Theory and Educational Research

Toward Critical Social Explanation

Jean Anyon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135854430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Most empirical researchers avoid the use of theory in their studies, providing data but little or no social explanation. Theoreticians, on the other hand, rarely test their ideas with empirical projects. As this groundbreaking volume makes clear, however, neither data nor theory alone is adequate to the task of social explanation—rather they form and inform each other as the inquiry process unfolds. Theory and Educational Research bridges the age-old theory/research divide by demonstrating how researchers can use critical social theory to determine appropriate empirical research strategies, and extend the analytical, critical – and sometimes emancipatory – power of data gathering and interpretation.

Each chapter models a theoretically informed empiricism that places the data research yields in constant conversation with theoretical arsenals of powerful concepts. Personal reflections following each chapter chronicle the contributors' trajectories of struggle and triumph utilizing theory and its powers in research. In the end this rich collection teaches education scholars how to deliberately engage with critical social theory in research to produce work that is simultaneously theoretically inspired, politically engaged, and empirically evocative.

PART I
Theory and Explanatory Analysis

CHAPTER 1
Critical Social Theory and the Study of Urban School Discipline

The Culture of Control in a Bronx High School

KATHLEEN NOLAN

The cops in the school, it’s like they run it. They are the school. But if you really look at it, the cops are supposed to be the law. Cops ain’t supposed to be education. You know what I mean?—Student

In the mid-1990s, the issue of school discipline gained heightened public attention owing, in part, to an increase of violence among urban youth and a number of school shootings, primarily in white suburban high schools. In response, politicians and educational policy makers appropriated the “tough on crime” discourse associated with current criminal justice policies, and declared “zero tolerance” for offending students. Zero tolerance attaches swift and harsh consequences to student offenses. Suspension, expulsion, police intervention, and, at times, entrance into the criminal justice system for even minor, first-time offenses are typical responses (Skiba and Peterson, 1999).

Not surprisingly, new school discipline policies and practices rooted in a criminal justice logic play out differently in the lives of students along race and class lines—with low-income students of color disproportionately experiencing their punitive and exclusionary effects (American Bar Association, 2001; Brown, 2003, 2005). One factor in the creation of these disparities is the implementation of order-maintenance-style policing, along with zero tolerance, in large racially segregated urban schools (see Drum Major Report, 2005). Order maintenance policing, which was pioneered in New York City in the mid-1990s, is an aggressive neighborhood policing approach that involves the heavy monitoring of targeted areas and the cracking down on low-level violations of the law, the common use of “stop and frisks,” summonses to criminal court, and arrests (Harcourt, 2001; New York State Office of the Attorney General, 1999). Under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, order maintenance policing was introduced to New York City. As city crime rates went down, order maintenance spread to cities throughout the US and elsewhere, and NYC served as a model.

In urban neighborhoods and schools around the country, zero tolerance and order maintenance policing approaches have gained public support as a commonsense solution to disorder and violence. In New York City, newspaper headlines such as “Mike [Bloomberg] Mops up the Dirty Dozen” highlighted the Mayor’s supposed success in using criminal-justice-oriented disciplinary approaches to improve twelve of the city’s most troubled schools. But how successful are these policies? And how are the new disciplinary approaches shaping the daily lives of students inside schools? How do they impact the school culture and the educative aims of the institution? What political or economic purposes might these policies serve at this historical moment, and why have they gained such widespread support?

This chapter describes a year-long ethnographic study of criminal-justice-oriented school discipline policies (i.e. practices and a logic appropriated from the criminal justice system) as they were experienced by students in a large, racially segregated urban public high school in New York City, which I call Urban Public High School (UPHS). In this school, as in a growing number of urban districts serving poor and working-class students of color, zero tolerance is augmented by a high-tech security apparatus, a heavy police presence, and order-maintenance-style policing. During a year of participant observation and in-depth interviewing at UPHS, I gained insight into the impact such discipline policies had on school culture and the educational mission of the school. I was interested in how students and others in the school community made sense of schooling and negotiated their environment in the context of the new disciplinary practices. Although my research examined several aspects of school culture and the cultural practices of students, for this chapter I analyze the interactions between students and school-based law enforcement officials that led to the use of criminal-procedural-level strategies, arrests, and/or the issuance of summonses to criminal court. The law enforcement team in the school was made up of police officers assigned to a special task force for school safety, officers from local precincts, and security agents who worked under the auspices of the New York City police department. “Criminal-procedural-level strategies” is the term officers and agents used when describing the approaches they would use during a police intervention. These approaches include, but are not limited to, handcuffing, frisking, and issuing summonses.

