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CHAPTER 1
Rethinking Youth Conflict
Popular and scholarly imagination casts youth violence and aggression as taken-for-granted aspects of poor, urban high schools, with students of color playing central roles as predatory threats to social order. Missing in this vision is a systematic look at how youth make sense of social dissonance while contributing to civility on school grounds. This book fills that gap by locating violence and aggression — what conventionally stands for urban youth conflict — as a narrow slice of a broader range of peer responses to interpersonal and intergroup trouble. We find social trust acts as a cultural resource tilting peer relations toward inclusive, group boundary crossing, and ways of handling peer trouble toward peaceful improvisation. At a more general level, our findings shed light on the conditions under which urban youth become solutions to social problems rather than treated as social problems themselves.
The research reported here spanned three decades, 1997–2013, a period of intense fear about violence in American schools, yet also a period of overall decline in rates of school violence and widespread adoption of carceral-like school discipline and security under policy rubrics related to the criminal justice–leaning "safe schools" movement. Our focal research site, a high-poverty, urban public school in the American Southwest we call "New West High School" (NWHS), offers an illuminating window into these dynamics since multiple benchmarks characterized the school as safe before succumbing to the lure of resources and hard-edged legitimacy linked to the adoption of safe schools policies. We tracked peer responses to interpersonal trouble before, during, and after these policy changes through a combination of ethnographic, archival, and institutional evidence. This strategy offered a rare, in-depth view of how youth respond to personal enmities on a safe, high-poverty campus, and a longitudinal view of how administrative adoption of carceral-like control policies disrupts but fails to dismantle these practices permanently. To begin, consider these representative illustrations of how NWHS students and staff gave voice to these dynamics over the course of this study.
Voices of Peer Trouble
Troy Johnson, José Rodriguez, and Pamela Boynes, three students who attended NWHS in 1997, talked about how they approached peer trouble on campus in discussions with Cynthia Bejarano and Jerlyn Jones, two members of our diverse fieldwork team. Their views were commonly voiced among students during our first two years of fieldwork in the late 1990s:
JERLYN: Ever had any trouble with another student on campus?
TROY: Yeah. A friend, well, someone I was with [dating]. ... You know, sometimes you get these little dramas.
JERLYN: What did you do?
TROY: I got outta her face. Let things cool down. It was okay for a while. Then the dramas start again. ... I went right up and talk with her, try to work it out. ... You can find a place outta the way at lunch or after school sometimes to talk it out. ...
* * *
CYNTHIA: What about trouble with another student on campus?
JOSÉ: A little. Had someone I don't know talkin' shit to [insulting] me in the cafeteria.
CYNTHIA: What'd you do?
JOSÉ: I fight him.
CYNTHIA: Why?
JOSÉ: Someone talks shit, you can't back down. Other kids was watching. You do what you gotta do. Not my first way to go. ... [G]et your rep. Be strong. ...
* * *
JERLYN: Any trouble with another student on campus?
PAMELA: Not too much. Sometimes.
JERLYN: What do you do when you have trouble with another student?
PAMELA: Most of the time you handle stuff yourself. Like if it's someone you don't have to be with you can avoid 'em. ... Kids here are okay, they can work it out on their own. ... Sometimes you can go to adults, like a teacher or a coach. You're having problems with another kid, the adult can help.
These students each illustrate different aspects of handling peer trouble in descending prevalence on campus: youth talking with or avoiding troublesome peers, engaging in verbal or physical aggression, or mobilizing school staff. Troy, a black eleventh grader who played team sports and was into graphic arts, took us inside the tensions ("little dramas") he faced with his girlfriend from whom he temporarily distanced himself to "let things cool down." When the tensions resurfaced, he tried to "talk with her" about the trouble in an "outta the way place" where they would not be disturbed. José, a ninth grader who came to the United States from Mexico as a toddler with his mother, noted that violence was not his "first way to go." Yet he resigned himself ("gotta do what you gotta do") to not "back[ing] down" from a peer who insulted him ("talkin' shit"), thus evoking well-worn images of urban youth conflict as affairs of intimidation and violence. Pamela was a twelfth grade honor student of mixed black, Mexican, and white descent, who played multiple varsity sports. She pointed out that youth on campus are "okay" and "work ... out" much of their interpersonal troubles without adult intervention, although they "sometimes" seek adult "help" on campus.
Three years later and several months into a new administration's commitment to implement a bundle of safe schools practices heavy on surveillance and control, student responses to similar questions about handling interpersonal trouble on campus dramatically changed. In 2001, Christine Yalda, another member of our fieldwork team, spoke with Rachel, a black eleventh grader active in several student clubs, about her experiences with peer trouble on campus:
... [I]t's more tense now. You gotta stay in one part of campus at lunch so they [school staff] can see you. People mark their spaces more. ... Makes it hard to meet for a club because things really tense if you gotta walk somewhere or put up a sign or something [for a club]. You might get in the wrong place and people be like "what'cha doin' here?" There were fights before [safe schools] but you could find some place to work things out too. Hard to do that now always lookin' over your shoulder. Don't seem too safe.
Rachel signaled a heightened sense of territoriality and anxiety among students and the constraints they faced in finding places to "work things out" with one another. She observed how these developments undermined out-of-class activities, such as meeting in student clubs. Similar worries emerged in a diverse male-female focus group composed of black, Latino, and white youth from the tenth and eleventh grades that Christine and Cynthia conducted, including statements like: ". ... students ... they can't even breathe sometimes," "maybe we go for while without any fights [on campus] and then it's like wham, bam, people kickin' ass all over," or "people don' work it out like they use to, they got to defend theyself any way they can or wait for guards." Increased personal and social anxieties, handling interpersonal trouble aggressively, and the heavy shadows of school surveillance and control all marked these accounts.
Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a change in the NWHS administration dramatically relaxed safe schools practices, demonstrating an adaptive, local organizational response to formal policies enacted from above. In 2008, Cal and Michael asked a diverse, representative group of students drawn from the eleventh and twelfth grades about their experiences with peer trouble. This group responded with accounts that paralleled what we found a decade earlier when students navigated their way through trouble, including: "people find a place to work it out here without gettin' too messed up," "sometimes they fight, but mostly not," and "if you got a real problem with someone or a group, talk it out or let it go, see a teacher you trust, if not."
We also observed changes over time in the ways school staff talked about youth trouble and conflict on campus. Prior to safe schools, Mrs. Robinson, a veteran teacher and black, voiced sentiments similar to many teachers on campus in speaking with Michael, noting that she "put[s] her ear to the ground to hear what the youth are saying." She pointed out that "there's mostly good kids here ... even though they face so much challenge in their lives like poverty, racism." She cautioned that teachers "have to be real, to know when ... to discipline 'em ... [or] ... give guidance, support, when to trust 'em and let 'em [youth] work it out on their own." Other teachers, such as Mr. Brown, a veteran white teacher who spoke with Cal, took a dimmer view of NWHS students, noting that "there's no real violence much of the time ... real violence could happen" because there are "... a lot of immature kids on this campus ... [who] can be a problem with kids in groups and if gangs are involved." He voiced an opinion shared by a group of teachers that "tougher policies ... would give us better control."
When we checked in with these and other teachers three years later, the full-blown engagement of safe schools had further divided the NWHS faculty. Some, such as Mr. Brown, in a follow-up conversation with Cal, expressed strong convictions that safe schools policies worked "to reduce problems on campus." Many teachers, such as Mr. George, another veteran white teacher, expressed concerns that the new disciplinary policies themselves might be creating problems. He told Michael that the new policies, especially the spatial confinement of students in certain parts of the campus during lunch and other free periods, might even "encourage fighting" because they stripped away students' capacities to move out of the public spotlight to handle peer trouble. We learned how the new policies fomented trouble among teachers staffing the new policies and compelled some to modify their identities as educators, becoming, as one teacher put it, "a cross between a prison guard and a cop." Several years later, Cal and Michael uncovered yet another sea change in teachers' perceptions. A diverse focus group of veteran and neophyte teachers discussed how "well meshed" the students appeared on campus compared to earlier in the decade during the "high" safe schools period. They talked about what they learned from that period, including how disciplinary patterns and academic tracking that "favor one group over another" diminished students' trust in each other and the staff, at the same time "hardening" social divisions among students.
Explaining Youth Conflict in Schools
The student and staff accounts above point to a shifting social landscape at NWHS through which youth navigated peer conflict. Their perspectives on peer conflict hinted at the importance of youth agency and trust, staff orientations and commitments to their students, and the administrative focus of the school. What clues does the existing literature on urban youth conflict, particularly related to schooling, offer in aiding the translation of these hints into grounded explanations?
Criminological research on youth conflict in and around urban schools primarily focuses on the delinquency and criminality of student populations, especially incidences of rape, nonsexual forms of assault, and theft. This line of inquiry views much of what goes on in schools as reflections of social contexts off school grounds and deficiencies in school resources, linking higher rates of criminality to schools with higher concentrations of students of color from lower-income households, impoverished larger public schools, and unstable neighborhoods that result in constant student transfers in and out of schools.
