Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School

5 Tensions between Educational Approaches and Discourses of Control

. 95 . . CHAPTER 5 . Tensions between Educational Approaches and Discourses of Control Deans and administrators at UPHS asserted their own disciplinary strategies and even, at times, intentionally subverted the use of criminal justice or school discipline. They often strove for what could be called a culturally relevant disciplinary approach. The strategies I observed , such as counseling, parental contact, mediation, and problem solving (addressing the academic or organizational issue that might be causing the misbehavior), generally grew out of educational or social-psychological frameworks rather than a criminal-justice framework. However, at the same time, the overarching criminal-justice framework produced institutional discourses of control and influenced almost all interactions between school disciplinarians and students during disciplinary incidents. In his ethnographic study of high schools similar to UPHS, John Devine notes that with the implementation of new security technologies , zero tolerance, and heavy policing, teachers have retreated into their classrooms and no longer take on the role of providing moral guidance to students.1 In my own study, I found that deans (who were teachers) and school administrators were still personally addressing hallway disorder and attempting to assert a culturally relevant disciplinary practice—doing the difficult work of “reaching the kids”—but, despite their efforts, they, too, had lost their moral authority. Ultimately, school disciplinarians appeared to become invested in the new policing practices (and the language of policing) and would defer to law enforcement or risk getting arrested themselves when even minor incidents became “police matters.” The Educator–Police Relationship At some of the Impact schools, there has been considerable tension between educators, led by the principal, and police and security agents, and 96 DISCOURSES OF CONTROL disagreement over which group has ultimate authority in the building.2 At one Bronx high school, a principal and a school aide were arrested for obstructing justice when they intervened on behalf of a student in what had been deemed a police matter. Several teachers in other Impact schools were also arrested, and a couple of schools received media attention for heated tension between educators and law enforcement. The relationship between the police and educators at UPHS that I observed was not so strained. Over the school year, I witnessed a growing cordiality that was also reflected in interviews with at least some school personnel and law-enforcement officials. In September, when I first met Alvarez, the principal, and asked about the administration’s relationship with the police, she replied, “We coexist ,” and reminded me that it was her building and that UPHS was still a school. In those early months, many of the deans expressed frustration with the heavy police presence. “Students are getting summonses for the smallest things!” several complained. In turn, one of the police officers expressed considerable disdain for Juarez, the assistant principal of school safety, and reminded me that, according to his understanding of NYPD regulations, the hierarchy in the school went like this: the police had the most authority, followed by the security agents, and only then the school administrators. In addition, several of the deans I spoke with expressed deep concern over the astoundingly high numbers of black and Latino men, and increasingly women, who are incarcerated or in some way (such as parole or probation ) caught up in the criminal-justice system. The heavy police presence in the school made them uncomfortable. Some educators, as people of color from the surrounding or similar communities, alluded to the fact that it affected them personally. Nevertheless, as the year went on, the two groups forged a seemingly good working relationship. By the end of the school year, the principal pointed out that some educators in other schools could not get along with the police and insisted on interfering in police matters, and one of the police officers made a similarly critical remark about officers at other schools who did not respect the educators’ authority enough. By midspring, Juarez informed me in his quintessentially smooth style that he and the police sergeant had been sitting down together for months each morning for coffee to discuss the day ahead. It appeared to me that they had come a DISCOURSES OF CONTROL 97 long way from the time I witnessed Juarez yelling at the officers to get out of his office during Terrell and James’s arrest. By the end of the year, it appeared that the lead administrators and deans at UPHS generally accepted (or at least resigned...