The Cultural Proficiency Manifesto

Finding Clarity Amidst the Noise

Randall B. Lindsey

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506399379
• eBook ISBN: 9781506399386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

A call-to-arms for educators in tumultuous times

In times of social disruption and uncertainty, we must return to our core values and remember why we entered education in the first place: to make a difference in the lives of all children. Cultural Proficiency can provide us with essential tools for acting on the promise of American public schooling.

The Cultural Proficiency Manifesto places today's political divisiveness in the context of greater historical change and provides a roadmap to interrupting the cycle of hostility towards marginalized groups. Readers will find:
• Esteemed author Randall Lindsey's latest thinking on Cultural Proficiency
• A deliberately brief format that unpacks the Cultural Proficiency Framework and offers practical guidance 
• Tools and guiding principles to help educators move their school community toward inclusivity 
• Prompts for individual reflection and team dialogue

Now more than ever, our students need educators to uphold our commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion for all. 
  "Lindsey?s manifesto is a call to action for educators to ensure we are creating culturally responsive environments to support all learners. It teaches us how to authentically engage in the work of educating our wonderfully diverse population."
—Julie A. Vitale, Superintendent
Romoland School District, CA

"This manifesto is indeed timely and essential. Dr. Lindsey?s vast experience as an expert and leader in cultural proficiency reminds us that now is the time to acknowledge and address the vast number of diversity, equity, and social justice issues at hand."
—Kenneth R. Magdaleno, Executive Director
Center for Leadership, Equity, and Research

Part I The Noise: A Vicious Cycle

Forgiveness does not forget the past, but it does enlarge the future.

—Paul Boese (1967, p. 146)

In Chapter 1 I discuss the purpose of this manifesto. I describe my perspective and my concern. I introduce the Cultural Proficiency Framework, a bit about technical and adaptive change, bigotry as a pivot point, and the design of this book. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of inequity and equity as a context for the “noise” emanating from the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath. The chapter also introduces two of my lessons learned that I offer not so much as examples for you to emulate but more to encourage you, as an educational leader, to be continuously engaged as a learner striving to meet the needs of our diverse school communities. Chapter 3 presents our history as reason for hope in moving forward as a profession and as a country. Chapter 3 closes with my belief that “Amidst the Noise Is Clarity.”

Chapter 1 Purpose of This Manifesto

I have hope for our country. More specifically, I have hope for the education profession. I begin with expressions of hope because of the noise that has surfaced in our country. Racist chatter, ethnic and religious-based name calling, graffiti on mosques and synagogues, desecration of Jewish cemeteries, bomb threats to Jewish community centers, and assaults on people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender have reemerged. I recognize these incidents as a part of the historic fabric of our country too often unrecognized and, therefore, unacknowledged. For progress to be made, it begins with you and me recognizing there is a problem. It begins with us—you and me—recognizing hate and bigotry as our problem as leaders to address; it doesn’t matter who we are.

The rancor and discord unleashed by the 2016 election cycle poses risks that, when viewed as part of a recurring historical cycle, can be posed as opportunities for our schools. Expressions of racial, ethnic, and gender-based bigotry and hate must be acknowledged as real, not transitory, and reframed in terms of next steps that educators and our schools and school districts might take in providing high-quality inclusive educational opportunities and outcomes for all of our students. The United States of America will not become less diverse. Diversity is our present and our future. Now is the time, and opportunity is at hand to mold the vision of our diverse country as a place where one’s cultural characteristics are viewed and embraced as assets and not as deficits. One’s race, ethnicity, gender, faith, social class, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and the various intersections make us who we are as individuals and as a country. Our profession as educators puts us in position to be leaders in our country’s evolution in being inclusive. It has not been easy to this point so, please, don’t think it gets any easier. I’ll bet there was at least one important person in your life that echoed for you what my father intoned on numerous occasions: “Anything worth having in life takes effort.”

Yes, developing facility with strategies designed to interrupt hate speech or to promote dialogue among discordant voices is very important. With this manifesto I appeal for you to listen beneath the noise and to recognize the range of voices that have been unleashed. Some voices are calling for the expulsion or imprisonment of others and are in stark contrast to voices of the aggrieved. The voices of the aggrieved must not be confused or conflated with the voices trying to shout them down. In responding to the noise, we must not be seduced into approaches that paper over differences in order to “just get along.” Now is an opportune time in our nation’s history to dig more deeply into our own personal values and into our schools’ and school districts’ core values to promote intergroup understanding and provide equitable educational opportunity and outcomes for all students in our schools.

All Who Dare to Proceed Will Benefit. For sake of illustration, I propose that we array educators along a diversity-type spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are people who view our society as politically correct in dealing with cultural differences, while at the other end are educators who regard society as irreparably oppressive. My experience is that most educators are not aligned with extreme views but are concerned by the tumult that arose from the 2016 election cycle. I write this book as a means for interested parties to seize this moment and to guide deep-thinking educators, irrespective of where they might be along this spectrum, to engage in reflection and dialogue activities. In doing so participants have the opportunity to develop mindsets for them and their schools being successful in educating children and youths from across the demographic spectrum. The opportunity is before us and is ours to seize.

Historic and systemic oppression is part of our country’s history and repeats in cyclical fashion. We can embrace this cycle of rancor as an on-ramp to opportunities for extending the benefits of education equitably to all demographic sectors of our vast and varied nation.

My Perspective

More than five months have passed since our November 2016 general election. I’m taking this moment to look back on my own history as well as our nation’s history to learn more about who I am in the context of our country’s greater history and what you and I can do as educators to move forward with purpose and intention.

This is my fifty-second year as an educator. I am a member of the ascendant middle class. My parents were teenagers during the 1930s, in the era of the Great Depression. My father as a nineteen-year-old enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps where he served for three and a half years. In his words, he was taking a mouth away from the table. My mother worked part-time for governmental relief agencies. My parents were hard-working people. My father worked forty years in a factory and my mother was a stay-at-home mom until my sister and I graduated high school, after which she worked as a sales clerk. I am a first-generation high school and college graduate.

I was in a college sociology class when I learned our family was considered low income, information based on parental education and jobs. Taken aback by that evaluation and revelation, I asked my father about his take on my new learning. Though Dad stopped his education after the eighth grade because he knew the family couldn’t afford clothing for high school, he remains one of the most learned people I have known. His smiling response was, “No, we are not poor. There just never is any extra money.”

My first job earning a paycheck was as our school custodian’s helper when I was fourteen years old. I worked before and after school and a half-day on Saturdays, and forty-hour weeks during the summers. I was very fortunate as a freshman and sophomore high school student to have a job. I continued with part-time jobs at grocery stores until I graduated high school. Having a wage-earning job allowed me to experience independence early in my life. Also, having a job allowed me to select and pay for my own clothing, which took pressure off the family budget. I was not a lot different from many of my 1950s small-town mid-America male and female classmates. Most of us held part-time jobs.

Dad reminded me I was among the first in his and mom’s family to actually finish high school. I was very fortunate to begin my college experience in 1960 as President Eisenhower’s signature infrastructure accomplishment, the Interstate Highway System, was being constructed across the country. Having the opportunity for well-paid construction jobs afforded me the opportunity to attend and graduate from university loan free. Little did I know at the time that these early life experiences would shape my worldview about the socioeconomics of educational equity.

I began my career as a teacher of social studies to ninth-grade junior high school students in Kankakee, Illinois. I have taught at two high schools (Illinois and California) and have served as an administrator of school desegregation in two school districts (Illinois and Ohio). The second decade of my career led me to university-level teaching where my primary focus has been school leadership for social justice. I am not a particularly religious person but if I were, I am most swayed by Buddhist and Jesuit commitments to social justice.

I share these snippets of the progression of my career so that, early on, you are very clear about the purpose and intent of this book: it is to make the case that we, as educators, possess the necessary information and skills to successfully educate children and youths from all demographic groups (i.e., racial, ethnic, gender, social class, gender identity/expression). More than twenty-five years ago the late Professor Asa Hilliard (1991) posed the provocative question that appears as an epigraph to Part I and continues to guide me to this day: “Do we have the will to educate all children?” I believe with all my energy that the vast majority of us in this profession possess the skills of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The will to educate all children is developed when we embrace the moral aspects of our work—from the classroom, to the school level, to the district level. When we embrace the notion that all students can learn and we can teach them all, then we are capable of educating all students.

My Concern

The rancor and hatred, let alone the viciousness, unleashed by dynamics surrounding the 2016 election primaries and general election and aftermath pain me. For me, a subtext to the campaigns began with the noise I heard from the general population via television and social media. Following that, I heard noise from schools and classrooms across the country. Finally, I began to hear noise in my own family.

The noise that I hear carries with it sometimes subtle, other times direct, expressions of racism, sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. All of these give rise to oppression that, when allowed to go unchecked in our nation’s history, has led to loss of civil liberties and loss of life itself. It is as if a festering boil has been pricked again and suppressed forms of poison have erupted.

