A Historicized Understanding of How School Segregation and the Carceral Apparatus Mutually Reinforce One Another

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Education and the Carceral State

Abstract

This study considers how school segregation and the carceral apparatus in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) schools have mutually reinforced one another from the 1950s to the present. The authors utilize critical discourse analysis to review current and archival newspaper articles to examine how race, racism, school segregation, and discipline practices are contested, produced, and reified through written language. This examination lends itself to an investigation into how tropes and ideologies of school segregation and school safety mutually reproduce and justify one another. This study contributes to the increasing and rigorous scholarship illustrating how ineffective school reforms aimed at combating zero-tolerance engage in particular logics to advance policies that often reinforce, expand and naturalize punishment, confinement, and inequality.

Authors

• Talia S. Leibovitz, University of California - Berkeley

• Cynthia Valencia-Ayala, University of California - San Francisco