Ending Disciplinary Architecture in America's Public Schools

budgets on emergency repairs and upkeep
rather than make long-term investments and
restoration that in turn give their facilities
longevity. A 2015 study of California school
districts found:
“low-wealth districts spent
a higher proportion of their
total education spending on
the daily upkeep, operation,
and repair of their facilities
than high-wealth districts. But
low-wealth districts also spent
far less on capital investments
for building system renewals
such as roof or mechanical
system replacements and
building alterations such as
modernizing science labs.
Because it is more difficult for
low-wealth districts to borrow
the necessary capital to invest
in the long-term stability of
their facilities, these districts
end up making necessary and
emergency short-term repairs
using their operating budgets
— the same funds they need
to pay teachers, purchase
instructional equipment, and
pay for other day-to-day
educational necessities. As
such, low-wealth districts
often get trapped in a vicious
cycle; underspending on
routine and preventive
maintenance in the short term
leads to much higher building
costs in the long term.” 3
This vicious cycle is indicative of the
disproportionate impact of aging
infrastructure on low-income communities,
and necessarily limits the amount of capital
available for important educational resources
like up-to-date textbooks and technologies,
teacher salaries, extracurricular programming
or classroom supplies.
Low-income students, who are
disproportionately students of color, “are
often relegated to low-quality school facilities
that lack equitable access to teachers,
instructional materials, technology and
technology support, critical facilities, and
physical maintenance. These absences can
negatively impact a student’s health and
ability to be attentive and can exacerbate
existing inequities in student outcomes.” 4
Students are, in effect, punished for living
in a low-income area, and provided with
inadequate opportunities to improve their
quality of life in the future. This deleterious
effect fans out into the larger community.
School improvements are directly linked to
increased property values, micro economies
of neighborhood businesses, student
enrollment boosts, and higher teacher
retention rates just to name a few. By limiting
the ability of low-income schools to invest in
themselves, we also perpetuate the devalued
nature of their environment. Even though the
Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that everyone,
regardless of race, class or ethnicity, has the
right to an equal public education, it is clear
that pernicious inequalities continue to this
day. The established and persistent reality is
that this ruling by no means guaranteed that
the education students receive would be highquality
or equal.
BREAKING THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON
PIPELINE
Tangential to education inequality is the
school to prison pipeline. This phrase
refers to a mechanism wherein students are
taken from the public-school system and
channeled directly into the criminal justice
system. It is a product of zero-tolerance
policies that penalize students for behavioral
issues no matter how minor or major the
offense. Students who break established
rules are liable to be punished in the form
of suspension, expulsion or placed directly
in a juvenile detention center. But these
punishments are often not carried out equally
across socioeconomic and demographic
lines. Many of these students have learning
disabilities, histories of abuse, trauma or
neglect and would benefit from the very
educational services they are being denied.
These policies have also been shown to be
discriminatory and are carried out at a much
higher rate with low-income and minority
students than for their white, affluent peers.
In fact, a 2012 report from the Department
of Education found that black students are
suspended and expelled at a rate three times
greater than white students, while students
with disabilities are twice as likely to receive
an out-of-school suspension as their nondisabled
peers. 5 In effect, students facing
social and physical barriers are penalized for
factors outside of their control.
As students become accustomed to carceral
design, disciplinary architecture plays a
corollary role in this issue. When schools
resemble prisons, it is no wonder these
students feel as though it is their destiny. By
replacing hall monitors with police officers
who have little training working with children,
placing security cameras throughout the
buildings, and body scans at the entrance,
we send a message to students that they
are valued only for their submission and
compliance. How youth perceive themselves is
shaped by interactions with the world around
them, and when this manifests in police taking
regular disciplinary roles at school, it often
seeds distrust of authority and feelings of
powerlessness. The architecture of school
buildings doubly reinforces this paradigm by
creating a physical environment reminiscent
of a prison, built to enforce conformity and
constrain behavior, rather than a space
developed for learning. And academics are
taking note:
Fig 1.0 Police officer violently pulling a misbehaving
student from their desk at a high school in Columbia,
SC.
Fig 1.1 As of 2016, corporal punishment - the use of
physical force (usually paddling) on a student intended
to correct misbehavior- is still legal in 19 states.
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