Rooted in anti-Black ideology, Alabama school discipline policy and practice follows a grammar: Removal, Resistance, and Reform. To disrupt and repair the harm caused by anti-Black school discipline, The Grammar of School Discipline explores how school discipline operates and how students and educators resist it.

The Grammar of School Discipline examines how seemingly discrete school discipline policies and practices constitute a particular grammar: Removal, Resistance and Reform. Weaving numeric data with portraits of students and school practitioners, the authors detail a nuanced landscape of school discipline in Alabama and its anti-Black foundations. The removal of Black students can be traced to the antebellum construction of Blackness as criminal, deviant, and deserving of punishment. A focus on resistance centers the agency that students and practitioners exercise despite anti-Black removal. An exploration of specific reform efforts emphasizes that even the most well-intentioned and well-organized reforms are limited when the removal of students remains an option for practitioners. The authors end with an appeal to educational stakeholders to repair the harms that these anti-Black policies and practices inflict on students and communities, and thus move towards repairing the damage that white supremacy inflicts on everyone’s humanity.

Foreword by Cheryl E. Matias

Prologue

Introduction: Any Given Day in an Alabama Alternative School

Part I: Removal

Chapter 1: Methods of Removal written with Nicholas P. Triplett

Chapter 2: Motives for Removal

Chapter 3: A Portrait of Removal – Cotton County Schools written with Jasmine S. Betties and Sangah Lee

Part II: Resistance

Chapter 4: Removed for Resistance

Chapter 5: Who are the “Bad Kids”?: Portraits of Alternative School Students written with Sean A. Forbes

Chapter 6: Resistance and School-Based Practitioners

Chapter 7: Hitting Kids “Just Doesn’t Sit Well”: Resistance to Corporal Punishment written with Benjamin Arnberg

Part III: Reform

Chapter 8: Efforts Toward Reform

Chapter 9: A Portrait of Reform in Timber County written with Nanyamka A. Shukura, Sangah Lee, and Jasmine S. Betties

Part IV: Reparations

Chapter 10: The 4^th R

Chapter 11: Self-Portraiture, Problematics Positions, and Politics