It was a Saturday night at a Days Inn in Carthage when I first read Boonstra during my road trip to Chicago. That detail matters only because of what happened by Tuesday at that Chicago Airbnb. After reading Skiba, Strassfeld, and Cherng, the kindergarten classroom she describes had shifted entirely. It began to feel less like a research site and more like an origin myth told in reverse, the kind of story where you already know the ending, and the cruelty lies in watching the beginning unfold with the patience of someone who does not yet know the cost of a clip chart: how such routine, 'moment-to-moment' interactions relentlessly assign and solidify a child's identity as a 'behavior problem' (Boonstra, 2021, p. 6).
Boonstra (2021) gives us Ms. Avery's classroom, where the speed of interpretation functions as a technology of racialization. When Carter, a white boy, punches a classmate in the restroom, he is "beckoned... over and conferred with... quietly" for two minutes to brainstorm "alternative behaviors" (p. 11). Yet when Da'Vone, a Black boy, demonstrates frustration, his body is immediately wrapped under an adult's arms and carried across the rug, his movements read "as though they indicated threat and ill intent" (p. 10). The behavior is comparable. Boonstra's ethnography captures something no regression can: the white child's act passes through a membrane of leniency so thin it is almost invisible; the Black child's identical act passes through no membrane at all, arriving immediately as confirmation. Holland et al.'s (1998) "figured world," as Boonstra deploys it, is a machine for producing differential temporal density. Certain children are given seconds to self-correct, others are given none, and this asymmetry in institutional time manufactures the very behavioral divergence it claims to discover.
I want to linger on these disciplinary technologies. Boonstra documents how teachers use "cultural artifacts—material or symbolic resources that are ascribed with shared meanings" (p. 2) to construct behavioral identities. Consider the 'calm down chart' or the 'red dot' permanently affixed next to a marginalized child's name on a roster. These are chronotopic technologies: they fuse a spatial ordering (isolation from peers, public visibility) with a temporal ordering (the irreversible accumulation of infractions across the school day or year) into a single apparatus of governance. What Boonstra calls "artifacts" I would call administrative instruments of the chronotope, and their genealogy does not begin in the kindergarten classroom. It begins in the statute.
Skiba (2002) writes as though the IDEA '97 disciplinary provisions represent a "precarious balance" between the right to FAPE and the right to safe schools (p. 81). But these values did not arrive at the negotiating table with equal histories. FAPE was wrestled from a system that had for decades excluded disabled children entirely (p. 81); zero tolerance was manufactured in the 1990s through a moral panic whose evidentiary basis has since collapsed. Skiba himself acknowledges that "there is no evidence that suspension or expulsion… makes a contribution to safer schools" (p. 89) and that applications of zero tolerance "have further increased the use of school suspension and expulsion" (p. 87). To frame their collision as a "balance" is to perform the same epistemological courtesy that Boonstra's teachers extend to the behavior of white children: treating a political construction as though it were a natural force requiring accommodation rather than interrogation. This is not a misreading of policy. It is what György Lukács termed Verdinglichung1 — reification — the erasure of human authorship from human-engineered systems of control, so that they acquire the immutability of physical law. Like the behavioral charts on the kindergarten wall, zero tolerance becomes most unassailable at the precise moment it ceases to be visible as a choice.
What interests me more is the manifestation determination. Here, a team of professionals must decide whether a student's disability impaired the ability to understand the consequences of the behavior or to control it (p. 84). This presupposes what Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013) have taught us to refuse, a stable boundary between disability and its absence. Skiba concedes that "forcing an IEP team to make these difficult distinctions in the absence of adequate assessment tools may reduce the manifestation determination review to a battle of wills" (p. 85). For Black students, whose behavior has already been processed through the figured world's differential interpretive machinery, the manifestation determination functions as a second order Procrustean operation. The first operation constructs "behavior problems" from racialized perception; the second asks whether the constructed behavior is caused by a classified condition that was itself constructed from the same perceptual field. Meanwhile, "school suspension is also commonly used for a number of relatively minor offenses, such as disobedience and disrespect" (Skiba, 2002, p. 88), precisely the subjective infractions where racial bias operates most freely, and where disproportionality in discipline "seems to be related to race above and beyond the effects of socioeconomic status" (p. 89). The circularity is not an error. It is the load bearing wall.
And then the wall becomes a cell. When Strassfeld and Cherng (2021) run logistic regressions on juveniles in secure care, their initial models suggest that specific treatment programs predict recidivism. But in Model 3, once race enters the equation, every program coefficient collapses into nonsignificance (p. 264). What appeared to be institutional variation was merely demographic composition wearing an institutional mask. The only stable predictors are being Black (β=0.76, p<.01) and Indigenous (β=1.44, p<.001), operating regardless of program assignment (pp. 262–264). Yet the authors paradoxically recommend better "program placements" (p. 265), retreating into the very carceral grammar their own data just emptied of meaning. Within this grammar, 1,092 living juveniles—their emotional disturbances, their encounters with confinement—are flattened into a binary variable of recidivism. There is a word for people who exist only as administrative traces, whose systemic value depends on erasing the living subject. Gogol (1842/1996) called them dead souls. Chichikov's genius was not fraud but literacy: he read the census exactly how the bureaucracy wanted it read, trading names that were administratively alive but physically absent. Model 3's β=0.76 operates in this same bureaucratic register. It is not a finding about people; it is a finding about what remains of people after the institution has finished recording them. Like Chichikov's serfs, these juveniles become most valuable to the system at the precise moment they cease to be visible within it.
What I see across these three texts is not a pipeline, though the metaphor tempts. It is something closer to a palimpsest2: each study overwrites the previous surface while the earlier inscription bleeds through. Boonstra's child, restrained on the kindergarten floor (p. 10), is already legible in Strassfeld and Cherng's Table 2, not because fate is determined at five, but because the institutional gaze that constructed "behavior problem" in Room 6 is the same gaze that constructed "emotional disturbance" on the intake form, and the same gaze that will interpret a Black teenager's post-release existence as recidivism. The gaze does not age. It merely changes its institutional host.
References
- Annamma, S. A., Connor, D. J., & Ferri, B. A. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511
- Boonstra, K. E. (2021). Constructing "behavior problems": Race, disability, and everyday discipline practices in the figured world of kindergarten. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 52(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12374
- Gogol, N. (1996). Dead souls (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1842)
- Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Harvard University Press.
- Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics (R. Livingstone, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1923)
- Skiba, R. J. (2002). Special education and school discipline: A precarious balance. Behavioral Disorders, 27(2), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/0198742902027002
- Strassfeld, N. M., & Cherng, H. Y. S. (2021). Services for juveniles with emotional disturbances in secure care settings: An exploratory analysis of racial disparities and recidivism. Behavioral Disorders, 47(4), 257–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/01987429211046552
- Verdinglichung is composed of three elements: Ding ("thing"), the prefix ver- (which in German marks a process of transformation or becoming), and the nominalization suffix -lichung. The word thus describes, at the level of morphology, exactly what it names conceptually: the act of making something into a thing — converting fluid, contingent human relations into objects that appear solid and given. ↩
- The "palimpsest" described here functions as the operational mechanism for the systemic destiny explored in my companion piece, Chronicle of a Marginalization Foretold. If the former text established that the marginalization of minority youth was written in the "future perfect," the current analysis reveals exactly how the institution executes that prophecy—by erasing the child and rereading the label. ↩