Beyond the discipline gap

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

Bibliographic Data

ID2922848
AuthorsBriana Markoff (0000-0001-7512-134X, Michigan State University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume46
Issue2
Pages132-143
Publication date2025-03-04
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiscourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0159-6306 • E-ISSN: 1469-3739
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01596306.2024.2378304
OpenAlexW4400650502
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited26

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

Child discipline · Criminology · Indigenous · Poison control · Political science · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Critical Race Theory in Education · Education Discipline and Inequality · Psychology · Social Psychology · Youth Development and Social Support

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