Cultural Competence Now

56 Exercises to Help Educators Understand and Challenge Bias, Racism, and Privilege

Vernita Mayfield

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781416628491
• eBook ISBN: 9781416628927
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

What will it take to create equitable educational opportunities for all students? According to veteran educator Vernita Mayfield, teachers and school leaders need to learn how to recognize culturally embedded narratives about racial hierarchy and dismantle the systems of privilege and the institutions that perpetuate them with knowledge, action, and advocacy.

Cultural Competence Now provides a structure to begin meaningful conversations about race, culture, bias, privilege, and power within the time constraints of an ordinary school. The 56 exercises include activities, discussions, and readings in which to engage during each of the four quarters of the school year. School leaders will discover how to facilitate learning through the four steps—awaken and assess; apply and act; analyze and align; advocate and lead—as you and your colleagues* Increase your awareness of privilege and bias.
* Adapt your professional practices to meet the needs of all students.
* Examine policies and practices that inhibit opportunities for marginalized populations.
* Align resources to eradicate inequity in your school.

Mayfield offers advice on establishing a safe environment for professional conversations, setting goals for cultural competency, overcoming resistance, reviewing school data and the school's vision and mission through the lens of race and culture, and strategically managing what can be a transformative yet uncomfortable change process. Cultural Competence Now responds to the urgent need to build the cultural competency of educators—for the sake of children and in the interest of supporting and retaining all educators.

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Chapter 1

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The Case for Cultural Competency

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There are few things more frustrating than being misunderstood. Imagine having your intentions questioned every time you walk into a room, make a purchase, or drive down the street; your humanity questioned and assessed like a relentless pop quiz; your successes met with disbelief, anger, or denial. Imagine having every behavior, emotion, nuance, and physicality scrutinized, labeled, criticized, demonized, criminalized, or mocked—at times with clear intention and other times with complicit indifference. Imagine having your aspirations mocked, your progress chastised, your self-worth ridiculed, your identity deprived, your accomplishments minimalized, your culture bastardized, your talents narrowly defined, and your intellect derided. Without a word, you are deemed a menace as peers shrink away in fear or stare with indignance.

Such are the experiences of many people of color who live their lives being misunderstood. How did things get this way?

Students of Color in Public Schools (This Isn't Pretty)

The American social, economic, and educational system was intentionally designed to have a ruling elite class and a subservient class destined to serve them (Apple, 2009; Watkins, 2001). To educate everyone equally would have been counterproductive to a socioeconomic structure in which power, wealth, and status were granted on the basis of your ability to assimilate within a dominant class. The dominant class, whose domination was established by brutal force and the crafting of clever narratives to deflect from that force, established schooling for their children while initially denying schooling for all others. Like so many policies that guided the establishment of America, keeping the perceived underclass in ignorance was legislatively established and legally enforced (Abul, 2008). Teaching a person of color to read or write could result in severe fines or imprisonment if the perpetrator was white. Whippings or worse punishments were rendered if the perpetrator was Black (Blackmon, 2009; King, 2005).

During the period of slavery in America, educated African Americans were a novelty. The educated few, however, were powerful and compelling rebuttals to the narrative of white supremacy. Their voices resounded with bitter clarity the evils of institutional racism, and many were active in the abolitionist movement (Lerone, 1975).

After emancipation, African Americans did not fare better in terms of educational opportunity. Many whites still opposed the education of ex-slaves (Hart, 2002). Schools that did so were burned and their teachers threatened, and any person of color who demonstrated agency, resolve, dignity, or intellect was often summarily murdered or lynched (Watson, 2012). These kinds of intimidating practices imparted fear, distrust, and a legacy of generational trauma among African Americans that is still evidenced in modern-day behaviors.

There were few exceptions, but most notable were the Rosenwald Schools, the brainchild of Tuskegee Institute's Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, an American businessman and philanthropist. Nearly 5,000 schools were built in the U.S. rural South to educate poor Black children. The schools were built with modern architectural features and admitted generous natural light, but they lacked updated textbooks, materials, and resources, which exacerbated an already growing gap between academic quality measures in Black and white schools (Carruthers & Wanamaker, 2013). The teachers, however, promoted a rigorous curriculum and encouraged the students to achieve at high levels. Some of the distinguished alumni include Maya Angelou and Representative John Lewis of Georgia.

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that public facilities, such as schools, that were separated by race were legal if they were equal. Alleged separate but equal educational institutions were established for minorities. These schools were often controlled with the hegemonic values and beliefs of white superiority. The dominant class largely wrote the curriculum in which the ingenuity, intellect, tenacity, and accomplishments of people of color were deliberately omitted. The curriculum, resources, and facilities for people of color were conveniently inferior to those available to the dominant class (Cross, 2007). The culture, values, and identity of people of color were denigrated and negatively dictated. Cultural repression was leveraged within the education system to make the oppressed ashamed of themselves, their values, and their history (Lerone, 1975).

