Beyond the discipline gap: the role of spectacular state violence in the discipline and punishment of Black and Indigenous children in US public schools

Abstract

Education research frequently measures and calls for an end to racial disparities in rates of US school discipline practices such as office referrals, suspension, and expulsion. This paper asks what a more expansive understanding of discipline can demonstrate about how schools discipline different students differently. Tracing the history of corporal punishment from Native boarding schools, through Ingraham v. Wright, to violent school policing and arrests today, the author finds that, because Black and Indigenous children can never be ‘normalized’ within white supremacist US schooling, the shift in disciplinary tactics that Foucault described never took place for these students and in fact, the functioning of normalizing school discipline for all depends on extraordinary, spectacular violence against the most marginalized. Rather than focusing on the discipline gap, education research must attend to the violence inherent in US schooling and seek to abolish it.