School Discipline and Civil Rights: Education Reform in the Neoliberal Era

In the midst of intensifying income inequality, police violence, and school segregation, Obama’s Administration launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in 2010 to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement and eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline. Since then, the Supportive School Discipline Initiative has been touted as a success story of grassroots advocacy, philanthropic involvement in education reform, bi-partisan collaboration, and cross sector coordination between education, school psychology, law enforcement, and criminal justice. Education reformers invoke common narratives of liberal reform in this process, including bottom-up change, collaboration between strange bedfellows, and innovative policymaking through networks. Yet, this study finds that even under ideal implementation conditions, characterized by successful destabilization and educators committed to change – the social control, punishment, and policing practices in the school district didn’t change much. Instead, the district mandated the adoption of more behavioral management programs and the creation of a district-wide discipline data system, both experienced as bureaucratic and insufficient to address the school climate and culture needs in schools. While, dominant explanations for liberal reform failure place the blame on resistant or incompetent educators, this study asks what larger political and economic interests were at stake in the creation, implementation, and outcomes of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative. Through social network visualization and qualitative coding of policy and advocacy reports published on school discipline between 2000 and 2014, I found that the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice worked together to support and shape a national policy network through which education reform non-profits and for-profits co-opted the school-to-prison pipeline frame to drum up demand for behavioral management programs and other education reform products and services. Through an in-depth qualitative case study of the first two-and-a-half years of the implementation of the Supportive School Discipline Initiative in an urban school district, I find that the policy mandates, the civil rights ideals it invoked, and the current grant-dependency of urban school districts incentivized district central office administrators to compete with one another to secure funding for education reform industry products and services and to coordinate a shared managerial interest in data auditing and accountability. Thus, I conclude that the Supportive School Discipline Initiative worked largely as it was intended to, serving the interests of the education reform industry and not the interests of those concerned with the school-to-prison pipeline or creating more just schools