scholarly journals A is for Apple, B is for Bulletproof: The racialized fortification of schools

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Woulfin ◽  
James Sadler

From Colorado and Connecticut to Florida, school shootings have struck the U.S. education system, accelerating and deepening the fortification of schools. Fortification entails prioritizing and instituting multiple types of infrastructure, technology, and routines that militarize schools while defining 'safety' as a function of the building and framing educators as responders to gun violence. The school security industry is now a $2.7 billion market, so it is vital to comprehend the structures, policies, conceptualizations, resources, and activities linked with school safety. We apply structure-agency theory to advance arguments on the fortification of schools. In particular, we explain the interrelation between racialized school safety policies and practices. Thus, we highlight educators’ discretion in enacting safety policy in varied contexts. Our discussion of fortification sheds light on the nexus of guns and schools, operationalizes facets of structure-agency theory, and provides recommendations for research and practice.

Author(s):  
Aaron Kupchik

Since the 1990s, K-12 schools across the U.S. have changed in important ways in an effort to maintain safe schools. They have added police officers, surveillance cameras, zero tolerance policies, and other equipment and personnel, while increasingly relying on suspension and other punishments. Unfortunately, we have implemented these practices based on assumptions that they will be effective at maintaining safety and helping youth, not based on evidence. The Real School Safety Problem addresses this problem in two ways. One, it provides a clear discussion of what we know and what we don’t yet know about the school security and punishment practices and their effects on students and schools. Two, it offers original research that extends what we know in important ways, showing how school security and punishment affects students, their families, their schools and their communities years into the future. Schools are indeed in crisis. But the real school safety problem is not that students are either out of control or in danger. Rather, the real school safety problem is that our efforts to maintain school safety have gone too far and in the wrong directions. As a result, we over-police and punish students in a way that hurts students, their families and their communities in broad and long-lasting ways.


Author(s):  
Jacqueline Vickery ◽  
Jen Cardenas

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (8) ◽  
pp. 26-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wang
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 98 (8) ◽  
pp. 64-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice J. Elias ◽  
Samuel J. Nayman ◽  
Joan C. Duffell ◽  
Sarah A. Kim

Considering the key role of social-emotional and character development (SECD) competencies in college, career, and life success — and considering that many of those competencies are teachable — there is no excuse for failing to incorporate them systematically into our education system. That would be the equivalent of depriving children of oxygen. This article is addressed to the U.S. Secretary of Education and other education policymakers and offers them specific recommendations to guide policy that would yield high-quality programs of support for SECD in all schools.


Author(s):  
Samantha Deane

Schools are sites of personal, political, and symbolic violence. In the United States acts of rampage school gun violence, themselves symbolic, are connected to acts of personal violence via the inscription of social gender norms. Carried out by White teenage boys rampage school shootings call us to grapple with the ways in which schools form and discipline gendered subjectivities. Central to the field of masculinity studies is R. W. Connell’s theory of masculinity which draws on a Gramscian theory of hegemony rather than a Foucauldian theory of power. Whereas Gramsci focuses the ways in which power moves down, Foucault studies the impact of small interaction on our subjective sense of self. When addressing the phenomena of rampage school gun violence where White teenage boys target their schools in acts of gendered rage, a Foucauldian theory of power helps us to take seriously the significance of everyday interaction in legitimating gendered ontologies. Jointly Foucault and the contemporary works of Jane Roland Martin, Amy Shuffelton, and Michel Kimmel point towards an avenue that may afford us the opportunity to root out practices and environments wedded to hegemonic masculinity (and thus rampage school gun violence): the everyday celebration of gender-inclusive and egalitarian ways of learning and living.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002242782095320
Author(s):  
Alexander L. Burton ◽  
Justin T. Pickett ◽  
Cheryl Lero Jonson ◽  
Francis T. Cullen ◽  
Velmer S. Burton

Objectives: The recurring mass murder of students in schools has sparked an intense debate about how best to increase school safety. Because public opinion weighs heavily in this debate, we examine public views on how best to prevent school shootings. We theorize that three moral-altruistic factors are likely to be broadly relevant to public opinion on school safety policies: moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear. Methods: We commissioned YouGov to survey 1,100 Americans to explore support for a range of gun control and school programming policies and willingness to pay for school target hardening. We test the ability of a moral-altruistic model to explain public opinion, while controlling for the major predictors of gun control attitudes found in the social sciences. Results: The public strongly supports policies that restrict who can access guns, expand school anti-bullying and counseling programs, and target-harden schools. While many factors influence attitudes toward gun-related policies specifically, moral-altruistic factors significantly increase support for all three types of school safety policies. Conclusions: The public favors a comprehensive policy response and is willing to pay for it. Support for prevention efforts reflects moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather C Alonge ◽  
Constant P Craig

This essay examined the issue of school shootings within the United States, to include a literature review and analysis of the current status of the issue on a national level. From the review and analysis, the essay provides the multidisciplines engaged in school safety issues with viable, workable, and quickly implementable solutions to address this serious national issue at the local school district and even school level of implementation. This analysis examined a multidiscipline and multiprofessional community approach using existing federal guidelines that address actionable intelligence (social media and human information/informants), school design and incorporation of safety and protective features, involvement of law enforcement on campuses, and engagement of law enforcement with administrators and educators. Most importantly, it provides awareness to educators, administrators, and law enforcement along with the general public that the attitude of “It can’t happen here” can indeed and way too many times it has “happened here.”


Author(s):  
Mohammed bin Nasser al-Maatiq Al-Shahrani

The study aimed at evaluating the school safety and security which is necessary to protect students with special needs in Saudi Arabia. The analytical descriptive approach was used  and study was divided into two main chapters: The first chapter deals with the conceptual framework by identifying the meaning of school security and safety, and identifying the special needs group. Then in the next chapter the researcher analyzed the current reality in Saudi society and diagnose it. The negative effects of not integrating special needs students in schools, and concluding with the most important recommendations and mechanisms to remedy these problems, and design a plan of action to implement the study and set a timetable for it. Results: Children with special needs face several problems, including psychological, educational or social, and the integration of this group into society in general and in schools is a complex issue. Integration is defined as providing opportunities for children with disabilities to become involved in the special education system as a means of emphasizing the principle of equality Opportunities in education and aims to integrate in general to meet the special educational needs of children with disabilities within the framework of the regular school and according to the methods and methods and methods of educational studies and supervised by the provision of a specialized educational system in addition to the cadres of education in the public school and many studies pointed to the impact Consolidation and support, including those rejected as a result of several positive and negative trends.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0044118X2110466
Author(s):  
Faraneh Shamserad

Although school violence statistics indicate that schools are safe places, anxiety over school shootings continues to influence school safety reform to the extent that security measures in American public schools include the arming of schoolteachers. Furthermore, not only have youths’ perceptions of school security been relatively unexplored, existing research points to racial inequalities in the use of and the effects of school security practices. This study uses data from high school students across multiple school districts in a Midwestern county to examine how race and perceptions of fairness intersect to influence attitudes on arming teachers. The results suggest that, relative to White students, Black students are less supportive of arming teachers and anticipate greater decreases in safety if teachers are armed. In addition, perceptions of fairness mediate the effect of race on support and feelings of safety. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.


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