Police in the Hallways : Discipline in an Urban High School

COVER CONTENTS FOREWORD INTRODUCTION: Studying Urban School Discipline: A Bronx Tale 1 How the Police Took Over School Discipline: From Policies of Inclusion to Punishment and Exclusion 2 Signs of the Times: Place, Culture, and Control at Urban Public High School 3 Instituting the Culture of Control: Disciplinary Practices and Order Maintenance 4 Against the Law: Student Noncompliance and Contestation 5 Tensions between Educational Approaches and Discourses of Control 6 The Underlife: Oppositional Behavior at Urban Public High School 7 Living Proof: Experiences of Economic and Educational Exclusion CONCLUSION: Recommendations for Effective Urban Schooling and Sound Discipline Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. In Police in the Hallways , Kathleen Nolan explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience. Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, Nolan offers a rich and nuanced account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. She documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers. Nolan follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, she shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation. Police in the Hallways also examines the prevalent forms of oppositional behavior through which students express their frustrations and their deep sense of exclusion. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has on the real lives of low-income students of color—and, in turn, on us all. In 1998, the mayor of New York City placed the police department in charge of security and discipline in the city's public schools. In this eye-opening ethnographic study, Nolan (teacher preparation program, Princeton U.) observes and interviews real-life students, teachers, administrators, and police officers at one Bronx high school, where 12 local police officers, four officers from a special task force, and 20 'safety agents' patrol the school's hallways and other areas to maintain order among 3,000 nonwhite, low-income students. Nolan lived and worked in the neighborhood for 20 years as a public school teacher, community organizer, and social worker; her familiarity gave her access to students who did not usually trust outsiders. She follows individual students from the classroom to the courts to illustrate the negative impact of school-based policing and penal institutional practices in American schools, and describes how students cope when they are confronted by law-enforcement officials for minor school infractions, arguing that the students' perspectives can reveal the shortcomings of current policy and provide a vision of alternative possibilities. In addition, the author examines school-based policing in the context of socio-economic change, school reform, and criminal justice trends, and makes recommendations for more effective urban schooling and sound discipline. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Exposing the deeply harmful impact of street-style policing on urban high school students