Data Embargoes as a Tool for Emplacement and Displacement of Children in Early Childhood Classrooms: A Comparative Case Study

Abstract

Data embargoes constrain teachers’ understanding of children by withholding and/or coding particular information on children’s attainment and/or identities. Data embargoes may mask children’s identities in ways that influence their rights to belong in early childhood programs and may construct White positivist childhoods by maintaining the belief that individual children’s bodies can, whether in the present of future, be subject to objective measures of human learning or intelligence used for comparisons that uphold Eurocentric positivistic sciences and neoliberal accountability. By comparing children’s experiences in two racialized and socioeconomically denied policy contexts, we show how data embargoes are implicated in sustaining inequities.