Calcifying Categories: Measurement in Search of Understanding

• In Event: 31.064 - Disabling Race and Racing Disability: Developing DisCrit

Abstract

1. Objectives
In this paper, we examine the intersections of historically constructed markers of difference and the impact that they have on the structural and human resources that are required for institutionally sanctioned learning to occur. We emphasize the notion of institutionally sanctioned learning because learning is part of the human experience yet schools also constrain what is supposed to be learned. We argue that ways in which data evolve into “real” structures calcify the construction of difference.

2. Theoretical framework
Drawing from DisCrit, and drawing on cultural historical activity theory, we examine the ways in which four school districts that surround major, public universities report and perform within the categories that constitute Office of Civil Rights (OCR) data collection.

3. Methods/modes of inquiry
This paper uses data from the most recent (2014) release of OCR data to examine how districts report disproportionality for special education, section 504, and advanced placement. We explore data collected through OCR and state assessments to understand how these districts report and use these data, examine their results, and how they vary across four contexts. Our aim is to expose the structure of the data and its implications for systems organization and practice. Without a strong theoretical orientation to the nature of data reporting itself, the capacity of systems to develop flexible systems that account for how individual lives emerge from the intersections of social constructions of multiple markers of difference. The ways in which difference is constituted within systems such as education, create contexts which simultaneously exist and are resisted individually, collectively, and, as we argue in this paper, culturally.

4. Data sources & evidence
In addition to OCR and state level data, we engage in conversations with local practitioners, to explore the ways in which they make meaning of these data. In iterative discourse we trace how data become part of a process of constituting difference and in doing so calcifying some categories while ignoring or marginalizing others.

5. Results and conclusions
Bringing a layered understanding of culture to our data offers the opportunity to examine the intersections between individual and institutional histories and processes in schools. We consider students whose cultural histories, experiences, and practices are orthogonally positioned against normative cultures of U.S. schools instantiated through curricula, practices, and school policies. Friction between the cultures of students and those of schools offer important context for the minimal progress that U.S. schools have made in terms of inclusivity and equity. Inclusiveness cannot stop at borders created by imposing data structures on the design and delivery of opportunities to learn. Nevertheless, for students who are marginalized for a variety of reasons including language, race, ethnicity, and abilities, the question of inclusion into what is no small matter.

6. Significance of the study
Becoming educated in the complex spaces of schools in the U.S occurs at the crossroads of culture as (a) identity and toolkit, (b) institutional culture, and (c) the cultural dynamic of communities (e.g., classrooms) at work.

Authors

• Elizabeth B. Kozleski, The University of Kansas

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Arizona State University