Resurfacing the History of OCR (Office of Civil Rights) Data Collection: Statistical Disparity and Education Policy

• In Event: "We Are Our History”: Historicizing Current Black-White Disparities in Exclusionary Discipline

Abstract

Scholarship on the school-to-prison pipeline has long pinpointed the passage of "zero-tolerance" policies as the driver of a punitive turn within educational institutions that more intimately connected schools, police, and prisons. To demonstrate the impact of "zero-tolerance" policies, researchers often point to the dramatic rise in suspensions between 1974 and the early 2000s documented in data collected by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). These statistical comparisons, however, are too often decontextualized from the history that explained why national data emerged in 1974. This paper returns to the history of OCR data collection regarding suspension to document the earlier rise of exclusionary punishment during the contested era of desegregation. It traces the discourses, policies, and practices that engendered more punitive disciplinary systems in schools; the student and community resistance to these changes that compelled the OCR to collect data; and how civil rights organizations, in particular the Children's Defense Fund, challenged OCR data collection practices for their failure to capture the scope and process of exclusionary punishments within schools. In so doing, this presentation will analyze what drove the rise in exclusionary punishments during desegregation and how policymakers transformed statistical disparities documenting discrimination into justifications for criminalizing youth of color, pursuing punitive education reforms, and legitimizing the resegregation of schools. It demonstrates how these changes both reinforced and shaped law enforcement in ways that produced the ideological and material conditions that spurred mass incarceration. Drawing on histories of student activism, congressional testimony, correspondence between the CDF and HEW, and other archival material, this paper resurfaces a longer history of punitive school discipline to understand the processes and function of the contemporary school-prison nexus as well as how policymakers have historically used disciplinary statistics to produce and stabilize this punishing system.

Author

• Matt Kautz, Eastern Michigan University