Education and Racism

A Primer on Issues and Dilemmas

Zeus Leonardo, W. Norton Grubb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138118768
• eBook ISBN: 9781351588393
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education and Racism is a concise and easily accessible primer for introducing undergraduate and graduate students to the field of race and education. Designed for introductory courses, each chapter provides an overview of a main issue or dilemma in the research on racial inequality and education and the particular approaches that have been offered to explain or address them. Theme-oriented chapters include curriculum, school (re)segregation, and high stakes testing as well as discussions on how racism intersects with other forms of marginality, like socio-economic status. The focus on particular educational themes is the strength of this book as it paints a portrait of the systematic nature of racism. It surveys multiple approaches to racism and education and places them in conversation with one another, incorporating both classical as well as contemporary theories. Although conceptually rich and dense with critical perspectives and empirical study, this expanded edition contains several powerful vignettes that illustrate the commanding roles racism and structural inequality continue to play in the classroom.

Perfect for courses in Multicultural Education, Sociology of Education, Ethnic Studies and more, Education and Racism is the ideal primer for engaging students new to race and education without sacrificing the content for those who are already familiar with the field.

1

Curriculum and Racism

Introduction to the Curriculum

Tonight is Orientation Night, an evening when students and parents alike learn about the high school this set of eager teenagers is about to enter. The event is held in Carnegie High School’s gym, which otherwise goes by the name of “all purpose room” when there isn’t a home basketball or volleyball game in play. It is a cool fall evening, with a slight wind blowing through the campus. The leaves are starting to turn colors in this upper northeastern state. Most of the students are White, but the city has experienced a recent upsurge in Black Somali families immigrating to the area. Almost overnight, the city’s demographics changed radically. But of course, this is nothing compared to the environmental transformation for Somali families who face both frigid weather and a tepid reception at their arrival.

These families face the paradise of alienation in this otherwise beautiful city that struggles to incorporate them. Arguably flushed with resources they could only dream of in their native land, this host city finds it a challenge to integrate the Somalis into U.S. society, this city specifically. The new families find it hospitable but strange, and they do their best to understand the customs of the host society. Contrary to some perceptions, which do not make assimilation any easier, they are not resistant to becoming “American.” The hometown residents likewise find it a challenge to welcome with open arms a people who look different from them, speak a different language, and practice a different culture. There is a lot of pressure on the public schools to reform. Needless to say, they have their work cut out for them.

Meanwhile, the attendants file into the gym. It is noisy as the wooden floor and high rafters create an echo chamber and you cannot hear the person next to you, but ironically can hear a conversation almost across the room. As the principal, Mr. Hope, stands on the stage fixing his tie and straightening his coat sleeves, he is flanked by his vice principal and inner circle of administrators, all of whom are White. He reads his notes for the event and then walks to the podium. He signals to the technical and computer aide on the front row, who obligingly projects the presentation onto the big screen. Mr. Hope greets the crowd who begin settling down in their seats. With a confident voice and a presence with gravitas, Hope beams over the room and proudly announces that another ten Somali families have been added to the school’s roster. The crowd claps, some people looking around the room for the conspicuous bodies. They are easy to find, sitting together in the back rows. None of this clumping has been orchestrated, but happens as a by-product of socio-cultural processes. The town families smile at the new immigrants, the latter awkwardly raising their hands in what looks to be something between a wave and a visible acknowledgment of their presence.

Hope announces that the school has hired a multicultural coordinator whose charge is first to understand the racio-cultural climate of the school and second to suggest improvements. Ms. Mendoza is a second-generation Mexican American from the U.S. southwest. Tracing the hypotenuse of a triangle, this city is virtually the farthest place from her childhood city for more reasons than geography. But Mendoza is gritty and comes from immigrant stock from Mexico, so traveling for greater opportunity is in her family’s DNA. She raises her hand to greet the families, where only a few Latinos pepper the room. Hope adds that Mendoza’s first important task is to examine the curriculum to see where the school can make improvements to diversify what otherwise has been a Eurocentric knowledge base. Some of the white families look on with some confusion on their face.

