“Please Don’t Let Me Lose My Students”: Place, Race, Policy and School Discipline in the Rural US South

Schools – by choice or by political intervention – have largely moved away from a focus on enlightenment and growth and come to function as bureaucracies designed to maximize efficiency through rules and control (Weber 1978). In the United States, pressures presented by educational accountability and school choice policies threaten school funding and local control, and not only shape administrators’ orientation toward academic performance, but ripple out into decision-making in other spheres. However, not all schools - or students - are impacted in the same way.

Drawing on an ethnography of a public school in the rural US South, I illustrate how Black schools and Black students are harmed by purportedly ‘race neutral’ policy reforms that in actuality heighten race and class based inequalities between schools. I describe how schools under pressure may adopt policies and practices designed to control students, and which enable them to remove students deemed ‘deviant’ – or who disrupt efficiency - from classrooms and instructional environments, enabling schools to progress toward meeting their requirements (Morris and Perry 2017). Because of school choice and localized context – including the racialized social, economic, and social order – schools must also think about local perception of their schools, which requires them to manage racialized stigma. This study extends the literature to consider how school discipline is shaped at the nexus of race, place, and historical and political context in the rural American South.