Place, Power, and School Pushout: Defensive Localism and School Discipline

“Suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests: These exclusionary and overly punitive disciplinary responses disproportionately impact Black students and have become normalized throughout the nation. In reality, school pushout, or the disciplinary sanction of removing students from the classroom, contravenes the very purpose of public education to prepare children to engage as full citizens in our democratic republic.

This Article attributes school pushout to harmful exercises of local authority over education, an authority given constitutional cover under the democratic ideology of localism and decentralized governance. Many communities, however, exercise local power to exclude and hoard resources to the detriment of neighboring communities.

This Article examines how many majority-Black districts deprived of the benefits of “classic localism” exert parochial power to control their educational communities, often resorting to overly punitive disciplinary responses. This Article applies the concept of defensive localism to describe this destructive exercise of local power, which imposes citizenship harms on impacted students. Like their wealthier, white neighbors, these school communities are not immune to the impulse to exclude.

Meanwhile, the carefully curated “community” in wealthy, white suburban enclaves often incentivizes reliance on ineffective school discipline interventions and a false sense of safety, obscuring signs of potential school violence. Black children suffer a range of citizenship harms resulting from exclusionary discipline, including increased likelihood of involvement with the criminal legal system.

This Article urges communities to reimagine school discipline to not alienate or exclude students, but embrace them by providing needed services and supports that foster genuine community and participation.”