From Noncompliance to Columbine: Capturing Student Perspectives to Understand Noncompliance and Violence in Public Schools

Abstract

The paper reviews a number of ethnographic studies of students in U.S. secondary schools to help understand the causes of a range of student behaviors from minor noncompliance to lethal violence. Based on these studies, as well personal experience, the authors suggest that educators and educational researchers approach and understand student perspectives on school life. Such perspectives often reveal the logic of noncompliance, and show that aspects of school structure and practice can exacerbate or contribute to violence. Student non-compliance and alienation can escalate into violence if the student view is not regularly consulted in schools.

Not "Getting Some Guns and Doing Some Damage": Listening to Teens and Learning From a Ragtime Festival

“…Teens respected each other's playing and there was no hostility or jealousy between the groups. Thus, these different ways to belong were not hierarchical in ways documented in public schools (Stevick and Levinson 2003;Tonso 2003); nor were ragtime teen peer groups oppositional (Eckert 1989;Foley 1990;O'Conor 1998).…”

“…Subtle alterations in some facts served to reduce the possibility of revealing participant identities. In the findings I privilege how teen pianists explained their school and Festival worlds, following the advice of Stevick and Levinson (2003) that we need to hear more from students if we are to understand how schools must change to become responsive to the needs of all students.…”

“…(Tonso 2003, 401) Rather than meaning simply an athlete, as some presume, the usage of the term "jock" in Eckert's study and at Columbine (Tonso 2003) signaled those in ascendance at schools, those that school structures enrolled, promoted, and otherwise elevated. Many such schools incorporate a particular form of sports culture where some athletes use their prestige to bully others, and it appears to be widely distributed (Eckert 1989;Foley 1990;Kimmel and Mahler 2003;O'Conor, 1998;Stevick and Levinson 2003). Thus, one manhood "standard" that these middle-class, suburban, white schools supported was a straight form of masculinity associated with use of violence by some boorish athletes and their friends (Kimmel and Mahler 2003).…”

“…Thinking back over studies of high school culture helped Doyle Stevick reflect on his being an educator who had close contact with a student who became a shooter: Ben "August" Smith, a white supremacist and affiliate of the World Church of the Creator, who went on an out-of-school rampage that left Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and Indiana graduate student Won-Joon Lee dead. Stevick and Levinson's (2003) commentary further supports the importance of school structures and practices in framing school violence: [T]he behavior that appears to teachers and administrators as misconduct or irrational violence may in fact be a rational student response to a variety of school conditions: teachers' reified presentation of knowledge (Everhart), corporate hierarchy (Eckert), racial stigmatizing and individualistic assignments (Fordham), attempts to strip student identities in favor of a corporate identity (Foley), tracking, discriminatory remarks, and communicative distance (Davidson), violent school discipline (Devine), and exclusionary practices of students and teachers (Aronson). Features of school organization may thus actually bring out forms of misconduct and violence among students.…”

“…As Stevick and Levinson's (2003) review of ethnographic studies of high schools demonstrated, student peer group cultures are produced and reproduced in the context of school structures. For instance, Penelope Eckert (1989) studied a suburban Detroit high school.…”