Deterring discrimination with data

Discrimination on grounds of race, sex, and handicap persists in many local school districts in spite of nearly twenty years of sustained attention from federal policymakers. Because litigation proceeds slowly and expensively, and because administrative attacks on discrimination have been stymied by political controversy, additional policy strategies merit careful consideration. We studied the operation of one such strategy in nine local districts: the mandatory collection of data concerning civil rights matters in schools. Data collection and reporting shaped local compliance with civil rights laws in four ways: by threatening local officials with future penalties, by providing political ammunition to constituencies that care about civil rights, by allowing local districts to learn about their own performance, and by framing school practices in ways that heighten awareness about equity. In this policy setting, data collection has advantages and disadvantages that complement those of other enforcement strategies. In this and other policy settings, data collection has power to elicit compliance even in the absence of conventional enforcement.This paper is based on research supported by the National Institute of Education, Grants NIE-G-81-0037, NIE-G-81-0038, and NIE-G-83-0008. We acknowledge with gratitude the research assistance of Rosa Yvonne Herrera, Elizabeth Greenberg, and Lauren Rothfarb, and the encouragement of Grace Mastalli.     

The Limits of Reconciliation: The Story of a Perpetrator,Katherine Ann Power

In this paper, I apply concepts of restorative justice, along with moral philosopher Joanna North's (1998) multistage model of the process of earning forgiveness to the case of 1960s antiwar militant, Katherine Power. Both frameworks assume that forgiveness ought to culminate in reconciliation between perpetrator and victim. On September 23, 1970, Katherine Ann Power, a 20-year-old college student, was a member of a group of five who were robbing a bank near Boston to support the movement against the Vietnam War. One from the group stayed at the bank and shot and killed a Boston police officer and father of nine. Under Massachusetts' felony murder law, all five were chargeable with murder. Power went underground for 23 years, remaining on the FBI's Ten-Most-Wanted list longer than any other woman in history. During her fugitive years, Power lived her life in a purposeful attempt to make atonement. Ultimately, though, she came to understand that her crime was not a private matter, but demanded social and relational modes of remediation, including public confession, public penance (in a penitentiary), and efforts at reconciliation with the family of her victim. So in 1993, she turned herself in, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and began serving an 8–12-year sentence in Massachusetts. She completed her prison sentence in October, 1999. Power spent her years in prison engaging in reflection and action that maps well onto the first five stages of North's model and onto much of the restorative justice model. So far, though, Power's efforts have failed to yield the hypothesized reconciliation with her victims. Examination of the parallels and divergences between these theoretical frameworks and Power's narrative provides significant insight into the meaning, the promise, and the limits of reconciliation.     

Packaging Support for Low‐Income Families: Policy Variation across the United States

This paper addresses a gap in state‐level comparative social policy research by analyzing policies that support low‐income families with children. Variation in state policy “packages” is measured by considering three characteristics of 11 social programs. Individual measures of policy are found to be weakly and inconsistently inter‐correlated at the state level, but when cluster analysis is used to analyze multiple dimensions simultaneously, five clusters or regime types are identified that have distinctive policy approaches. These range from the most minimal provisions, to conservative approaches emphasizing private responsibility, to integrated approaches that combine generous direct assistance with employment support and policies that enforce family responsibility. A comparison of a subset of programs at two points in time (1994 and 1998) suggests that states made substantial changes in cash assistance and taxation policies after the 1996 federal welfare reforms. The magnitude and direction of these changes remained consistent with the state clusters identified in 1994. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.