‘Learn baby Learn,’ Federal Education Policy and the Disciplining Politics of Opportunity: 1965-1999

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./nThis 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./nChapter 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./nThe 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./nBy 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.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel H