Public schools have again become important sites for sociolegal inquiry in the twenty-first century. Issues of social inequality remain an important locus of this inquiry, but attention has shifted away from overt discriminatory and segregating state practices to the ways in which new structures of governance and discipline, driven by fear; the grip of market norms on public services; and the proliferation of institutional surveillance have infiltrated schools and altered their power dynamics, curricular practices, and social climates.
Sociolegal scholarship from the first decade of the twenty-first century is foundational to this strand of inquiry. It provides a road map for conceptualizing new governance, discipline, and surveillance regimes; empirically investigating whether and how these regimes are manifested on the ground in organizational and everyday social activities; and offering normative guidance for interrupting their dehumanizing qualities. I draw upon these works to provide context for reviewing two books on contemporary public schools: Aaron Kupchik's monograph, Homeroom Security, and Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D. Torres's edited volume, Schools under Surveillance.
While focusing on the transformation of welfare rather than on schools, John Gilliom breaks ground in Reference GilliomOverseers of the Poor (2001) by deploying ethnographic field methods and inductive theorizing to establish the transformation from welfare to workfare as a new regulatory surveillance system intended to control both the frontline workforce and the impoverished recipients of governmental assistance, and yet discover that it is a system pocketed with resistance by recipients and workers alike. David Garland, in Reference GarlandThe Culture of Control (2001), theorizes about how crime—both its prevalence in the latter twentieth century and the fear surrounding it—led to the formation of a new governmental sector that focuses on the prevention of crime and disorder, utilizing security and surveillance as principal tools of controlling social interactions and taking hold well before 9/11. While policy studies have prescribed a reinvestment in privacy protections, James Rule, in Reference RulePrivacy in Peril (2007), conducts an analytical investigation of the operational norms and practices of institutional surveillance and reveals why privacy-protection strategies are ill matched to negate the controlling capacities of surveillance systems. Jonathan Simon, in Reference SimonGoverning through Crime (2007), argues that security and surveillance, or what he refers to as the logic of penal control, has become a governing regime for many long-established institutional spheres of social life, including public education. Finally, William Lyons and Julie Drew, in Reference Lyons and DrewPunishing Schools (2006), move into the field and conduct a two-school comparative case analysis, one urban and one suburban, revealing the penal logic in their policies, organizational routines, and everyday practices; showing how they enact this logic similarly and differently; and building a normative argument about how these practices undermine civic engagement and participatory democracy, inside and outside the schools. Together, these works lay down theoretical, methodological, substantive, and normative marks for reflecting on Kupchik's monograph and Monahan and Torres's volume.
Aaron Kupchik's monograph is well situated with the earlier works. In the introduction and chapter 1, he draws upon the theorizing of Garland and Simon to address how public schools have come to be security and surveillance centered in their governing practices, and identifies policies, school personnel, and disciplinary routines aligned with this regime of governing schools. Then, like Lyons and Drew, he engages in a four-school comparative analysis—of two urban and two suburban schools in two regions of the United States—and uses quantitative and qualitative methods, including field methods similar to that of Gilliom, to empirically investigate how the policies (zero tolerance, 142–144 and 199–200), personnel (particularly public and private police in chapter 3), and disciplinary practices (what he calls “teaching to the rules” in chapter 4) are implemented and with what effects. Kupchik wants to know the effects of surveillance-centered practices in the schools; he wants to know their utility, what works and what does not, and why: “… if it is true that police in schools are able to reduce students' fears or effectively mentor students, or that zero-tolerance policies are able to limit unfair uses of discretion in handing out punishments, then the practices can help. But … we need to consider these benefits alongside the harms they also cause” (10).
Kupchik's empirical investigation leads him to the conclusion that the “negatives outweigh the positives” (10) by far. Like Lyons and Drew, he finds that all four schools have the same policies, regardless of their differential needs for security. Why the practices proliferate irrespective of need is never fully explained, but the results, particularly the ways in which these practices reproduce social inequalities, are very well documented. Ethnoracial identities shape how school authorities, police, and school disciplinary personnel structure perceptions of threat, particularly in the urban schools. Targeting whom to watch is driven by stereotyping, just as it is on the streets of urban neighborhoods. Moreover, Kupchik establishes that discipline is unequal, with ethnoracial minorities in the urban schools more likely than others to be punished, even as this is “hidden” or rationalized by claims of meritocracy, or as Kupchik puts it, “the fact that grades mediate the effect of race on getting into trouble illustrates how racial disproportionality in school punishment is veiled and made to seem fair” (172).
Kupchik uses his mixed methods with interpretative finesse. Like Gilliom, his qualitative data are employed to make truth claims, not just to illustrate conclusions reached through quantitative analysis. And, by triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods, often called for by interpretative empiricists but rarely delivered, he is able to dig deeper and discover more, including his well-grounded claim that meritocracy hides racialized targeting in the schools and the distribution of punishments. Moreover, much of the qualitative data reported in the monograph is delivered as narrative and in long form with characters, plots, and endings, often revealing the normative judgments of the frontline disciplinarians—pointing out why they do what they do. This makes for text that undergraduate students, not just scholars, will feel compelled to read and reflect upon, and it explains why I am using his book in a course on youth, culture, and justice.
The narratives one reads in the book are mostly those of the people who police the school—uniform officers and school personnel assigned as disciplinarians, rather than line teachers. I raise this point because Kupchik notes that most disciplinary moments occur in the classroom or the hallways, and involve everyday interactions between teachers and students (154–155). But we don't know whether and to what extent the disciplinary regime reaches deeply into the school and the core of everyday interactions or is blocked through resistance. Moreover, we don't know how much trouble youth handle on their own or how much help they provide each other to navigate rules, policies, and disciplinary personnel, even though this line of inquiry is central to sociolegal inquiry of trouble and has been pursued in the setting of schools (Reference MorrillMorrill et al. 2000).
The minor focus on teacher-student and student-student interactions in and around issues of trouble is also surprising because of Kupchik's normative argument about how to reform the disciplinary regimes proliferating in U.S. public schools. Lyons and Drew argue that new disciplinary regimes are undermining the centrality of teachers and the development of high school students as citizens equipped to put the democratic ethos to work in their everyday lives. Kupchik agrees with this and lays out an agenda for “undoing the harm” of these practices by repositioning line teachers as central to governance, including the handling of trouble (203–208), and empowering youth as full participants alongside teachers (215–218). But, while arguing for the empowerment of teachers and students in school governance, Kupchik advocates for teacher training programs in classroom management (203–205) as a key policy intervention. Such a program of reform or social technology, in my thinking, is problematic for two reasons. First, it presumes that teachers and students are not already up to the task and engaging in everyday conflict management. Yet, sociolegal scholars have documented that teachers have formidable conflict-management skills, and have uncovered a rich repertoire of youth strategies for handling trouble among themselves, often with support of teachers tuned in to youth cultures (Reference Maynard-Moody and MushenoMaynard-Moody & Musheno 2003; Morrill & Musheno Reference Morrill and Mushenon.d.; Reference MorrillMorrill et al. 2000). Second, unleashing a new management tool, planned by central administrators and put into place by outside vendors, may produce yet another means of surveillance directed at teacher-student interactions in the classroom and hallways, similar to the management system that Gilliom uncovers in his study of surveillance and workfare. Rather than countering surveillance, management tools tend to enhance it.
The field of surveillance studies has a much longer history in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia and has been expansive in identifying surveillance apparatus—including paying close attention to management and digitalized client information systems—and in theorizing about surveillance practices. However, empirically grounded scholarship in this field of study is less developed than is the case in sociolegal studies. The field does have its own journal, Surveillance and Society, and its own academic association, and it has formed an international research network that increasingly involves U.S. scholars. Even as it is not a field well in tune with sociolegal studies or modeled on the early twenty-first-century works I identify above, any sociolegal scholar interested in surveillance needs to become familiar with this thriving interdisciplinary field of study. Monahan and Torres's volume, Schools under Surveillance, provides a window into this field.
Well aligned with Garland and Simon, the volume makes substantial reference to these works and builds a conceptualization of public schools as sites of penal, or what they call “carceral,” structuring and practice. With theorizing the greatest strength of surveillance studies to date, Foucault's thinking is prominent, and his lesser-known works relevant to surveillance are carefully interpreted (see Simmons: 55–70). The volume offers a potential answer to why surveillance tools and strategies are proliferating in public schools regardless of need, an issue Kupchik leaves unanswered. Part II of the volume points to public education as “a market for selling of security equipment and the purchasing of students' data and bodies” (introduction 11), and one chapter is particularly valuable in depicting the marketing of surveillance in Canadian schools (Steeves: 73–86).
While management techniques and tools associated with contemporary public education (training practices, personnel audits, testing, and standards) are called accountability measures in educational policy parlance, they are reconstructed in this volume as surveillance technologies (Part IV), including in a piece by Gilliom, who interprets the surveillance regimes embedded in No Child Left Behind legislation by concentrating on its assessment mechanisms (194–209). Resistance, a construct of historical importance to sociolegal scholars and developed as central to Gilliom's earlier treatment of workfare, is featured in Part V. The conceptualization of resistance in the context of schooling is well aligned with how sociolegal scholars conceptualize and study this dynamic of human agency, and the two chapters in this section are among the relatively few in the volume grounded in systematic empirical work.
The thinness of empirical grounding in the volume is recognized by Monahan and Torres, who call for more systematic inquiry of teachers and school administrators, specifically their value judgments and localized social-control practices in particular school settings, and of students, including their subjective experiences “living within, navigating, and appropriating everyday surveillance” (14). Moreover, the editors encourage scholars of surveillance studies to enhance their research on the legal dynamics of surveillance and to pay more attention to legal actors, including local school boards (14). Students of surveillance studies should turn to sociolegal scholarship to guide this strand of inquiry and, at the same time, sociolegal scholars building a research agenda on surveillance should consult this volume, as well as two other volumes by Reference MonahanMonahan (2006, Reference Monahan2010), to see how the construct is being conceptualized and framed in the field of surveillance and society.
