer, the woman slipped her arms around the boy and asked him what he needed to do. The officer backed off, and the boy, still sobbing, uttered his first comprehensible words: “I wanna call my mother.” This confrontation took place in 2000, just a few years before the commencement of the study that has culminated in this book. The incident did not typify my experience as a teacher, but my colleagues and I wondered whether such events were evidence of a change happening in schools like ours—so-called poorly performing schools serving low-income Latino/a and black students. We were aware that in the mid-1990s, educational policy makers had mandated a national policy of “zero tolerance,” which calls for swift and harsh punishment—usually suspension or expulsion—even for first-time offenders of minor school infractions and tends to increase the likelihood of police involvement in disciplinary cases.1 Then, in 1998, the mayor placed the New York City Police Department in charge of security and discipline in the city’s public schools. From that point on, security 2 INTRODUCTION agents came to work under the auspices of the police department, and law enforcement became more visible in schools. The bulk of our conversations in the teachers’ room were mainly about the daily frustrations of getting struggling students to pass the standardized tests, mice running around in the classrooms, textbooks that weren’t aligned to the new standards, a student in special education throwing a chair out a second-floor window. But soon our discussions turned to the new police presence in the building and the proposed installation of a metal detector at the front entrance. Some teachers thought the new security measures were necessary to restore order to troubled schools and reduce violence; others worried that they created, as one of my colleagues put it, “a negative psychology” that would make students feel resentful and unwelcome in their own school. The teachers whom I knew best largely agreed that policy makers did not appear to have a clear understanding of daily life inside our schools. Nor were they aware of the lived experiences of the students—the pressures and the lack of resources with which teachers contended and the struggles, both in and out of school, that poor students of color faced. Our students came from some of the poorest urban districts in the country—Mott Haven, Melrose, Morrisania, Hunts Point—known collectively as the South Bronx. The view from the windows of the upper floors of the school revealed the poverty of the area: garbage-strewn lots, broken sidewalks, and, a few blocks away, a shopping district with a variety of discount stores, street vendors, an army recruiting station, and several fast-food restaurants. Just on the other side of the run-down playing field stood the only new and impressive building in the area: a youth prison. Teachers with sardonic senses of humor warned students that they would end up there if they continued to misbehave and didn’t pass their classes. As a teacher, I could not help but observe that urban schools could be doing much more to lessen inequality. The literature on social reproduction in schooling—that is, the idea that schools are structured to reproduce social hierarchies—resonated with me as I contemplated my students ’ futures and wondered what outcomes their educational experiences would yield.2 I considered my own struggle to secure basic resources for my classroom...