Disciplining Our Own: Politicizing the Image of the Strict Black Principals, 1970-1985

Between the 1970s and 1980s, a bipartisan group of philanthropists, educational researchers, and eventually the Ronald Reagan administration politicized the image of the strict school disciplinarian as the key to urban school turnaround. While Black communities saw Black leaders as part of a broader project of racial and economic justice, local and national networks of educational elites reduced Black urban communities’ demands for self-determination to the disciplinarian strategies of strict Black leaders. This group of actors advanced Black school leaders’ disciplinarian strategies as a substitute for structural reforms that targeted the political and economic conditions that constrained urban schools. This idea of the strict Black disciplinarian clarifies how discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970. In doing so, it deepens understanding of the educationalization of social problems, clarifies how and why discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970, and illuminates the consequences of the neoliberal carceral turn in urban education.