School discipline and behavior management is an area of considerable contest in educational policy formation. Additionally, educators have a greater responsibility to engage in more rigorous theorizing as a first step to more useful research. The first part of this paper distinguishes between "discipline" as a discourse of management and control and educational theories of student discipline and student behavior. By exploring and contrasting the epistemological foundations for classroom management with an educational theory of discipline, the paper proposes a greater range of interventions that free educators from both neo-Skinnerian behavioral straitjackets and from what Basil Bernstein (1996) has referred to as "spurious biology" or "sets of biological metaphors" that proceed from an acceptance that disruption in schools represents a problem of dysfunctional individual pathologies. The second part explores the political economy of surveillance and control in schools, offers observations on shortcomings of traditional methods of control, and considers new forms of student control. The paper suggests, by providing vignettes from two projects, ways of pursuing discipline that eschews short-term behaviorism and provides school communities with greater opportunity for educational progress. (Contains 87 references.) (LMI)