One of the parents raises her hand and asks the question, “What do you mean by Eurocentric? Isn’t the curriculum the way it is because of worthwhile and universal knowledge by design?” Mendoza shows no hesitation and interjects that curriculum selection is a process whereby certain cultures or traditional ways of knowing are elevated to “official” status. She explains, “Multicultural curricular reform asks us to consider what other forms of knowledge, either by way of material for study or those which guide instruction, may be considered pursuing as a way to enlarge students’ awareness of world cultures and self-evaluation.” The parent curls her lips and wrinkles her brows but does not offer a reply. She is clearly not satisfied, but admittedly this will not be the last exchange on this matter.

Hope swoops in to curb the palpable discomfort. He adds, “Ms. Mendoza is correct. Our city has experienced transformations with which our school is only beginning to deal. We are being proactive so as to provide opportunities for new students to feel ownership of their city and its schools as well as expand the perspective of the town’s existing population. In other words, curriculum reform is not for new students per se but deals with the question of what basic education ought to look like for all students.” This is obviously a long process that requires consensus at multiple levels of Carnegie High, but curriculum represents the bread and butter of the educational interaction to many educators because it begins the learning process, which teachers then customize for their own classroom context. Of course, there are state standards to guide any selection of texts so there are built-in limitations, but Hope and Mendoza focus on the power and flexibility that exist within otherwise prescriptive conditions. Teachers are accountable to the standards, Common Core, or the latest comprehensive reform, but they own a modicum of power as soon as they close the classroom door.

As Mendoza, a young 30-year-old, emphasizes, curriculum is like a garden and it is time to cultivate many types of plants and flowers of different hues and shapes. Some of the parents look perplexed but they stay and listen for the next fifty minutes about the importance of bringing in readings and novels outside of the usually Euro-heavy curriculum at Carnegie. Truth be told, the high school’s curriculum consists of non-White contributions, but they are stereotypical, such as when Blacks make an appearance through slave narratives and civil rights figures in textbooks. This is better than none at all, but Hope feels the school can do better, much better. He would like the community to be more bold and less cliché. Surely these are risks, but ones worth taking if the school is going to counteract the impression that multicultural curriculum reform is a special interest of the few against the many. Rather, a culturally relevant curriculum for all students is in the nation’s interest.

Curriculum creation is arguably the most appropriate way to begin a discussion around education and racism. Because schools are ostensibly places where students daily study “something” for a given amount of time, curriculum represents the actual material that facilitates this interaction. To most educators, curriculum is comprised of the content usually organized around subject matter or disciplines. In short, it is the “stuff” of schools, which teachers structure into instructional units within a classroom context and which students attempt to master. In reality, curriculum is a broader concept than this simplification might imply because curriculum creation includes values and politics, such as which knowledge counts most and how it should function in society. Nonetheless, it serves our purpose of starting a conversation based on a generally agreed-upon definition of curriculum as the content that students study.

Curriculum selection overlaps with concerns regarding instructional delivery or administration—for example, at the district level—but it is conceptually distinct from teaching or leadership. Why district leaders choose certain materials as well as how teachers will deliver them are different issues from what education, as a larger field of study, considers is a worthwhile collection of knowledge. This set of facts and perspectives as well as what they exclude is then systematized into discrete units of learning. In Chapter 4, we discuss tracking practices, which come with curriculum differentiation for students assigned to various levels. In this chapter, we introduce curriculum as students’ relationship with school knowledge and how the curriculum implicates race relations.

As we discussed in the Preface, the modern sense of race is primarily assumed as the stratification of social groups understood through skin color. But how skin color implicates culture is not straightforward. The shift from biological racism, or the genetic basis of superiority and inferiority, to cultural racism, or the same super- and subordination as a function of cultural values associated with groups, complicates our understanding of race and culture. Perhaps it may be summed up as the associative relationship between the lightness and darkness of one’s group culture, or the process whereby culture achieves a color. So rather than culture replacing race, we suggest that culture becomes the new way to rationalize race stratification. Seen this way, European culture is commonly represented as a form of enlightenment, whereas African culture, to take one instance, remains in the dark. The first is angelized and the second is demonized. We argue that this way of perceiving culture is consistent with the process of racialization and not incongruent with it in the sense that a culture found lacking equates with a dark worldview and a culture worth elevating is a bright one.

Racism in the curriculum is first and foremost a question of representation. Below, we discuss the finer nuances of the racial politics of representation. Here we are concerned with a more literal interpretation of representation guided by the question, “Are people of color there?” Without proper accounting for this question, finer-grained analyses of representation will not achieve traction, or worse, will become moot issues. So, the most overt issue to resolve in challenging racism in the curriculum is driven by the need to include people of color at multiple levels. To an important degree, these changes have occurred, largely through decades of school reform. They lead to the ultimate goal of significant, rather than superficial, inclusion of minorities in the curriculum.

Curriculum formation is rarely a transparent process, often going through multiple deliberations and iterations before becoming accepted as an official set of documents, like textbooks. It is debated at every foreseeable level of education, from local to national, informal to formal. Although it is becoming rarer, at the local level, curriculum setting invites teachers and administrators’ input on what is considered knowledge of most worth for student learning. At the national level, politicians, academics, interest groups, and economics enter the picture as broader debates surrounding the United States’ global standing become important. In large trend-setting states, like California and Texas, curriculum is also big business as textbook publishers enter the equation.

Curriculum is clearly a political matter as forging it ebbs and flows with power élites. For instance, to take a few examples, when A Nation at Risk was commissioned under President Ronald Reagan’s administration, a national debate was sparked regarding the kind of curriculum that would give the United States a competitive global edge at a time when Reagan considered that educational standards had fallen below acceptable levels. This included an emphasis on raising standards for mathematics and literacy. Under President George W. Bush, formal laws and initiatives, such as No Child Left Behind, drive what standard curricula look like in attempts to ameliorate achievement gaps, most of which is experienced by four subgroups: English Language Learners, students with disabilities, poor or working-class children, and racial minorities. Curriculum is at once a source of the problem, whereby its relevance for some students but not others facilitates or delays achievement, as well as a potential solution for educational dilemmas through school reform.

Although their influence on curriculum setting is steadily decreasing, curriculum scholars exercise influence on the national debate regarding the direction the curriculum should take. It is more than what kind of knowledge most counts, but what kind of children, or citizens to be more precise, schools are going to produce. For curriculum is not only about processing information, but processing people as well. From the individual 50 states to the nation-state, curriculum defines central aspects of the social function that schools serve for society at large. The curriculum has the tendency to reproduce existing social relations and arrangements, but it may also challenge them. With respect to race, this process also implicates the uneven achievement rates among the racial groups and what, if anything, is to be done about them.

There are many curriculum schools of thought. From child developmentalists, like G. Stanley Hall, who argue for the cultivation of the child’s “inner self”; to social reconstructionists, like George Counts, who see schools as agents of social change, particularly for economic equality; to humanists, like William Torrey Harris, who emphasize mental discipline and the training of reason; to social efficiency advocates, like Edward Thorndike, who model schools after factories and seek to increase efficiency and reduce waste—curriculum has always been a battleground. More recently, proponents of great or canonical books, like Mortimer Adler, would revisit the debate on the national curriculum to which students should be exposed. Multiculturalists, like James Banks, would question the core knowledge of U.S. schools based on the fact that the nation’s demographic is represented by different racial groups and what this means for national interest. Although not all educators and politicians agree that knowledge relations explain the heart of schools, the sheer amount of political and economic investment in curriculum formation suggests that it is a significant arena for the aims and development of education.