A call to action. I use the term “noise” as an indicator for “listen up.” We must use this noise as our rallying call to action. My focus for this book is confined to my role of educator. This manifesto is my rallying call to other educators who are compelled to move forward using culturally proficient practices focused on socially just classrooms, schools, and school districts.

In these first two decades of the twenty-first century our profession has made progress in educating Pre-K to twelfth-grade students to ever-higher levels of academic progress. I hasten to add, though, that the progress is uneven. The progress is very uneven. Yet there is progress and it is our challenge to stay in the game. To achieve an inclusive democracy aligned with goals of democratic public schooling we cannot—no, we must not—let societal rancor and divisiveness impede our goal of providing inclusive schooling practices for all children and youths. Rather, the rancor should shake us into action.

My design with this manifesto is, first, to reflect on our country’s progress in providing access to the benefits of our democracy in increasingly inclusive ways, with particular emphasis on educational opportunities. In doing so I illustrate progress made and barriers that exist and persist, and I focus on the future of what can be.

With the backdrop of historical challenges met and real progress that continues, the Cultural Proficiency Framework is presented in Chapter 4 as a road map for lessening the noise. Raymond Terrell, Kikanza Nuri Robins, and I adapted Terry Cross’s (1989) Cultural Competence model for social work to the PreK–12 school context. We learned of his work while directing the Regional Assistance Center for Educational Equity, a U.S. Department of Education–funded desegregation center at California State University, Los Angeles. From Cross’s approach we observed an open, unambiguous depiction of historical and current barriers to equity in schools that could be countered by core values and standards, when applied to schools, could lead to narrowing access and achievement gaps that persist in our schools and school districts.

Reflection

Have you noticed the levels of noise that I describe? What is your reaction? If you have not noticed the noise I describe, what is your reaction to my description? Please use the space below to enter your responses.

• __________________________________________________________________
• __________________________________________________________________
• __________________________________________________________________

The Cultural Proficiency Framework as a Road Map

The Cultural Proficiency Framework arranges Cross’s (1989) Tools of Cultural Proficiency into a scaffold to guide your movement forward as an educator and to help you lead an equity focus for your school or school district. The two major functions of the Framework are providing tools to support the clarification of your and your school’s core values in educating students from diverse communities; and providing tools for guiding your behaviors and developing your school’s policies and practices to be inclusive of students from diverse communities. School district leaders across the United States and Canada are using the Framework to guide their planning and consequent actions in addressing identified inequities in student access to high-level thinking curricula, student achievement, and disciplinary treatments.

The Framework and the embedded Tools of Cultural Proficiency are described in detail in Chapter 4. As you proceed through this chapter and then Chapters 2 and 3, you will learn the Tools of Cultural Proficiency:

• Barriers function as default negative core values for embracing students’ cultures as deficits. Cross (1989) identified barriers to be the following: systemic forms of oppression, a sense of privilege and entitlement, resistance to change, and unawareness of the need to adapt in ways that serves all students in our schools and school districts.
• The nine Guiding Principles of Cultural Proficiency inform intentional development of core values that shape your behavior and actions as an educator. Additionally, the Guiding Principles might be used to inform development of core values that guide your school and school district’s policies and practices in meeting the educational needs of students from diverse cultural communities.
• The Six-Point Continuum represents unhealthy and healthy educator values and behaviors as well as school policies and practices. The deficit-laden barriers foster Cultural Destructiveness, Cultural Incapacity, and Cultural Blindness. Cultural Precompetence, Cultural Competence, and Cultural Proficiency are informed by the Guiding Principles.
• The five Essential Elements of Cultural Competence, informed by the Guiding Principles, are expressed as action words to lead your personal behavior and your school’s policies and practices.

Stipulation

Before proceeding too deeply into describing challenges and opportunities that we face as a profession, let alone as a country, I’ll make an important stipulation. The rancor and vituperation that have surfaced before and since the 2016 general election are not new. No, in fact the anger and viciousness that gives rise to bigotry is an American tradition that surfaces every few years as an unfortunate, cyclical part of our histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I The Noise: A Vicious Cycle
• Chapter 1 Purpose of This Manifesto
• Chapter 2 A Brief History of Inequity and Equity: A Tsunami Warning
• Chapter 3 History and Hope for Changing Schools
• Part II Listening for Clarity
• Chapter 4 The Cultural Proficiency Framework
• Chapter 5 Resistance to Change: The Anger–Guilt Continuum
• Chapter 6 Going Forward Takes Commitment and Effort: It Always Has
• Chapter 7 My Final Thoughts and, Then, Your Turn
• References
• Resources
• Index
• Publisher Note