The Fight: Discipline and Race in an Inner-City Public Charter High School

Vani S. Kulkarni

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2017, vol. 673, issue 1, 150-168

Abstract: What are the disciplinary practices in which inner-city schools engage? How is order maintained or restored? Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of a public charter school in Philadelphia, this study demonstrates the significance of understanding school discipline through a cultural lens. Beginning with a case study of a fight in the cafeteria, I describe how teachers, administrators, and students made sense of the school’s disciplinary ethos and how the disciplinary gaze that pervaded the school put invisible pressure on staff and students. Teachers and administrators in charge of discipline, who were overwhelmingly white, made implicit racial appeals regarding what practices were the most effective and fair to students who were overwhelmingly black and from single-parent, economically precarious households in urban neighborhoods.

Keywords: school discipline; race; inner-city school; public charter school; ethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716217725508 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:673:y:2017:i:1:p:150-168

DOI: 10.1177/0002716217725508

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().