This study examines the development of radical educational consciousness in Detroit, 1943-1974. This study draws on precepts of critical social theory to analyze archival data, memoir and biography, personal archival collections, extant oral history interviews, and 16 original oral history interviews conducted in Detroit. Utilizing a relational historical ethnography research design, this study asserts the emergence of radical educational consciousness was informed by a critique of capitalist relations of production and experiential knowledge of a geography of spatial racism. This radical analysis directly challenged racialized administrative control over the school system. In Detroit, a radical conception of community control of schools was articulated as a rejection of both racial liberalism and bourgeois cultural nationalism. By the late 1960s, radical educational consciousness conceptualized educational struggle as a front of broader liberation struggle.

When educators, administrators and researchers discuss issues like academic underachievement, school discipline or culturally relevant teaching, they often focus on poor and working class "urban" Black and Latino boys. Nonetheless, generalizations regarding "racialized masculinity" writ large may contain essentialist understandings of Black and Latino boys as a population. To do so, the dissertation examines the lived realities of race and young manhood by looking at the lives of two groups of "gifted and talented" Black and Latino boys attending a single-sex and a co-educational independent school in the Northeast U.S. This study asks: What do the experiences of poor and working class Black and Latino boys, making their transition into young manhood reveal about the nature of race, class and gender power relations in in the twenty-first century U.S.? The ethnographic data utilized in this study is derived from a year of participant observation and 33 semi-structured face-to-face interviews. These methods revealed patterns of meaning that constantly summoned the language and feelings of contradiction and liminality. In order to understand these results I utilized Black and Latino "theories of existence," which argue for understanding race as a dynamic and ongoing site of contestation over what it means to be human.

As evidenced by a year of field notes and interviews, I found that these young men often experience existential dissonance-moments when they experienced a gap between their lived realities of race, class and gender, and the colorblind ideology of twenty-first century U.S. society - that cause feelings of contradiction and confusion. Furthermore, this study finds that along their journeys, Black and Latino boys look to a range of institutions, spaces and relationships, or what I call existential resources, to process the often conflicted meanings, feelings and experiences they encounter as they begin their search for manhood. The need for and existence of these resources elucidate the juggling of competing racial, class and gender ideologies that these boys must navigate to take advantage of the educational opportunities that await them in high school and beyond. Ultimately, however, even among "gifted and talented" poor and working class Black and Latino boys, the usefulness, effectiveness and availability of these existential resources are varied and often times are impacted by poverty, mass incarceration, deportations, poor housing and violence.

These results suggest a need to move our understanding of race beyond the racial conscious/colorblind dichotomy. Instead this study invites us to engage the simultaneity of the competing meanings and practices of race in the age of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Dietrich call "Obamerica;" an era of political and social governance that often settles for narratives of racial harmony. Nonetheless, we cannot lose sight of the larger institutions, laws, policies and structures that continue to produce inequality, injustice and trauma in our students and their communities. Mass incarceration, poor public schooling, unaffordable and segregated housing, health care, poverty wages are all issues that influence these young men and must be struggled over if their conditions are to be truly transformed. More concretely, this dissertation suggests that schools explicitly deal with race, class and gender in their curriculum while also providing students with the cultural, spiritual and emotional infrastructures to heal and renew relationships and friendships that can help youth deal with the trauma and pain cause by the existential dissonance of this era.

Few twentieth century African American educators were as influential in their lifetime and as neglected by scholars in our day as Nannie Helen Burroughs. The founder of the National Training School for Women and Girls, she was admired by African American leaders ranging from Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. Relying on Burroughs’ papers and other archival sources, this dissertation examines Burroughs’ educational thought and its relationship to her leadership of the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the National Association of Wage Earners and other Black organizations. This dissertation argues that Burroughs both drew on the main currents of African American thought and developed a unique synthesis of practical education, prophetic Christian Pan Africanism and woman-centered leadership.

This dissertation examines restorative justice in a large public school and the labor of shifting the school’s punitive discipline culture to one that is restorative. It investigates how school staff experience this shift and what their experiences tell us more broadly about how practices of punishment and care interact, and how these practices reproduce or contest the dehumanizing racial conditions of urban school life. Extolled as one of the best interventions to address discipline disparities and transform school cultures of violence, restorative justice has become a central social justice effort to disrupt the link between schools and prisons in the United States. Punishment and Care explores how restorative justice was received during its implementation, and if restorative justice indeed offered alternatives to the criminalization of children. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with non-profit restorative justice workers, school security officers, teachers, and administrators, reveal how well-intentioned adults bring the paradoxical relationship of discipline and care to life. Analyzing discipline, criminalization, and care as mutually constitutive rather than opposed processes in the work of school staff, it focuses on people who brought strong ideals to the work of school culture change and how these ideals were forgotten. This dissertation treats real life circumstances as complex and contradictory, ultimately making apparent the ways that punishment and care become symbiotic priorities in educating poor children, rather than the work of education itself.

The question of what constitutes "the human" has been of pivotal import since the rise of European modernity. While what it means to be human has been claimed to be a universal concept, the human has in fact been defined in ways that have been both narrow and exclusionary, especially in regards to race. The purpose of this dissertation, a work of intellectual history, is to understand how black educational thinkers have gone about the task of not only critiquing Eurocentric ideals of humanity, but also redefining what it means to be human. Because modernity and its ensuing Enlightenment focuses so centrally on the capacity to be educated and knowledgeable, or to reason, it becomes a crucial place for black educational thinkers to intervene. Thus, black educational thinkers pose a fundamental question: How do we go about the task of understanding, creating, and articulating notions of black humanity when the very language of humanity is based on a universal that excludes? I seek to understand how race has been rearticulated as a question of "the human" in the 20th century by critical theorists and movement intellectuals by focusing on the educational thought of three individuals: W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin. The historicity of these thinkers illuminates a specific intellectual tradition in the 20th century concerning the relationship between blackness, universality, and the human in the modern era. Together, they illuminate a larger concern--ranging from optimism to despair--over the status of black people in 20th century America and how this status relates to educational projects. This study is important for several reasons: it shows how historical and philosophical debates concerning the human have influenced educational theory and transformation, it allows us to think about how we go about educating persons based on race and/or cultural background, and it also provides the opportunity for scholars from multiple disciplines to consider how we can go about reconciling simultaneous commitments to diversity and the assertion of universal principles of human rights.

Throughout their history, schools in the United States have served as both a primary mechanism for treating poverty and in doing so also a key mechanism for regulating, governing and criminalizing low-income and racialized students. This study explores the evolution of federal education policy and particularly the nation’s largest anti-poverty education program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), to track how federal policy makers framed ideas about education, race, and urban poverty as they pursued federal education reform. Drawing on theories of social control and tracing popular ideas about the causes of Black poverty, this study finds that since its origins, one of the primary features of antipoverty education reforms, or “educational opportunity” has been the desire to curb urban disorder, and Black rebellion and in doing so characterize children as disorderly, criminal and punishable. A process that ultimately made way for the imposition of more punitive, criminalizing school discipline reforms. I employ archival methods to examine how federal policymakers' ideas about educational opportunity and tougher school discipline practices changed across three eras: 1965-1969; 1983-1987; 1993-1999. These three eras are significant to both the punitive turn in US federal social policy and are also critical moments in the expansion of the federal role in education reform. I find that undergirding these key moments of federal education reform has been an enduring disciplining politics of opportunity –a political project that relies on shifting notions that education can be used as an equalizing force to bring about racial and economic uplift. Throughout this dissertation I interrogate how educational opportunity as discourse and policy functions to regulate behaviors, restrict protest, and ultimately impose stricter, more punitive and more criminalizing school rules. The politics of opportunity undergirding federal educational policies are predicated on a presumed marker of urban, often black criminality.

This dissertation is divided into three chronological and thematic chapters. After the introduction chapter, Chapter 2 explores the origins of federal education policy. As federal policy makers strategized their legislative program for their budding War on Poverty, they simultaneously envisioned the ways that educational programs including Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) could be used as a primary strategy to confront urban poverty and issues about urban delinquency and crime. This chapter uses the urban rebellions as a backdrop to explore how ESEA and other education initiatives stemming from the War on Poverty were promoted as programs that could address disorder. Suggesting that these initiatives were more than just an “opportunity program” for the “educationally deprived,” this chapter demonstrates that ESEA and other federal education programs were used by federal policy makers to discipline Black urban youth away from delinquency and urban rebellion. This “vision,” to use educational opportunity to discipline Black students, has remained an enduring legacy of 1960s federal education policy.