I discovered that students at UPHS were confronted by law enforcement officials on a daily basis for breaking school rules, not the law. And the behavior that was defined by the police as warranting a summons to criminal court or an arrest, more often than not, occurred after the student was confronted by an officer or security agent. In effect, the disciplinary practices helped to produce the behavior that was then criminalized.

The purpose of this chapter is not so much to present the empirical data, but to explicate the usefulness of critical social theories in analyzing these data—specifically my findings on the study of school discipline. I demonstrate how I use critical theories of punishment to illuminate the institutional and macro-structural forces that shape contemporary urban school discipline. These forces are not immediately evident in the empirical data alone. For me, theory is an analytical tool providing insight into the relationship between urban school practice, institutions of the criminal justice system, and larger economic and social exigencies.

I argue that a theoretically informed analysis of disciplinary practices allows us to unravel the dominant ideological assumptions that legitimate current school discipline policies and present them as natural, necessary, and neutral. I call on theories of punishment to highlight how political, economic, and social forces shape criminal justice—and by extension, school discipline policies. The theories on punishment in society provide insight into how policies gain support within the mainstream culture. The work of David Garland (1990, 2001) in particular has been useful in developing an understanding of the ways in which—and the reasons that—urban schools with low-income students have taken on crime control responsibilities.

By using social theories of punishment to analyze what occurs in the school, I am also able to reconsider theories of social reproduction via schooling—as originally developed by Bowles and Gintis (1976), among others. When our understanding of the penal functions of low-income minority urban schools is illuminated, we can see that, while some schools (say, in middle-class suburbs) reproduce traditional social class hierarchies, schools in low income neighborhoods of color now assist in the production of a criminalized class.

In the following sections, I define critical social theory so as to highlight the specific ways in which I use the concept. I also discuss why such a theory is essential to the study of urban school discipline, and demonstrate how I use this conceptual armature to strengthen my analysis of the institution. I then present a small data set that illustrates how school discipline policies play out in the daily lives of students, and how institutional discourses serve to legitimize these policies. Finally, I illustrate ways in which my theory serves to reveal deeper social meanings embedded in these school data.

Urban Educational Research and the Usefulness of Critical Social Theory: The Case of School Discipline

With the exception of a relatively small body of literature (for example Anyon, 1997; Lipman, 2004; Willis, 1977) empirical studies of education have remained largely focused on examinations of the micro level (for example, the classroom or the individual student) removed from larger social, political, and economic contexts. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and the political rhetoric surrounding what counts as educational research have reinforced this tendency to micro-level analysis by privileging studies based on experimental and quasi-experimental designs or—in some cases—on microlevel qualitative approaches that narrow the investigatory lens, in the name of scientific rigor, to the point that what is examined is only that which can be observed directly or quantified—numbers, test scores, and slices of school life. Supporters of these paradigms insist that such research is more objective, value-free, and generalizable than, say, critical, theoretically informed ethnography.

However, the prevailing research paradigms, while they may have some strengths, are based on the underlying assumption that the classroom (or a school office or hallway) can be treated like a medical laboratory existing separately from the world outside its doors. Such endogenous educational analyses do not take into account, indeed they obscure, the complex set of external factors that get mediated through the micro-interactions inside schools.

Thus, that which is often not immediately observable—power relations and the socio-historical and economic forces that shape institutional life and the actions of individual agents, for example—goes unexamined. In the study of urban school discipline, for example, the potential exists within such narrow modes of research for students’ misbehavior to be seen in purely psychological terms (Ferguson, 2000) and for social conditions that may be producing the behavior to be ignored. The reasons behind students’ actions can be misunderstood, and the complex interplay of the causes of disruption and violence is likely to be oversimplified.

Theoretical sociologist Ben Agger (2006) defines critical social theory in a way that has been useful in my work. Agger writes that “critical social theory opposes the positivist notion that [social] science should describe natural laws of society, believing on the contrary that society is characterized by historicity” (4). The notion of historicity suggests that present conditions did not come about through universal or natural laws, and, although past and present patterns may appear to be intractable, they can in fact be changed through political and social efforts of oppressed groups. He goes on to say that another aspect of critical social theory is that it views the relationship between social structure (such as the regularities of economics, political systems, social institutions, culture) and human agency as dialectical; thus, individual knowledge of structure and its role in daily life can facilitate change in social conditions. Thus, in Agger’s view critically theoretically informed research would have emancipatory potential, in part by critiquing ideology. Such research raises consciousness about oppression and points to possibilities for change.