Meanwhile, white scientists conducted studies theorizing that people of color were biologically and cognitively inferior to whites. This kind of rationalization of Black intellectual inferiority provided a framework for the denial of social privileges during the 20th century and rationalized the colonial plundering of their assets, economic domination, and denial of equitable educational opportunities (Watkins, 2001).

Postsecondary institutions for Black people also differed vastly from their white counterparts (Condron, 2009; Lerone, 1975). First, they were structured to be highly regimented. Students were expected to adhere to a strict course of discipline. (If that sounds eerily familiar to you, you might want to reexamine the discipline policy in your school.) Black people were taught how to cook, clean, perform physically challenging work, and do mentally menial tasks (Watkins, 2001). Schools that chose to deviate from the established curriculum by offering courses in the hard sciences were denied funding from their wealthy white benefactors (Anderson, 1980). The goal for Black education was to create an obedient and stable semiskilled workforce (Hart, 2002). According to Darder (2002), education was thus used as an "institutionalized politicizing process for conditioning students to subscribe to the dominant ideological norms and political assumptions of the prevailing social order" (p. 156).

During the Jim Crow years, institutions such as Harvard or Columbia admitted and graduated limited numbers of Black students, but those students were typically barred from teaching in these institutions. And although some Black students attended classes along with white students, they were usually prevented from using the campus libraries and laboratories or attending scholarly association meetings.

After World War II, the G.I. bill provided all veterans with eligibility for low-cost mortgages, low-cost loans to start a business, and tuition and living expenses to attend college. The bill also entitled veterans to receive one year of unemployment compensation. Although responsible for creating an American middle class, the bill also created the largest divide in economic status between whites and people of color. G.I. bill grants were distributed to states and local agencies, including those that practiced Jim Crow laws (laws that supported American apartheid). Thus, many soldiers of color were denied access to the funds. Even though they had served their country in the same way as all other soldiers, they were unable to advance economically, as the white soldiers did. People of color were denied well-paying jobs, retirement pensions, competitive educational degrees, and business capital—all of which resulted in their inability to gain middle-class status as easily as their white counterparts.

Soldiers of color who were granted access to G.I. funding pursued education but were limited in their choices. Not all colleges and universities accepted people of color, and those that did limited the number of slots available. Historically Black colleges and universities accepted students, but they were not as numerous as white institutions.

Veterans of color who were granted G.I. funds for housing were limited in where they could purchase a home. Certain neighborhoods prevented the sale of homes to people of color. The mortgage industry redlined areas where people of color lived and made it difficult for them to get reasonable mortgage rates or lines of credit. Schools in the redlined neighborhoods were crippled with inferior levels of funding and quality of education. As Watkins (2001) stated, "Black education experienced a separate tradition in funding, administration, teacher training, and curriculum" (p. 180). The inability to advance economically through home ownership or quality education prevented many people of color from pursuing postsecondary education.

By the end of the 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began a class action suit for the integration of schools, which ended with a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education) to abolish segregated schools with "deliberate speed" (King, 2005, p. 157). This legislation, however, did little to sway public opinion about integrating schools, and many districts simply ignored the mandate (Atkinson, 1993). In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to ensure the personal security of nine students determined to integrate Central High School in Arkansas. Additional support for desegregating schools would arrive in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided financial assistance to schools and districts attempting to desegregate.

President Lyndon Johnson's declaration in 1964 of an unconditional war on poverty in America was followed by one of the most influential pieces of educational legislation in American history—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 (Haycock, 2006). This bill would more than triple the amount of federal dollars allocated to support poor citizens in public school systems, many of whom were people of color. Supported by mandated busing, people of color began integrating into educational institutions at an increasing rate (Atkinson, 1993).

When President Johnson signed an executive order for affirmative action, many white colleges and universities began actively recruiting minorities and offering financial assistance. Consequently, enrollment of minorities increased in colleges and universities across the United States.

However, by the mid-1960s and early 1970s, disturbing trends and patterns emerged. White families began to flee districts that were forced to integrate schools. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in reading and math confirmed that minority children were not performing as well academically as their white counterparts in both lower-income and middle-class schools (Raffel, 1980). If that wasn't alarming enough, in 1972, the National Education Association reported that Black children were being pushed out of school, suspended, harassed, and arrested. African American students in desegregated schools were systematically excluded from extracurricular activities, tracked into vocational classes, and confronted with condescension or hostility (Atkinson, 1993). Twenty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education, school desegregation was briefly achieved. However, equity and the underlying beliefs enabling it had not withstood the trial (Atkinson, 1993).

Incentivized Achievement

The unfunded No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) legislated schools and districts to examine the achievement of minority subgroups in schools (Haycock, 2006). However, this legislation simplified the complexity of factors that brought education to this vortex (Bae, Holloway, Li, & Bempechat, 2008). Few questioned the deeply ingrained belief systems of teachers and staff who were now teaching diverse student populations (Berliner, 2010).

