Commentary: Michael Hand’s ‘on the necessity of school punishment’

Michael Hand maintains that punishment is necessary for school children to insure compliance with the important rules – those he calls moral and scholastic. I make three arguments against this position: First, Hand fails to separate the sorts of behaviors legitimately classified as interfering with teaching and learning from more trivial rules, leaving that determination entirely to the discretion of teachers. While Hand acknowledges a teacher must exercise ‘fine-grained judgement’ in determining the rules, fine-grained can easily become arbitrary; a subjective exercise that transforms a teacher’s preferred practice into a scholastic must-be-obeyed punishable offense. Second, Hand also fails to clarify which, among the vast array of sanctions teachers impose upon students, are to be included in the category of punishment. How is punishment cordoned off from corrections, penalties, and discipline? Third, in assuming that without punishment self-interest (selfishness) will prevail over unselfishness, and that punishment supports moral formation (consideration of others), Hand oversimplifies the complex motives that shape behavior.

Punishment and the argument from necessity: A reply to Hand

In his paper, ‘On the Necessity of School Punishment’, Michael Hand defends school punishment on logical grounds. In this reply, I show why this argument fails. First, I claim that the concept of a rule of obligation does not, in and of itself, establish that punishment is necessary. Second, I claim that a rule of obligation does not justify punishment on the grounds that it is necessary for social order or norm-conformity. Finally, I argue that a rule of obligation does establish the necessity of punishment, but only by assuming that social pressure and punishment are one and the same thing. The problem with this move, however, is that the necessity of ‘punishment’ becomes a trivial truth with little practical or normative guidance to offer educators.

Paternalistic aims and (mis)attributions of agency: What the over-punishment of Black girls in US classrooms teaches us about just school discipline

In this article, we explore the interrelated phenomena of teachers’ paternalistic aims and their misattributions of the agency of their students within particular schooling contexts of systemic racial injustice in the United States. We argue that, because teachers in these contexts assess agency in patterned, predictable ways that stem from – and reify – preexisting unjust patterns of oppression, teachers are unreliable evaluators of the conditions necessary for just punishment. To build this argument, we explore a complex case in which authorities regularly fail to meet these conditions: the punishment of Black girls in low-income, urban, predominantly non-White primary and secondary schools in the United States. Through our analysis, we offer a new concept, excess agency misattribution, which raises serious questions about subjective justifications for punishment in contexts of entrenched injustice. By delineating how the perceptions of teachers influence both the putative justifying aims and targeted recipients of punishment, we demonstrate how the existing terrain of school punishment practices ought to affect our normative reasoning about the fairness of punishment in these contexts.

On the necessity of school punishment

The question of the necessity of school punishment was raised, but not satisfactorily answered, in an exchange some time ago between John Wilson and James Marshall. Wilson argued that social interaction in schools must be governed by rules and that rules only exist if violations of them are normally punished. Marshall objected that there are some rules whose existence plainly does not depend on punishment of violations. Here I revisit and try to resolve the disagreement between Wilson and Marshall. I contend that, while it is not true of rules per se that they must be backed by punishment, there is an important subset of rules that do require this backing, and that subset includes at least some of the rules governing social interaction in schools.

Discipline, punishment, and the moral community of schools

The following article surveys changes to school punishment in the United States over the past century – particularly, the rise of exclusionary methods and the school-to-prison pipeline – to argue that prevailing disciplinary techniques are out of step with the developmental ethos of education and the principles of democratic oversight. To remedy these shortcomings, it offers a defense of schools as moral communities and outlines disciplinary responses grounded in the recognition and respect of the restorative justice model.

Legitimate concerns: On complications of identity in school punishment

In the present unjust context of US schools, many educators face uncertainty about the legitimacy of their issuing punishments, especially when their identity meaningfully differs from that of their students. In this article, we address these doubts by acknowledging distinctive elements of schools to provide helpful distinctions and analyses of the legitimacy of punishments within them. Specifically, we interrogate the role that identity categories such as race and gender play in establishing legitimate punishment within schools, with a particular focus on the case of Black girls attending US schools. We offer a taxonomy of legitimate responses to undesired student behavior, arguing that a particular person in their role within a school might lack legitimacy to punish based upon their identity even while other, related yet more nuanced, behavioral responses remain. In this work, we aim to equip educators with tools to better navigate the options available to them and better understand the significance of their actions in response to student behavior.

The Intergenerational Stability of Punishment: Paternal Incarceration and Suspension or Expulsion in Elementary School

Objectives: I extend the life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage to focus on continuity in punishment across generations. Specifically, I examine (1) the association between paternal incarceration and elementary school suspension or expulsion and (2) the extent to which behavior problems and weakened social bonds explain this association. Method: Analyses rely on logistic regression, propensity score matching, and mediation methods with data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study ( N = 3,201), a birth cohort of children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. Results: The odds of school punishment among children who had a residential father incarcerated by age 5 are 75 percent greater than the odds for children in a matched control group. About one third of this association is accounted for by behavior problems and weakened social bonds. Even after accounting for behavior problems and social bonds, children whose fathers were incarcerated are at greater risk of school punishment. Conclusions: I find evidence of an intergenerational stability of punishment and mixed support for an intergenerational extension to cumulative disadvantage theory. Paternal incarceration is associated with children’s likelihood of experiencing formal punishment in elementary school, and behavior problems and weakened social bonds explain part of this association.