Education and racial/ethnic relations

SIGNIFICANCE: Educational reform has been a focal point for improvement of racial and ethnic relations since 1954. This movement began with attempts to integrate the public schools and has since extended to the expansion of the school curriculum.

The purpose of educational reform is to improve the educational status quo. In the area of race relations, it has involved the push to integrate public schools. Some education experts suggest that integrated educational facilities are far more advantageous than segregated ones. In 1954, segregated educational facilities—historically associated with discrimination and racism in the United States, as made official with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible—were challenged by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the latter case, the Supreme Court determined that segregated educational facilities for African Americans were “inherently” unequal, placing Black students at an educational disadvantage that they were unlikely ever to overcome. Although racial and ethnic relations were a major focus of educational reform even before the Brown litigation, the real push for school integration began only after Brown.

School Integration

The 1950s witnessed massive social changes; chief among these was a renewed consciousness among people of color in general, and African Americans in particular, of their second-class place in society. Nowhere was this discrimination more evident than in racially segregated facilities, from public restrooms and restaurants to public schools. That segregation only echoed the deeper social and economic divisions between the races. In the wake of the Brown decision, however, the latter part of the decade began to witness a push for integrated schools.

Segregationists, particularly in the South, fought school integration at every step with a campaign of intimidation and delays called “massive resistance.” At the same time, Cold War fears of Soviet technological superiority—which came to a head with the 1957 launching of the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth, the Soviets’ Sputnik—spurred a drive toward the production of new math and science curricula in the schools. The goal was to produce more mathematicians, scientists, and engineers to combat the perceived Soviet threat. Conservative pressures to maintain the status quo therefore joined with postwar fears of a Communist takeover to mitigate against social equality in the classroom. At the same time, in the wake of Brown’s official denunciation of segregation, African Americans began taking bold steps to secure their civil rights. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and spawned the Montgomery bus boycott. In September 1957, a plan to integrate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, was met by White resistance that extended to the level of Governor Orval E. Faubus, who resisted the entry of nine African American students with the National Guard. Racial strife would increase over the next years as the civil rights movement bloomed and liberal politicians stepped up their efforts to desegregate public schools.

Reform in the 1970s proved to be both prescriptive and reactionary. It was prescriptive in its call for more “effective schools” and reactionary as a strategy for helping to quell student activism during the period. Busing also emerged during this period as a controversial measure to integrate schools. Busing actually predates the effort to desegregate the public schools. For many years in the South, busing was used to facilitate segregation by transporting Black youth to segregated Black schools and transporting White students to segregated White schools. It became controversial when the federal courts decided that buses could be used for the opposite end—to bring Black youth into White communities. Part of the controversy concerned objections that busing required extended periods of time traveling to and from school. However, given that such objections were rarely voiced when busing was used for purposes of segregation, many civil rights activists saw these objections as a smokescreen masking resistance to integration. Busing was the most feasible strategy for transporting large numbers of students and would remain the primary method for implementing mandatory pupil reassignment for purposes of desegregation.

A Nation at Risk?

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a renewed call for the production of more mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Much of this reform was initiated by the 1983 report A Nation at Risk. The report focused on what was seen as the failure of the public schools, the failure of public school teachers in their professional preparation and in their classroom instruction, and a prescription for strengthening the public school curriculum. In many school districts, many of the reform measures proffered by A Nation at Risk have been implemented. The number of academic core courses has been increased in high schools, teacher preparation programs at most of the major institutions of higher education have undergone restructuring, assessment tests have been implemented at grades three through eight and in high school subjects. Most public high schools have introduced requirements for computer literacy.

However, desegregation has not fared as well. Many school districts still remain segregated. Strategies such as magnet schools, school choice, and mandatory busing have all had varying degrees of success in the desegregation effort. Some school districts have been released from their obligation to enforce desegregation, a few because they had achieved a degree of “racial balance,” particularly via magnet schools. The release for some, however, was not a function of successful desegregation but rather an artifact of White flight to the suburbs and to private schools.

School choice policies such as vouchers, charter schools, and open enrollment have been found to increase de facto segregation rather than alleviate it. As Adrienne D. Dixson et al. point out in The Cost of Racism for People of Color: Contextualizing Experiences of Discrimination (2016), low-income families of color often lack the resources to enroll students in their preferred schools. As a result, in cities such as Denver and New Orleans, White student enrollment decreased in low-performing schools and increased in high-performing schools; conversely, the enrollment rate of students of color increased in low-performing schools. Similarly, vouchers often increase de facto segregation as private schools are not subject to the same rules as public schools.

White Flight

School desegregation has therefore never been fully achieved. As the mandate to desegregate was issued by the federal courts, the incidence of White flight increased. Initially a movement of middle-class White people to escape the decay and dangers of life in the city, White flight turned into a flight to avoid desegregation. As a result, many inner-city White schools initially forced to desegregate became predominantly Black and Latino over time. In some large urban districts, desegregation became a feeble attempt to reshuffle the remaining White students into predominantly Black and Latino schools. In the late 1990s, more than one-third of the states had African American and Latino students attending schools with minority populations exceeding 65 percent. In Illinois, New York, and Michigan, more than 80 percent of the African American student population attended segregated schools; in New York, Illinois, Texas, and New Jersey, more than 80 percent of the Latino student population attended segregated schools. A number of school districts once considered desegregated have become resegregated. Additionally, some have developed “second-generation segregation,” which involves the sorting of students into academic tracks based on ability grouping. Disproportionately, African American and Latino students are placed into the lower academic tracks (especially in special education programs) while White students and Asian Americans are placed in the higher tracks. This phenomenon occurs even in schools said to be racially balanced.

