My research centers on the relationship between history of education and critical policy studies in education. My work in education history ties together the intellectual roots of school reform initiatives and post-civil rights era black education. I am particularly interested in what historians of education refer to as the “educationalization” of social problems, that is, the use of schools to solve a range of social problems related to racial inequality, socioeconomic exploitation or even police violence. I am curious about the possibilities this presents but also take seriously how policy foci on education foreclose other political and economic possibilities. My research also aims to uncover the taken-for-granted “ideas” undergirding urban school reforms and research. More specifically I want to uncover the powerful ideas about race, poverty, or more specifically, ideas about black poor students and their families are used to inform, rationalize and ultimately limit a range of reforms including school choice policies, school discipline or educational leadership.
My current book project Disciplining Opportunity: How Education Reforms Punished Black Students and Perpetuated Inequality explains how since the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s, education, once hailed as the primary purveyor of racial and economic opportunity, has instead controlled, punished, and funneled children through a “school to prison pipeline.” The book reveals how contemporary school discipline policy, including more punitive forms of policing, suspension and exclusion, is an outgrowth of liberal policy efforts to compensate low-income, black children congregated in urban communities with structures of educational opportunity. A basic tenet of American liberalism, opportunity refers to the enduring political ideal of equality based on the rights of the individual and on the premise that equally talented people should have the equal chance to compete for social advantages. An intellectual and cultural history of opportunity as discourse, policy and research focus, this book considers the limit of the opportunity ideal through a critical study of how it informed and moved through federal education policy. Initially theorized by social scientists of the late 1950s who were deeply concerned with urban delinquency and crime prevention, a version of opportunity focused primarily on disciplining youth eventually served as the building blocks of federal efforts to alleviate poverty and redress civil rights violations through establishing order in and outside of schools. As federal commitments to racial equality have largely lived out through education endeavors, this quest made education a catch-all panacea for issues of poverty and racial exploitation and foreclosed the political horizons for schools and society more broadly. The consequences have been especially dire for Black children, who attend schools that are less funded and more heavily policed, and are overwhelmingly subject to disproportionately punitive disciplinary policies.