Curriculum, Race, and Racism

Curriculum setting is related to the racial organization of schools. On the most obvious level, the content that students study relates to the intellectual grappling with the history of race and racism. For example, the way that school materials handle events, like the establishment of the U.S. nation through colonialism or the 250 or so years of enslavement, sends a message about the treatment of these topics, such as their importance and centrality to U.S. nation creation. The amount of space these topics occupy within the curriculum, year in and year out, suggests the amount of serious study that educators and students spend on them. In addition, their connection with today’s social structures may be highlighted, thus providing their continuity with current outcomes, or they may appear as snapshots in history and having little to do with today’s conditions.

Setting curricular parameters is not just an issue of deciding which facts to choose and how they will be highlighted. Through fact selection, a racial order is made because students learn what race means in their lives by virtue of how knowledge is organized and then woven together to tell a story. In short, the relationship between curriculum and race is part of the forging of race relations by grappling with it, and not just a re-enactment of its history through books. The main problem we seek to explore in this chapter with respect to the curriculum is its capacity to make race intelligible and by doing so to become part of race as a knowledge relation. In the act of ordering information and narrating history, knowledge becomes racial and race becomes part of the system of knowledge. This implicates knowledge in the racial project, knowledge which is no longer innocent or waiting to be discovered. People do not recruit knowledge simply to make race known to themselves, but that knowledge itself is already racial. For example, when history textbooks construct knowledge about racism as mainly a problem of extremist hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis, they promote a way of knowing that neglects the general system of White advantage in law, business, and national governance. Knowledge selection tells the story of race.

Curriculum setting is part of race creation rather than merely reflecting it. It is not a mirror, but a prism that bends the story of race for particular reasons. Curriculum has the ability to recreate race because students read their existence into and through their textbooks. In other words, curriculum making is part of race making. It is not just a way to explain the dynamics of race relations, but a way to reinforce, sometimes challenge, it in the very act of explaining it. In the worst cases, curriculum further marginalizes racial minorities, adding to the social inequality they experience outside school. When their social existence and participation in curriculum forging are minimized, they experience the educational form of racism. Although curriculum on its own, and education for that matter, are not responsible for the myriad reasons that lead to high minority drop-out rates and underachievement, such as the division of labor, it stands to reason that students who do not see themselves reflected in the curriculum will not have an organic connection with schooling. They will perceive it as separate from their intellectual development. This kind of disconnection has far-reaching implications for the kind of education they experience.

Curriculum is part of race making because race is a learned social relation. As a “social construction,” race is ultimately not about people’s biological or genetic make-up, but how physical markers, such as skin color, are interpreted to mean something about human worth, intelligence, and respect. That is, skin color is transformed into a symbol that associates racial groups with characteristics that have little to do with the tone of their skin. These human evaluations are then organized into a hierarchical system wherein Whites are judged as superior to people of color. To the extent that the color of one’s skin owes itself to biology, particularly the amount of melanin, race is the attempt to make unchangeable or immutable certain socially defined traits, like intelligence, and then inextricably links them with phenotype.

As a social relation, race is an invention. It is not just the history of skin color. It is the ability to make this rather simple symbol meaningful and powerful. Skin tone difference among people has always existed; race relation is precisely how this difference becomes the basis for social organization and group as well as individual worth. The way we use it here, race is a modern concept and its history is rather recent. Tension among groups has always existed, such as ethnic warfare, but they do not always take on a racial form. The groundwork for race was laid when Europe colonized the Americas, became institutionalized when chattel slavery became a U.S. industry, and was then codified in U.S. law in the 18th century. Among race scholars, there is general agreement that the creation of racial forms includes at least two processes: the law of immutability, applied to concepts like intelligence; and the significance of skin color as an organizing principle. This is what we mean by the modern concept of race.

Insofar as race is popularly understood as a “social construction,” this book argues that it is also learned as an “educational construction.” It is not learned once and for all, but race is continually...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Education and Racism
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Education and Racism
• 1 Curriculum and Racism
• 2 Culturally Relevant Education and Racism
• 3 School–Community Relations and Racism
• 4 Tracking, Segregation, and Racism
• 5 Funding, Resources, and Racism: When Money Matters
• 6 High-Stakes Testing, Accountability, and Racism
• 7 Education and Racism: Future Directions