Chapter 3 explores how the disciplining politics of opportunity shifted in the 1980s. educational opportunity as a strategy of social uplift was no longer used to equalize the opportunity structure or regulate protest. Rather, during the period of educational and welfare state retrenchment and a heightened criminal turn during a burgeoning the War on Drugs, Reagan officials drummed up fears about the rising problem of school disorder to implement a new goal in federal education policy making: increased school discipline. While other scholars have identified how President Ronald Reagan provided an explicit ideological view of the federal government’s role in education few studies have explored how school discipline and crime control was a consistent part of that ideological message. Moreover while many studies of 1980s federal reform focus on how the Department of Education’s report A Nation at Risk altered the goals and priorities of federal and state reform, this chapter provides a new lens for examining the effects of 1980s education reform. Focusing on the release of an internal report “Discipline in Our Schools” released months following A Nation at Risk, this chapter explores how Reagan officials partnered with educational leaders including teacher unions and Black school leaders—to make discipline, not more school funding the focus of educational opportunity to urban students. School discipline and increased school order was cast as the civil rights issue of the time--an idea that would go on to frame school reform during the 1990s.

The last chapter explores how President Bill Clinton’s proposed “third way” approach to social policy and education reform embraced opportunity by appealing to individual and community responsibility. I demonstrate that federal education initiatives designed for low income children worked in concert with other federal initiatives and served as part of a single umbrella message—to reform the delinquencies of “urban crime,” and welfare “dependence.” Through federal reforms like Goals 2000, IASA and education initiatives in the federal crime bill stiffer discipline policies, police and penal technologies were incorporated into schools. Second education initiatives were combined with paternalistic welfare reform policies to tackle multiple forms of dependency. Although Clinton sought to distinguish his social policies from earlier Democratic presidents, when it came to crime control, urban policy and reforming education, his policies and discourse harkened back to earlier Democratic policymakers. These similarities were most visible in his belief that educational solutions could alleviate problems of racialized poverty and “urban violence.” Yet the disciplining politics of opportunity had shifted-- ‘safe and discipline schools’ equipped with police, and metal detectors became a key goal of ensuring urban students had the opportunity to learn just as fighting other forms of delinquencies would discipline students away from a future of welfare dependence.

By relying on a discourse of educational opportunity (education as the key to social uplift)—liberals and conservatives have not only distracted from broader oppressive forces such as the persistence of police violence, mass incarceration, rising economic insecurity, but overtime policy makers and educators have used educational opportunity policies (like Title I) and a more punitive understanding of opportunity (as access to more ordered, disciplined, and crime and violent free schools) to impose stricter and more punitive school rules. Thereby far from providing economic uplift, schools become institutions that subject students to regulatory punitive social control.

The disproportionate suspension and criminalization of black students, referred to in the literature as "disproportionality" "over-representation" and in a nod to the achievement gap, as the "discipline gap," has become the subject of increased concern and analysis in recent years. In this dissertation, I apply concepts from Historical Institutionalism to the formation of exclusionary and criminalizing disciplinary policies in post-war New York City. First, I identify and illuminate how actors, in framing the problem of school disorder, deployed competing logics of discipline. Next I explore how the context, in particular tensions regarding school integration, influenced the framing of school disorder and contributed to the rising salience of logics that individualized school disorder and decontextualized it from the conditions of racism. Finally, I examine how school personnel engaged with and deployed these logics in their participation in the expansion and institutionalization of punitive, exclusionary and criminalizing disciplinary policies. This analysis demonstrates that punitive and criminalizing disciplinary policies were never neutral, but rather emerged out of a context of fraught racial politics that favored policies and actors that individualized, criminalized and racialized school disorder. Ultimately I demonstrate that the policies under-girding contemporary disproportionality in discipline were contested, contingent with pressure for integration and supported by educators and school personnel. This complicates existing explanations for the discipline gap that conceptualize the disproportionate punishment, exclusion and criminalization of black students as “unintended” and “unconscious.” It also highlights the organizational and ideological forces embedded in the institutional environment of schools that may pose challenges to reform efforts.