During fiscal year 2009–2010, the Obama administration allocated an unprecedented amount of stimulus dollars for school reform (McGuinn, 2012). For the first time in U.S. history, schools would be given both the ideals of equity and excellence in schools and the financial support to achieve them. Over $7 billion was allocated for turning around chronically low-performing schools and supporting innovation through a program titled Race to the Top, which incentivized educational innovation.

Grant recipients crafted school improvement plans designed to address academic achievement gaps, yet few schools used the monies to help teachers understand minority students and the families with whom they had little interaction in their social or private lives. Thus, many educators were endeavoring to close achievement gaps that they could neither define nor explain (Andrews, 2007). Schools with high minority student populations worked tirelessly to address teacher shortages and high staff turnover, but few used the grant monies to address the influence of their students' culture in the environment—a phenomenon that greatly influenced teacher retention, as teachers were often baffled by the seemingly odd behaviors of their minority students (Allen, 2008; Ford & Moore, 2013).

Teachers and faculty largely ignored race, privilege, and inequity while seeking to improve schools through strict and regimented systems that privileged some, disciplined most, and disenfranchised others (Hart, 2002; Howley, Woodrum, Burgess, & Rhodes, 2009). School staff claimed color blindness while simultaneously instituting policies and programs that perpetuated the inequitable suspension and expulsion of minority children. Staff convened around improving schools and student learning while largely ignoring the effect of culture, poverty, generational trauma, violence, poor nutrition, and an absence of regular health care on the students they were serving (Day-Vines & Day-Hairston, 2005; Epstein, Galindo, & Sheldon, 2011; Gay, 2002; Ware, 2006; Weinstein, Curran, & Tomlinson-Clarke, 2003).

Dismantling Inequity for Improved Outcomes

Creating equitable educational opportunities for all has been an espoused goal of American educational policy since 1954 (Blackmore, 2009). But history has demonstrated that the ability to achieve it will take more than legislation (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). We tried desegregation. We tried busing. We tried testing. We tried financial support. What we have not tried with reasonable effort, intention, and consistency is confronting the values and beliefs that established inequity as a way of life in America.

What we're afraid to talk about is how race has been used to establish economic and educational advantage for a ruling class while perpetuating economic and educational subservience for others. What don't we want to talk about? How we, as educators, treat children and their parents who look, act, and behave differently than we do. What are we avoiding in school improvement planning? The examination of practices and policies that perpetuate privilege and benefits for some while disadvantaging others. Too often when the history of educational racism in this country is presented to many educators, they plug their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and endeavor to drown out the hum of pain from the oppressed.

Some educators blame the victims and point to the current circumstances of the victims as somehow being their own fault, rather than examine the mare's nest of deliberate havoc that created those circumstances. More than ever, we need an army of educators with the political, moral, and professional will to dismantle systems of oppression that have historically crippled opportunity and access for students of color. We need champions of children who are willing to be temporarily uncomfortable so that all children might be enduringly celebrated and educated equitably. We need advocates for educational advancement who are willing to examine themselves, their behaviors, and their values as part of school improvement efforts. We need culturally competent educators. We need you.

Cultural competency, as I define it, is the ability to use critical-thinking skills to interpret how cultural values and beliefs influence conscious and unconscious behavior; the understanding of how inequity can be and has been perpetuated through socialized behaviors; and the knowledge and determined disposition to disrupt inequitable practices to achieve greater personal and professional success for yourself and others (Clark, Zygmunt, & Howard, 2016; Gay, 2010; Howard, 2010).

To examine this definition more closely, culture, as defined by Howard (2010), is "a complex constellation of values, mores, norms, customs, ways of being, ways of knowing, and traditions that provide a general design for living, is passed from generation to generation, and serves as a pattern for interpreting reality" (p. 51). Culture, therefore, influences how people think, the decisions they make, how they learn, what they believe is important to learn, how they speak, how they dress—in a nutshell, the values, beliefs, and behaviors on which they operate daily. We learn cultural values, mores, norms, and ways of being through people around us, media messages, common events, celebrations, and observances. We are immersed in a culture, sometimes several at once, from the time we are born until the time we die. Some of the behaviors, values, and beliefs we hold are conscious to us and espoused with regularity. Sometimes they are unconscious to us; they have become such a part of our belief system that we operate on them without critically examining why.

I prefer the term cultural competence to antiracist education because it embodies the comprehensive nature of culture, which is inclusive of the multiple identities one assumes or nurtures. The culture of an individual is complex in terms of what people learn or reject within their environment, including factors such as implicit bias, racism, privilege, and identity. The term competence suggests that you are endeavoring to become fluent in a set of practices or skills that adv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Cultural Competence Now
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Case for Cultural Competency
• Chapter 2. Dismantling Inequity: Leading the Change
• Chapter 3. When Silence Abounds: Facilitating Race Discussions Successfully
• Chapter 4. Awaken and Assess
• Chapter 5. Apply and Act
• Chapter 6. Analyze and Align
• Chapter 7. Advocate and Lead
• Chapter 8. The Long Road Ahead
• Homework Handouts
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright