DISRUPTED DISCIPLINE: SCHOOL PUNISHMENT, INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL, AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IN THE WAKE OF COVID-19

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the learning modalities schools utilized during the 2020 – 2021 academic year shaped patterns of school-based social control when students began returning to more traditional in-person instruction in 2021 – 2022. I conduct three related analyses, each structured around the premise that the type of disruption schools experienced during the 2020 – 2021 academic year shaped how exclusionary discipline and medicalization were reestablished the following year. In the first empirical chapter I examine whether learning modality during 2020 – 2021 was associated with suspension and expulsion rates in 2021 – 2022 and whether those associations differed by student race. In the next chapter I examine whether the relationship between learning modality and post-disruption discipline varied across urban, suburban, and rural schools. In the last empirical chapter, I examine how learning modality shaped both criminalization and medicalization as parallel pathways of school-based social control. Throughout the analyses, I draw on a two-condition theoretical framework arguing that school-based social control depends on institutional monitoring capacity and teacher-student relational ties, both of which the pandemic disrupted unevenly across modalities and geographic contexts. The findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic did not transform the racial structure of school-based social control, instead it reproduced it. Modality-associated increases in suspension were concentrated among White students rather than Black students, as Black student suspension rates are structurally elevated in ways that the modality-specific relational disruption cannot move further. The one clear locale-specific effect was hybrid schools in rural areas, where fragmented relational contact combined with limited institutional alternatives produced the only significant locale-by-modality finding. Medicalization followed its pre-existing upward trend regardless of modality, confirming that procedurally intensive pathways of social control are more insulated from short-term disruption than discretionary ones. Across all analyses, racial disparities persisted across every modality, every locale, and every model specification. When racial gaps narrowed it was because White student rates increase and not because Black student rates decreased. This dissertation advances sociological understanding of institutional social control by demonstrating that disruption can reshape how social control is enacted without altering the underlying racial inequalities that structure it.