The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the last century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment such as in-school suspension, school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing, but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes and structures are responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline. They show that these shifts disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental environment of education. What we need, they argue, is an approach to discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools could and should be.
Campbell Scribner is assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland—College Park. He is the author of The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy. Bryan R. Warnick is professor of education at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Understanding Student Rights in Schools: Speech, Privacy, and Religion in Educational Contexts and Imitation and Education: A Philosophical Inquiry into Learning by Example.