What are the disciplinary practices in which inner-city schools engage? How is order maintained or restored? Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of a public charter school in Philadelphia, this study demonstrates the significance of understanding school discipline through a cultural lens. Beginning with a case study of a fight in the cafeteria, I describe how teachers, administrators, and students made sense of the school’s disciplinary ethos and how the disciplinary gaze that pervaded the school put invisible pressure on staff and students. Teachers and administrators in charge of discipline, who were overwhelmingly white, made implicit racial appeals regarding what practices were the most effective and fair to students who were overwhelmingly black and from single-parent, economically precarious households in urban neighborhoods.
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