Curriculum Reform and Multicultural Education

Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, educational reform began to address racial and cultural differences not only through school integration but also through the curriculum. Much of this reformation emerged in the form of three new curriculum approaches: multicultural education, bicultural education, and centric education. Innovative and revolutionary, these new approaches have generated substantial controversies. Much of the debate stems from the fact that each approach makes race or ethnicity a focal point of the curriculum.

Multicultural education has been by far the most sweeping educational reform designed to deal with the issues of racism and discrimination. In the broadest sense, multicultural education is an extension of the civil rights movement, for the elimination of discrimination is not merely an issue of school attendance—of an African American, Latino, Native American, or Asian American youth’s right to sit next to White youth—but, more important, a struggle for equity in the pursuit of equality of opportunity.

Joel Spring argues that multicultural education programs have four primary goals: to build tolerance of other cultures, to eliminate racism, to include curricular content on other cultures, and to enable students to perceive the world from more than one cultural perspective. In their book Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (1998), James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks suggest that multicultural education is not merely an idea but also an educational reform movement and a process. Its primary goal is to change the structure of educational institutions so that racial and cultural makeup, gender, and exceptionalities do not influence the opportunity to achieve academically.

In practice, multicultural education has taken a variety of forms, from the early grades to higher education, manifesting itself not only in choices to teach the culture and history of underrepresented communities such as African Americans, American Indigenous populations, and Latinos, but also to consider different interpretations of the causes of historical events and different evaluations of their outcomes. Even in science—and particularly with advances in the discipline of genetics—advances have radically altered nineteenth and early twentieth century explanations of racial and ethnic differences. Where once these differences were seen as a product of heredity, it is now known, for example, that variations in DNA (the genetic material that determines human traits, from eye and skin color to intelligence) are virtually identical across all groups of human beings and thus have no impact on their social, economic, and other potentials.

While many schools have embraced multicultural education programs, some states have pushed back against teaching curriculum focused on the experiences of minority races. In the twenty-first century, many states began to denounce and make moves to ban curriculum that they argued fell into the category of critical race theory. Florida came into the spotlight after its governor banned critical race theory in public schools and further pushed back on multicultural education by banning AP African American studies in high schools in Florida.

Bicultural Education

“Biculturalism” literally means operating in two different cultures simultaneously. The premise of bicultural education is to implement educational strategies that help members of subcultures to function in the dominant (Eurocentric) culture without having to forsake their own cultures. All too often, individuals from subcultures have been expected to give up their native cultures if they were to experience a measure of success in the dominant culture. Many successful members of subcultures have articulated resultant feelings of alienation—both from the dominant culture and from their own native culture. A bicultural curriculum is structured in ways to help subcultures deal with the effects of racism and discrimination. Learning styles associated with particular subcultures are integrated into the curriculum. In addition, the teachers and other personnel are recruited from educators possessing a certain attitudinal posture that helps rather than hinders learning among subcultures. Some researchers suggest that the bicultural education environment should be warm, should employ a greater latitude of interpretation with respect to written material, and should use the child’s own language for initial instruction to achieve the most positive results— for example, Spanish for Hispanic students, native tongues for American Indians, and even Ebonics for African Americans when such an approach proves to facilitate learning.

Centric Education

Centric education is often also referred to as ethnocentric education. Supporters of centric education take a more radical position relative to Eurocentric education than either multicultural or bicultural educators. In predominantly Hispanic schools that focus on Hispanic cultures, centric teachers often use Spanish during informal interaction with students. This has proven to ease the acculturation process. Hispanic-centered education has gained a tentative foothold in the southwestern United States, although by far the most controversial centric approach has been Afrocentric education.

Afrocentrists (advocates of Afrocentricity) argue that an Afrocentric education has major implications for both the lifestyle that many African Americans have chosen to pursue and the type of education that they desire for their children. Although Afrocentric education is considerably more radical than multicultural education, some educational scholars actually view it as a single-group study under the broad rubric of multicultural education. Single-group studies are said to provide students from subcultures with a sense of their history and identity and, more importantly, with a sense of direction and purpose in their lives. An Afrocentric curriculum includes units or courses about the history and culture of African Americans, focusing particularly on how African Americans (and other subcultures) have been oppressed and on their social, political, and cultural struggles for liberation, equality, and justice. Pedagogy is also predicated on the ways that African American youth learn best.

Impact on School Curriculum

Multicultural, bicultural, and centric education do not merely advocate for the addition or deletion of certain types of material but also challenge the very existence of the curriculum that has historically been used in the public school—and therein lies much of the controversy over these various modes of educational reform. Longstanding distortions about European American traditions, heroic figures, and culture are often exposed and open to criticism under the multicultural, bicultural, and centric traditions. Hence, these approaches, while valuing the cultures and contributions of people of color, have been perceived by some White people as concomitantly devaluing European contributions. Such a perception is generally false; most efforts at educational reform have as their goal the amelioration, not the aggravation, of intergroup relations.

Bibliography

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Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity. Trenton: Africa World, 1988. Print.

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