Brokers and Boundary Managers: School Expulsions amid the Non-Punitive Turn

Abstract

Like many American institutions, K–12 schools are increasingly embracing a rhetoric of non-punitiveness and seeking to supply resources instead of imposing harsh punishment. Using ethnographic data from a diverse, suburban, well-resourced public high school, I explore how institutional actors manage this central role in the provision of goods and services. I find that school staff lack the capacity to successfully serve as brokers for all their constituents, forcing decisions about how to allocate their limited resources. Staff navigate these constraints by strategically managing the boundaries of the institution, redefining who gets to remain a member and who they will continue brokering for. I describe how and when these exclusions occur and show that students from less advantaged backgrounds are at higher risk of expulsion because they depend more on the school for resources than their privileged peers. Further, informal methods of exclusion become favored in this non-punitive pivot, meaning that official data likely undercount the number of students forcibly removed from their schools. As institutions take on more resource brokering amid the turn towards non-punitiveness, the decisions of boundary managers – those actors with the power to enroll and expel members – become increasingly consequential for the allocation of public resources.