Pollock, Mica
Teachers College Record, v107 n9 p2106-2140 Sep 2005
Abstract
This
article, written by a former civil rights investigator in the U.S.
Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), contends that
ordinary Americans advocating for equal educational opportunity for
students of color might enlist OCR more actively and knowingly to help
secure racial equality of opportunity 50 years after "Brown." Now a
scholar of racial inequality in education, the author shows that OCR's
original purpose of rooting out racial discrimination in federally
funded educational programs has been both hampered by hostile
administrations and eclipsed by nonrace casework in the years since
OCR's inception. The author argues that to successfully enlist OCR's
civil rights tools today, complainants must arrive at OCR with as much
concrete evidence of racial harm as possible and be ready to navigate
some core disputes over defining and investigating racial discrimination
in the current era.
article, written by a former civil rights investigator in the U.S.
Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), contends that
ordinary Americans advocating for equal educational opportunity for
students of color might enlist OCR more actively and knowingly to help
secure racial equality of opportunity 50 years after "Brown." Now a
scholar of racial inequality in education, the author shows that OCR's
original purpose of rooting out racial discrimination in federally
funded educational programs has been both hampered by hostile
administrations and eclipsed by nonrace casework in the years since
OCR's inception. The author argues that to successfully enlist OCR's
civil rights tools today, complainants must arrive at OCR with as much
concrete evidence of racial harm as possible and be ready to navigate
some core disputes over defining and investigating racial discrimination
in the current era.
