Enacting injustice; dissonance between youth and discipline

This ethnographic study examines the discipline culture of one school district as to how adolescent's culture is met by discipline policies and practices. The study took place in a suburban school district in northern California and consisted of interviews of site and district level leaders, from a studying up perspective. As a midlevel district employee, I collected, organized and analyzed data following the notion that knowledge and understanding would emerge out of the data - attempting to answer the question: How do district discipline policies, and the school administrator practices that follow, align with adolescent development in working to change student behavior? The theoretical framework for this study is the intersection of restorative justice theory and developmental theory - the two intersect where the aim is to hold adolescents accountable for their behavior while aiding the adolescent to develop appropriate skills to repair the damaged relationships and bring about behavioral change. Findings show that while administrative leaders generally hold some notions of restorative justice as their personal philosophy, they - contradictorily - believe punishment is the only tool when working with students. The lack of critical engagement around this sort of issue leaves school administrative leaders with no other recourse. The school district appear as having a closed communication system at all levels, which may be affecting education leaders' freedom to enact a culture of justice around youth behavior patterns.