A Question of Justice: Anna Haskins

Why do racial disparities in education persist despite decades of efforts on behalf of equal opportunity and racial justice? 

Professor Anna Haskins’ early research discovered part of the reason.

She looked at how criminal justice and education systems in the US overlap and impact families involved in them. That work connected scholarship on educational inequality with research on the consequences of imprisonment for families and showed that the incarceration of a parent affects how ready children are for school.

She looked at how criminal justice and education systems in the US overlap and impact families involved in them. That work connected scholarship on educational inequality with research on the consequences of imprisonment for families and showed that the incarceration of a parent affects how ready children are for school.

Anna’s recent research shows that incarceration continues to impact families and their children’s education even after incarcerated parents are released and return to their communities and homes. For example, fathers returning home from prison are less likely to be involved in their children’s education either at home or in school, an effect explained in part by their wishing to avoid interactions with surveilling institutions.  Simply put, schools often resemble prisons and that inhibits the involvement of previously incarcerated fathers in their children’s education. 

Foundation at home

Anna saw in her own family how education can either create or hinder opportunities for children of color. In the decade following Brown v. Board of Education her African-American father and uncle participated in a program that recruited talented students from under-resourced schools to attend elite, private schools in New England. Her father attended Choate and her uncle attended Avon Old Farms. After Choate Byron Haskins attended Wesleyan University and then earned a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Michigan. 

Education was important in the Haskins home and Anna loved it. In sixth grade she was a kindergarten aid; in high school she did pre-service teaching programs while thinking about going to college to be a teacher. After graduation from high school she enrolled in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. “I wanted to be part of the solution and work toward making classrooms and education more equitable,” she now explains. “And I had all those things on my mind because of how important education was both personally and for my family.” 

A developing interest

During her senior year at Michigan, Anna was exploring her interest in racial disparities in the classroom when a doctoral student suggested to her that she might find the sociology of education interesting. “What’s that?” Anna asked. She was about to finish her senior year and had never taken a sociology course but was intrigued. The doctoral student encouraged her to think about graduate school but advised that she teach first to get valuable practical experience. “Of course I wasn’t going to just drop everything and go to grad school anyway because I was about to graduate with a degree in education,” she explains. “But I kept the idea of going to grad school in my mind.”

With her education degree in hand, Anna started teaching third grade at Gompers Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. “I loved it,” she says, “and after three years of teaching I also felt like I still wanted to apply to graduate school.” She liked living in Madison and the University of Wisconsin, Madison had a strong sociology program.

Anna applied to doctoral programs in both sociology and education and was accepted to both while she continued to think about what she actually wanted to study.  “That’s where I came to sociology,” she says. “Because I think what I was often seeing in my classroom at Gompers was more a reflection of opportunity or lack thereof within the broader society. I was thinking about how poverty and residential mobility impacted my students, and those are sociological questions.”

Following a hunch

As a new graduate student, Anna heard Adam Gamoran, a prominent sociologist of education who taught at UW-Madison, share his research. He predicted that, given 20th century trends, racial disparities would decline over the next century while class disparities would increase. Anna wasn’t buying it. “I didn’t see that in the classrooms I was just in,” she thought. 

A week later Anna heard Pamela Oliver, a social movements scholar trying to understand why Wisconsin had the highest racial disparity in incarceration rates in the country. For every white person in prison there were 10 incarcerated Black people in a state where whites outnumbered Blacks by almost 20:1. 

Anna had seen that parental presence was deeply important for children’s success in school, so she wondered what it would mean for Black children that so many Black parents were being incarcerated. “There’s something here,” she thought. Her hunch led to further research and what is now an impressive body of work focused on how large social institutions like prisons, schools, and families are connected and create systemic, intergenerational, racial injustice.

Background artwork: The Good Life by Jeff Ferst