Race, Employment, and Schooling: The Office of Civil Rights Probe, New York City, 1976

• In Event: Data and Discourse: Diverse Approaches to Analyzing Teachers’ Work in History

Abstract

This paper examines the 1976 U.S. Office of Civil Rights investigation of the New York City school system and its finding of unequal teacher hiring and deployment across the city’s 32 community school districts. The OCR investigation reveals important information about the tensions around race, employment, and schooling in New York City; as a case study, the investigation also provides a distillation of the larger historical context, in which basic ideas about fairness, merit, affirmative action, and the reach and limit of federal civil rights enforcement in education were powerfully contested.

Author

• Bethany L. Rogers, College of Staten Island - CUNY