UC Berkeley

Situated at the intersection of federal, state, and local regulation, K–12 school discipline policy unfolds across vast and differing fields (e.g., federal, state, local; education and law; politics and education) and amongst competing actors and interests (e.g., state and local policy makers, teachers and administrators, unions, parents and students, advocates, researchers, law enforcement, social services). Indeed, the field of school discipline policy and reform can be characterized as one of struggle and stasis. Research on school discipline has provided insight into the policies and practices that have come to replace zero tolerance or punitive school discipline in K–12 schools. A major theme in the literature is the pronounced racial, ethnic, and gender “discipline gaps” that emerge as early as pre-K and persist, despite targeted reform interventions (Gilliam, 2005; Losen, Keith, Morrison & Belway, 2015). Research has likewise surveyed the effects of emerging alternative strategies broadly recognized as supportive or positive school discipline interventions. Scholars confirm that school discipline policies and practices continue to yield the same punitive and deleterious results absent the effort of local and state actors to do so (Noguera, 2003).Yet, little is known about the local change process or shift from punitive to positive school discipline reform from the vantage point of local actors within their local educational institutions. Indeed, the literature has failed to explain the problem with school discipline in its “broader structural context, [and has failed] to specify the processes and the subjectivities that mediate between structural and legal forces and the behavior of school actors” (Hirschfield, 2008).

This dissertation modeled the application of policy process theories in ways that clarified and lent order to the two most visible, clear cut turns in the field of school discipline in California: the turn towards punitive or criminalized zero tolerance school discipline policy and the shift towards positive, liberalized, or decriminalized alternatives. It explored the perceptions and strategic actions related to the rushed adoption and implementation of positive school discipline by superintendents, district leaders, school administrators, and teachers in California’s Central Valley. It focused on understanding the local shift from punitive to positive school discipline, which included the local and regional adoption of non-punitive alternative means of pupil correction and the implementation of a California law that banned suspensions and expulsions for willful defiance from the perspective of local school actors. Ultimately, this dissertation explored the liberalized positive school discipline reform “shock” to the punitive system and how local institutions and actors transmuted that central shock on the ground. While some local actors sought to improve relationships with and among students, others focused on bureaucratic, routinized remedies and legal compliance with the law. Mechanisms of punitive and positive school discipline were inadvertently blended, creating a hybrid “school-discipline new-normal” that relied heavily on taken-for-granted criminal justice ethos and rhetoric of law and order.