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The centralization of school discipline in the second half of the twentieth century is widely understood to be the inevitable result of court decisions granting students certain civil rights in school. This study examines the process by which school discipline became centralized in the Los Angeles City School District in the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, and finds that the locus of control over student discipline shifted from the school site to the centralized district largely in response to local pressures. Indeed, during a period of large-scale student unrest, and in an environment of widespread racial and cultural tensions, many Los Angeles students, parents, community members, and educators actively promoted the centralization of school discipline-although often for directly conflicting purposes. Ultimately, this article argues that the centralization of school discipline was not inevitable and must be understood in the broader historical context in which it occurred. 248 American Journal of Education had centralized most other aspects of schooling, school discipline remained a local and relatively unregulated process. Today, however, teachers and principals are expected to enforce centralized rules and regulations regarding student behavior and are granted little-if anypersonal discretion. In fact "zero tolerance" policies, which in the past decade have been implemented in some form in nearly every school district in the nation, are specifically intended to limit local educators' discretion by requiring them to impose uniform penalties for certain student infractions (Johnson et al. 2000; Skinner 2004). Moreover, at the same time that the primary site of school disciplinary decisions has moved from schools and classrooms to the district, the act of discipline has become increasingly procedural-often resembling court trials, replete with hearings and, in some cases, lawyers (Bowman 2003; Epstein 2003). These developments are only the latest manifestation of a general centralization of educational authority in recent decades; curricular and assessment decisions, for example, have gradually moved from teachers and schools to districts, state houses, and, with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government. An exploration of how and why disciplinary authority shifted from school sites to bureaucratic institutions, then, also sheds light on the organizational transformation of education more broadly. The centralization of school discipline in the United States is most commonly characterized as the inevitable result of key court decisions in the 1960s and '70s granting students certain civil rights in school (Arum 2003; Blacker 2000; Thernstrom 1999; Weinig 2000). 1 Yet, that explanation minimizes the degree to which racial and cultural tensions in schools and neighborhoods weakened teachers' and principals' authority independently of court decisions, and ignores the role that local actors-including educators-played in the centralization of school discipline. 2 In fact at the lev...

BACKGROUND High adolescent gun-related mortality, gun violence, pro-gun policies, white supremacy, and the long-term socioeconomic and other effects of racial oppression are intricately linked in the United States. Racist prejudice depicts male individuals of color as more prone to criminality than white male individuals. We described long-term patterns of weapon carrying in US schools among non-Hispanic (NH) white, NH Black/African American, and Hispanic boys, hypothesizing that in contrast to racist stereotypes, boys of color did not bring weapons into schools more often than NH white boys in recent years. METHODS We conducted a time series analysis using 1993–2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System data comparing boys’ self-reported weapon carrying in a nationally representative sample of US high schools by race and/or ethnicity, age, and self-reported experience of safety and violence at school. RESULTS Weapon carrying in schools has declined among all boys. Comparing all schools, we found no significant differences in weapon carrying (4%–5%) by race and/or ethnicity in 2017 and 2019. Boys who reported experiencing violence or feeling unsafe at school were at least twice as likely to bring a weapon into school, and such negative experiences were more common among boys of color (8%–12%) than among NH white boys (4%–5%). In schools perceived as safer, NH white boys have been more likely to bring weapons into schools than NH Black/African American or Hispanic boys in the past 20 years. CONCLUSIONS Our findings contradict racist prejudice with regard to weapon carrying in schools, particularly in more favorable school environments. Making schools safer may reduce weapon carrying in schools where weapon carrying is most common.