Our Focus

At Discriminology our mission is to leverage technology, data, and human capital to advance the social, civic, and economic strength of Black and Brown communities by ensuring their youth have equal opportunities at success through equitable opportunities to learn. As an organization we believe that access to educational excellence should not be determined by race, disability status and/or income level. A student’s academic outcome shouldn’t be correlated with superficial demographic labels. Every child should have access to the resources and/or services needed to thrive in our nation’s public education system.

Who We Are

Our organization has unapologetically, focused on racial equity since our inception and therefore every decision and action we have taken has been with intentionality towards racial equity for our community. That is, we are not pivoting like many organizations in the EdTech space to do racial equity work because of funding opportunities or popularity; our organization was created explicitly by Black educators to work with and empower Black and Brown families to address the racial inequity our children face in schools using technology and data. As we look out on our peers in the education space we know that makes us both unique but also intimately proximate to the challenges we seek to address. Meet our award winning team.

Why Discriminology

More than 60 years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to send African-American students to separate & unequal schools; we still have an education system that continues to dramatically disadvantage minority children, families and their communities. As an organization, we seek to address the achievement and opportunity gaps that are a product of systemic and historic racial inequity.

The Challenge

Current school accountability report cards are focused on test scores and do little to disaggregate education data in an accessible way that speaks to issues Black, Brown and low income families face. Also, they don’t elevate the voices of these communities nor do they provide contextual information that can help to explain the meaning or significance of the data as it relates to their personal experiences.

Our Work

Our work is centered around developing the social and digital tools that allow families, schools, and other educational stakeholders to visualize clearly the racial disparities that still exist in our public education system.

For example, we have aggregated, cleaned, and cataloged existing school accountability data from over 90,000 public and charter schools across the country using the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education and other reliable data sources to build a comprehensive source file that is currently being used by our school accountability report card tool.

Discriminology report cards empower families of color and other education stakeholders by clearly visualizing the disproportionate burden that exclusionary discipline and other discriminatory policies have on Black and Brown children. Using an evidence-informed equity perspective, school data is presented in a way so that the average family can easily digest, absorb, and use the information. We also provide evidence-based strategies for promoting equitable learning opportunities and incentivize families and community members to rate their school on these categories.

Power to the People

We know that African-American families have experienced particularly poignant historical and systemic disenfranchisement across economic, education, health & social sectors. Therefore, although Black families possess the capability (i.e. ability to advocate) to hold schools accountable for providing more racially just learning environments their capacity (e.g., time and resources) to do so has been systematically reduced since their arrival to this country. Despite and likely due to these realities Black families are the most engaged, motivated, and capable group to encourage our public education system to use clear and transparent measures in addressing the interpersonal racial injustice Black youth experience in school.

Our data platform allows for tracking incidents of racial hate and bias against children of color at the school and district level. To spur user engagement and parent activism, we partner with local organizations that are deeply embedded within their communities to mobilize families of color to collect this data. Families are then trained to use our platform to encourage their schools to adopt policies and practices that will limit the amount of daily racial injustices-extreme and micro-students of color experience. In doing this we learn directly from the people were designing for.

Security & Trust

At Discriminology we value your privacy, thats why we have gone to great lengths to make sure your personal information stays private and secure. Our website uses a security technology called SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to establish an encrypted link between your computer and our servers. This ensures the integrity of your personal information and keeps it private.

In addition, some of our school assessment tools use HIPAA compliant technology that encrypts your most sensitive data right on the form and then transfers and stores the data encrypted. This information is then stored in HIPAA compliant servers which are separated from the Internet using multiple levels of protection and firewalls, and the encrypted data is stored in encrypted databases.