From discipline to punishment: Race, bureaucracy, and school discipline policy in Los Angeles, 1954--1975

This dissertation asks how and why zero tolerance policies and the use of police on school campuses have become standard in American public schooling. It locates the roots of today's discipline policies and practices in structures and systems initially set in place almost half a century ago, and examines the processes by which school discipline became reformulated and reconstructed over the course of approximately 20 years. The study specifically traces the evolution of discipline from a school-based, informal process in the mid 1950s to a bureaucratized and centralized system of control and punishment in the 1970s. Through a close examination of how this transformation occurred in the Los Angeles City School District, the dissertation places the development of school discipline policies at the nexus of institutional and broader social and political forces, as well as at the center of the larger historiography of American schooling.;The Los Angeles City School District was one of the first in the nation to adopt a system-wide discipline policy in the 1950s, and it maintained a position of national prominence in its reformulation of school discipline in the decades that followed. As its student population grew and became more racially and culturally diverse, the school district---sometimes at the request of teachers and principals, other times at the request of students and activists---continued to centralize authority for student governance and limit local educators' discretion over and responsibility for discipline at the school site. In this way the Los Angeles school system was emblematic of city school districts across the nation, most of which followed a similar trajectory during the same time period.;Moreover, in investigating the processes by which discipline policies were formed and reformulated in Los Angeles from the 1950s to the 1970s, this dissertation also explores how the entire notion of discipline shifted during this period from an educative process for which educators had a moral obligation to a system of punishment in which educators' had bureaucratic authority. This transformation was informed by racial conflict and prejudices, but it also extended beyond race, and, like the so-called "zero tolerance" policies of today, ultimately became an institutionalized component of American public schooling.