Giroux (1997) similarly points to the value of historicizing empirical observations and interrogating ideologies, both of which can be accomplished through critical approaches. He describes current mainstream thinking that drives much research in terms of what he calls a “culture of positivism.” He writes (13):

Rather than comprehending the world holistically as a network of interconnections, the American people are taught to approach problems as if they existed in isolation, detached from the social and political forces that give them meaning. The central failing of this mode of thinking is that it creates a form of tunnel vision in which only a small segment of social reality is open to examination. More important, it leaves unquestioned those economic, political, and social structures that shape our daily lives. Divorced from history, these structures appear to have acquired their present character naturally, rather then having been constructed by historically specific interests.

Thus, the danger is that much educational research garnering support and legitimacy from policy-makers today works to reproduce inequality and obscure injustices. At the very most, such research might address student needs, for example by identifying a particularly useful learning strategy; but it does not address the conditions under which the strategy is needed or implemented, the historical processes that created those conditions, or the differential outcomes of implementation along race, class, or gender lines.

Many of the factors I would consider crucial to understanding urban school discipline deal explicitly with these exogenous conditions. For example, we live at a historical moment marked by severe social and economic stratification and drastically unequal opportunity structures (Anyon, 2005; Sassen, 2001; Wilson, 1996). Subsequently, the life courses for individuals along racial, ethnic, and class lines dramatically diverge. Unemployment and poverty plague many urban neighborhoods of color (Anyon, 2005). Public schools have become racially segregated at levels we have not seen since the late 1960s (Orfield and Lee, 2006); high school dropout rates are as high as 80 percent for some inner-city schools, and funding schemes in many states privilege suburban districts while penalizing the most needy urban schools.

At the same time, US rates of incarceration have skyrocketed, disproportionately imprisoning and impacting people of color and urban neighborhoods (Maurer and King, 2007). Imprisonment has become a regular, predictable, and often expected part of life for young black men living in urban neighborhoods as well as for an increasing number of Latinos and women of color (Garland, 2001; Western, 2006; see also Maurer and Chesney-Lind, 2002). Positive correlations have been identified between concentrated poverty, levels of educational attainment, and rates of incarceration (see Correctional Association of New York, 2002, 2005; Western, 2006). Finally, racist discourses that describe urban youth as a “new breed of super-predators” in our midst fuel public fears and encourage the most punitive criminal justice policies toward this group (Di Iulio, 2005). All of these developments and accompanying ideologies play into and shape what occurs in schools of low-income students of color.

While critical social theories have a variety of uses in education research, as delineated in other chapters of this volume, the theories I discuss here provide me the means with which to examine the relationship between the urban school, the criminal justice system, and macro-structural forces. Most specifically, my theoretical approach provides insight into the new role urban schools play in social reproduction: they manage poor and working-class youth of color as potential criminals. My theoretically informed lens also interrogates the rhetoric and the dominant cultural representations of urban youth, and the commonsense notions around crime and punishment now informing school discipline policy initiatives.

Examining the Data: The Policing of Misbehavior and the Creation of a Culture of Penal Control

The demographic context of UPHS is typical of many urban public high schools in racially segregated, low-income neighborhoods. It serves approximately three thousand students (with about another thousand students in the building attending one of six small schools there). The student population is predominantly black and Latino (99 percent nonwhite), and about 80 percent of the students qualify for free lunch, a common indicator of low socio-economic status. UPHS is considered a low-performing school by several frequently used measures. The vast majority of the incoming freshman read below grade level, and the dropout rate is approximately 60 percent. UPHS also has above-average levels of violence and disruption.

UPHS did not acquire its current characteristics in a vacuum. The social context of minority poverty in the city, and an institutional history of district-wide tracking and the discretionary powers of principals to bar students with disciplinary or criminal records from their schools, helped to create the existing conditions at UPHS. The school is located in a relatively stable working-class neighborhood of color many students come from nearby neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty and unemployment, giving weight to popular perceptions that UPHS is one of what the principal called the “dumping grounds” of the system (Nolan, 2007).

My analysis of interactions between students and law enforcement agents inside UPHS is informed by three sets of data—observations of interactions, the school occurrence reports (which provide official accounts of these interactions), and interviews with students and adults involved in the disciplinary process. What I found most striking in these data was the prevalence of incidents that began with an officer approaching a student who had not yet broken a rule or who had committed only a minor school infraction. The incident then would often evolve, through a series of exchanges and actions, into an “official police matter,” and students would end up in handcuffs with a summons to criminal court. It also appeared that the meanings assigned to these interactions by representatives of the institution were central to the construction of the dominant cultural logic that legitimized this penal management of minor behavioral infractions.¹

An examination of occurrence reports indicated a sharp increase in the use of court summonses since the onset of implementation of order-maintenance policing. Data from other schools show similar patterns (ibid.). At UPHS,...