Dissertation Defense Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Ajua Kouadio “A Cocoon and a Cage: Protest, Policing, Punishment, and Surveillance in New York City Schools 1968-1974”

In the United States, school districts spend almost a billion dollars annually on exclusionary discipline, policing, and student surveillance. The increased presence of what Carla Shedd describes as “the universal carceral apparatus” in schools has eroded their educational mission, siphoned off valuable human and monetary resources and put students at greater risk for violent police and criminal legal system contact. How did we get here? This dissertation interrogates how school-to-prison pipeline infrastructure was built locally as part of a conservative response to Black and Puerto Rican student activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Archival methods are used to explore the historical and local origins of policing, punishment, and surveillance in the nation’s largest school district, New York City. Like their collegiate counterparts, Black and Puerto Rican youth in the 60s and 70s, along with their parents, built coalitions with leftist organizations such as the Afro-American Teachers Association, Brooklyn CORE, and The Black Panthers. They protested, at times violently, and organized around school-related issues—faculty demographics, curriculum, facilities, and discipline policies, among others. Under intense pressure from the United Federation of Teachers—the city’s teachers’ union—policymakers responded to students’ direct actions by pouring resources into campus policing, exclusionary discipline, and various forms of surveillance. They did this instead of addressing student and parent demands. This social and political history exists at the nexus of carceral studies, school discipline history, and Black educational studies. It reveals the cycles of protest and repression students experienced in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City high schools. This research begins in the shadow of the 1968 UFT teachers’ strike and makes an important contribution to the historiography by challenging the idea that carceral apparatuses in schools are a recent phenomenon. It reveals how the rise in carceral apparatuses in schools was not a response to desegregation or even crime; it was a methodical retaliation for Black and Puerto Rican youth, parent, and teacher self-determination.