ABSTRACT
When I came to Penbroke High in the early 1980s, the ‘tightening up’ that occurred five years ago at Grummitt had just begun. This ‘tightening up’ took place, however, against a different background, and it was implemented for different reasons-or at least with a different rhetoric. On a rare occasion, a teacher complained publicly about a ‘general erosion of authority and discipline’. But that was not the usual tenor of the voices calling for change. The presenting problem, and simultaneously, its solution, was ‘structure’. The most favored narrative of administrators and teachers was that the population of Penbroke suburb had changed and in addition, there were more family problems even among its customary denizens. As a result, students were unable to handle the ‘freedom’ and flexibility of the current social organization of the school; there was a need for ‘more structure’.