A stream of sociological inquiry into interpersonal conflict in urban public schools examines the importation of what Elijah Anderson calls "the code of the street" from impoverished neighborhoods onto school grounds. The code emerges in socially disorganized neighborhoods beset by joblessness, family fragmentation, and institutional distrust, especially of law enforcement, that result in young poor people of color having few avenues for developing self-worth and peer respect as they transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Under these conditions, Anderson and other researchers argue that the code operates as a cultural script for personal honor and rough justice, compelling youth to handle disputes aggressively in order to protect themselves and garner a "tough front." Nikki Jones argues that young women of color in high-poverty contexts can face particular burdens in this regard, as they negotiate interpersonal power relations with female and male peers based on code-of-street, masculinized senses of control. Although Anderson notes that schools become places of "relative order" in high-poverty neighborhoods, he observes that peer conflict in schools under the strong grip of the code sometimes "can only be settled by death." Victor Rios agrees with Anderson that the code has roots in the social and economic conditions of high poverty neighborhoods but finds that urban school authorities engage in a "re/production of street culture and identity," first mimicking gang-associated youth to gain their attention and then "when mimicking failed, authority figures defaulted to mocking youths' language and style."
Sociological and criminological research on intergroup conflict in poor urban schools concentrates on the intersecting dynamics of street gang competition in illegal markets, neighborhood rivalries, and interethnic group tension, sometimes identifying the role of code-of-the-street mentalities. In these contexts, violence becomes a mechanism for settling intergang disputes, maintaining group solidarity, and disciplining wayward customers. Disputing gangs identifying with different ethnic or racial groups may stimulate or compound these conflicts. Neighborhood rivalries, whether tied to formal gangs or not, have been associated with violent defenses of neighborhood turf on school grounds. Recent research by Martín Sánchez-Jankowski takes such analyses several steps forward by linking interpersonal and intergroup violence in schools to the arrival in mass of new ethnic groups, the intersection of territoriality with ethnic identity, and intense interethnic competition over scarce academic and other vital resources.
Schools can play key roles in creating or exacerbating interpersonal and intergroup violence and aggression. Criminologists find that schools in which students perceive greater fairness and clarity of official rules experience lower rates of delinquency and victimization, including rape, other forms of assault, and bullying. The research proves mixed on the relationship between school violence and administrative commitments to carceral-like security, including armed personnel, zero tolerance, hardware screening, surveillance systems, and strict channeling of student spatial mobility on school grounds. Some research finds that such systems deter violence, particularly involving guns. Yet these systems are themselves shaped by racialized, gendered, and classed images of youth, which define the everyday realities of school life along carceral lines. For students already marginalized due to their ethnic, racial, and/or social class identities, such systems can produce dramatic social inequities, even becoming "toxic" in generating a variety of health and social maladies. They also set in motion dynamics that can alter life-course trajectories, making male youth, particularly African Americans and Latinos, more susceptible to the "school-to-prison pipeline." The risks faced especially by young women of color in such systems are just being documented. Kimberlé Crenshaw and colleagues, for example, use Department of Education national school disciplinary enforcement data from 2011–12 to find that all female students of color are at greater risk for exclusionary school discipline in US schools than white female students, but that African American female students face the greatest risk. In follow-up focus group interviews, student and adult participants observed that teachers and administrators distrust African American female students as a group, which feeds into punitive "overdisciplining" for peer conflict and their separation from school.
Taken together, studies of urban youth conflict and school control offer further direction, but not explanations for the longitudinal shifts in the shape of youth conflict at NWHS, nor how to understand reports from youth and adults that the campus experienced extended periods where youth "worked out" their conflicts through conciliatory practices. The guidance gained from the existing literature points to tracking the intersection of racial, ethnic, gender, and social class inequalities among the students, including the arrival of new ethnic groups and intergroup competition, which might increase or decrease the importation of street codes and gang defenses of neighborhood turf on campus. Previous research also underscores how shifts in the dependence on carceral-like and racialized school discipline can affect safety and security on campus. At NWHS, some of these changes, such as the arrival of new ethnic groups, particularly new immigrants crossing from the state's southern border with Mexico, occurred during periods when the campus was safest. Other dynamics appeared constant, such as the moderate presence of street codes and gangs. The biggest change we observed occurred with the dramatic shift in school discipline early during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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Excerpted from "Navigating Conflict"
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