“Positive” Behaviour Agreements Are a Misnomer

They’re manipulation disguised as collaboration

Power imbalance

In the summer of 2025 Manitoba’s Education Minister, Tracy Schmidt, announced new guidelines for school codes of conduct after hearing concerns about staff safety. In an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press (WFP), Schmidt discussed her preference for what she called positive, student-centred approaches to addressing concerning behaviour in public schools.

The “new” guidelines — which are, in fact, guidelines from a 2001 inclusion policy document with minor changes made over the years — purportedly focus on tools such as positive behaviour agreements rather than more punitive approaches, including timeouts and detention. The updated code of conduct policy guide, entitled Safe and Caring Schools, describes a positive behaviour agreement as “a collaborative agreement between a student and school staff”.

While student input can certainly be welcomed, one should question just how collectively such an agreement can be created, given the obvious power imbalance between school staff and students.

The policy document claims “providing students with strategic programming may curb behaviour that does not meet expectations”. Given that each school’s code of conduct is developed by the administration, based on requirements set by their division and the provincial government, those expectations cannot truly be collaborative.

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Waxing philosophical

Using Michel Foucault’s theories of power and discourse, I will show that school codes of conduct are discursive texts which delineate licit and illicit behaviour based on capitalist ideology. They are “forms of imperatives” imposed upon student bodies, “saturated with prescriptions” for how they should and should not behave, which turn schools into “agencies of control”. These “distinct and specialized institutions” are what Louis Althusser termed Ideological State Apparatuses, which aid in reproducing the social relations of production.