1999
Race and Policy
Ernest R. House
|
|
Abstract |
In his portrayal of the stark inequalities
among American schools, Kozol (1991) reported a
discussion of race and inequality with white teenagers in a wealthy New York
suburb. These teenagers expressed three main beliefs. First, fiscal
inequalities among schools don't really matter that much, although loss of
funds from their own school to equalize resources with poor schools would be
damaging. Second, any form of racial integration would be
met by strong resistance in their community, especially by their parents,
partly for fear education standards might decline. Third, achieving equity in
funding would not make much difference since poor, minority children would
fail anyhow. They lack motivation, parental guidance, and a good environment.
At this point in the discussion a frustrated boy exclaimed, "When people
talk this way ... they're saying that black kids will never learn.... So what
it means is—you are writing people off" (Kozol,
1991, p. 130). These beliefs are a product of racism in American society and
a major reason it continues. How is it that these students come to hold such
beliefs and what difference does it make for
education?
For a long time, I have been puzzled by
the connection between race and education policy. Despite attempts to
ameliorate racism and raise the school performance of minorities,
improvements have been modest. Why does racism persist? How do race and
policy affect each other? I want to offer a tentative explanation of this
connection. First, Americans hold deep-seated beliefs about democracy,
equality, and fairness. These beliefs are sincere, I believe. Second, America
is a deeply racist country in a particular way. Although many countries
harbor racist beliefs, those in America are peculiar in some respects. Third,
most "white" Americans don't fully comprehend that their country is
racist, nor the extent of that racism, nor how that racism is embedded.
These beliefs result in seemingly
contradictory policies. Given these beliefs, I would expect that policies
with racial import will often be invisible or disguised as nonracial. That
is, the intents and consequences of some policies will be taken to be
something other than what they are, even to those who espouse them. This
disguise enables the policies to seem fair and democratic, even when the
policies have racial overtones. For example, the sociologist William Julius
Wilson (1987) contends that Americans will not support policies that are
believed to benefit minorities primarily. They will support social security
since that is seen as benefiting all Americans, including minorities. But
they will not support welfare programs, which are perceived as helping mainly
minorities.
I have a corollary to Wilson's thesis.
Americans will support policies that are harmful to minorities that they
would not tolerate if those same policies were applied to majority populations.
In education, for example, Americans are strongly in favor of
retention—retaining students at the same grade level for another
year—even though the research evidence overwhelmingly shows strong
negative effects on the students retained. Retention programs are applied
massively to minorities in large cities, but not to majority populations. Yet
retention does not appear on the surface to have racial implications. Other
education policies that appear to have little to do with race also severely
disadvantage minorities, including how schools are financed, how schools are
organized, how standardized tests are used, and how students are grouped. In
other words, we have organized ourselves educationally in ways to
disadvantage minorities, even while maintaining appearances of equality in
such matters. No other developed countries have organized their educational
systems in this fashion.
I would call our system one of
institutional racism, racism not recognized by those participating in it
because the way the institutions function seems normal to those growing up in
them. Individuals need have no hostile racist thoughts, only adherence to the
system as it exists. I would not say that the way we have organized ourselves
educationally is determined solely by racial concerns, only that such
concerns are one powerful causal factor. Other economic and social factors
also have had strong effects. Now these are strong claims, outrageous claims,
some will say. How can they be substantiated? No single attempt of this
length could conceivably deal definitively with the problem of American
racism. In what remains of this attempt, I would like to explore explanations
as to how racism affects education policy: first, how race has been
constructed and used in America historically; second, how race is embedded in
American identity; and, third, how these beliefs play out in education
policies.
Our National Identity
Reluctantly, I have
come to believe racism is deeply embedded within the national identity
itself, built into the American character by history and experience. Jacobson
(1998) traced in detail how the concepts of "race" and
"whiteness" have been socially constructed and employed in the US.
In his history of the concept of "whiteness" he showed how
immigrants were assimilated through redefinitions of what
"whiteness" meant. What were seen as separate "races" of
people gradually came to be socially constructed as "white
ethnics," but not without struggle.
Early colonial Americans defined
themselves as "white" and "free" in contrast to those who
were not, especially slaves and Native Americans. As early settlers escaped
the class systems of Europe, they redefined themselves along racial lines,
yet another hierarchy of human worth. The first colonists were mostly
English, and they held strong beliefs of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority,
beliefs that the English displayed throughout their world colonies.
The notion of different "races"
with different characteristics embedded in nature presumed many such
"races"—Celts, Teutons, Poles,
Swedes, Hebrews, Turks, and so on. Race was assumed to be hereditary, fixed,
and closely associated with character traits. Knowing people's race was a
shorthand way of knowing about their character.
Race was also connected to one
particularly important attribute: The Anglo-Saxons saw themselves as uniquely
equipped to govern by reason of their natural superiority, whereas other
races were less well endowed. The idea that the ability to govern endowed its
possessors with rights over others had a home in the British upper classes,
and this idea was generalized to foreign populations that the English
contrasted with themselves, especially those colonized. Racism so conceived
was "a theory of who is who, of who belongs and who does not, of who
deserves what and who is capable of what" (Jacobson, 1998, p. 6).
Belief in their natural, God-given ability
to govern became a primary justification for appropriating land and resources
that others could not manage properly, i.e., to take land and resources away
from others so the resources could be used productively. For the British
these others included colonial peoples all over the world. For Americans
these others included African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and
Filipinos, all of whom possessed contested property at one time or another.
In the beginning, being white meant being
Anglo-Saxon. All others were of different races. Founders of the nation
(southern gentlemen planters) wrote restrictions on these others into law,
including their rights to hold property, become citizens, enter the country,
and even be owned by whites. Race was closely associated in the courts with
property rights. The very idea of "providing for the common
defense" in a country of slaves and frontier settlements was racially
imbued.
The 1790 naturalization law was fiercely
exclusionary, and the early statutes suggested that "whiteness" was
the criterion for full citizenship. Soon, this belief was challenged by the
arrival of assorted immigrants. The need for cheap labor for settlement and
economic development opened up immigration to all kinds of "races."
Large numbers of immigrants arrived, such as the Germans and Irish. These people
were seen as different races ("Teutons"
and "Celts") with their distinct physical features signifying
different character traits. The Irish were seen as a physically dark race which was certainly not up to self- governance (as in
colonized Ireland). Their assimilation was problematic. Over decades each new
immigrant group struggled to be defined in the "white" mainstream,
and for what that portended for social and economic advantage. Eventually,
most groups were redefined as "white ethnics" who were different in
"culture" but not necessarily race. In other words, their ethnicity
was derived from their culture and might be remedial, as opposed to their
"race," which was not. Just as the research of earlier times
buttressed theories of "race" so too did later research support
theories of "ethnicity" when their time came. However, the
assimilation of the "ethnics" (episodes portrayed as American
success stories) deepened the chasm between those "white" and those
not. If Jews, Syrians, and Turks were "white," where did this leave
African Americans?
In fact, the reason all these immigrants
were considered white ultimately was that they were contrasted to African
Americans, who were never considered white. The immigrants gained whiteness
by African Americans being excluded. And it was to the advantage of
immigrants to adopt beliefs and positions which were
overtly racist in order to contrast themselves to African Americans. Hence,
the racist dichotomy enabled the ethnics to become "Americanized"
at the cost and through the exclusion of others. What was conceived literally
as many separate races early in American history was reduced to a white-black
dichotomy in the 20th century, complicated by a large influx of Latinos.
Hence, in a sense the
"white"—African American racial relationship is at the center
of American national identity, though it is not recognized as such. Public
policy swirls around it much of the time, even when its influence is not
recognized explicitly. Typically, African Americans are portrayed as an
unfortunate group which just happens to be marginal, a minority which has
never quite made it for a number of reasons, (again) having to do with their
character traits, e.g., lack of skills, lack of self-discipline, impoverished
culture, low natural intelligence—and most certainly lack of ability to
govern themselves.
In a sense African Americans were never
marginal. They have been central to the formation of the American national
identity in that they provided a primary touchstone against which
"whites" defined themselves, though other "uncivilized"
peoples such as Native Americans also played such a role. "Racism now
appears not anomalous to the working of American democracy but fundamental to
it" (Jacobson, 1998, p. 12).
The Formative Process
The nature of this
complex relationship is difficult to untangle by those shaped by it, just as
it is difficult for males to understand how they construct their own
identities by defining females in certain ways. A glimpse into the
complexities of national identity is provided by Nobel Laureate Toni
Morrison's examination of the national literature.
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison noted that it is often the
literary image that is not presented or which is presented obliquely that
reveals distorted and repressed thoughts and feelings about race.
Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to
and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and
economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological
race ever was .... It seems that it has a utility
far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and
has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse
that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.... I
remain convinced that the metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy
definitive places in American literature, in the "national
character"... (Morrison, 1992, p. 63-64).
How is it possible that
Americans could harbor and repress racial images, disguising them even to
themselves? The early colonists located themselves in a vast continent far
from European civilization, besieged by what they saw as threatening Nature
and savage forces. Escape from the past was one goal, freedom another.
In this environment unfree
slaves served as surrogate selves for the colonists' literary meditations on
human freedom, their terror of being European outcasts, their dread of
failure, their fears of powerlessness, of nature without limits, of
loneliness, and of internal aggression. "What arose out of collective
needs to allay fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American
Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire
that is uniquely American" (Morrison, 1992, p. 38). Nothing
highlighted freedom like slavery.
The explicit focus of much early American
literature was the "architecture of the new white man" (Morrison,
1992, p. 15), the deliberate construction of the new American. This new image
was created by finding differences with Europeans, as Emerson did, but also
in contradistinction to those closer—slaves, Native Americans, and
Latinos. The flight from the Old World to the New World was a flight from
oppression and limitation to freedom and responsibility, but in a peculiar
way.
Morrison illustrates this developing
national identity in the character of an early planter slave-owner (taken
from Bernard Bailyn's (1986) Voyagers to the
West, an investigation of settlers becoming Americans). William Dunbar
was a young Scottish aristocrat educated by tutors and in math, astronomy,
and belle-lettres at the University of Aberdeen. He
became a London intellectual, an exemplar of Enlightenment thinking. But
after moving to the New World he suppressed a slave conspiracy on his
Mississippi plantation in 1776. He was astounded at his slaves' ingratitude
after he had treated them so well, and he administered two runaways 500
lashes on five separate occasions. Morrison cites Bailyn's
assessment of Dunbar's character transformation: "...feeling a sense of
authority and autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his
absolute control over the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man,
a borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half- savage world"
(quoted in Morrison, p. 42). Morrison takes these traits as prototypical of
the new white American male, traits valorized and inscribed as themes in our
national literature.
The sense of autonomy was transformed into
themes of American "individualism." Newness was transformed into
American "innocence." Distinctiveness was transformed into
"difference" and strategies for maintaining difference. Authority
and absolute power over others were transformed into a conquering romantic
heroism and masculine virility—and also into the moral problematics of exercising such power over others.
According to Morrison, the major characteristics of our national
literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus
historical isolation, acute moral problematics, and
themes of innocence coupled with figurations of death and hell are responses
to an Africanist presence—guilt, violence, alienation, power, freedom.
American coherence of identity was organized in part through a distancing
Africanism.
Hence, race functioned as a metaphor for
the construction of American identity. "Deep within the word 'American'
is its association with race." (Morrison, 1992, p.47). "What was
distinctive in the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom, and, second,
the presence of the unfree in the heart of the
democratic experiment...." (p. 48). The image of bound, suppressed, and
repressed darkness became objectified as an Africanist persona.
"Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as
not enslaved, but free; not repulsive but desirable; not helpless, but
licensed and powerful; not history- less, but historical; not damned, but
innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of
destiny" (Morrison, 1992, p. 52). According to Morrison, racial themes
are embodied throughout American literature, in spite of claims that American
literature is raceless. In denying racism these
matters were discussed in disguised ways. The consequence was a master
narrative that spoke for Africans but not of them. One theme is the view of
the Africanist character as enabler, somehow pulling free of claims of
retribution, as in Huckleberry Finn. Another is how African American
characters are used to limn out and enforce whiteness and how they are used
strategically to define the goals and qualities of whites, e.g., "to
control projections of anarchy with the disciplinary apparatus of punishment
and largess." (p. 53).
My suggestion that Africanism has come to have a
metaphysical necessity should in no way be understood to imply that it has
lost its ideological utility. There is still much ill-gotten
gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of
inferiority and the ranking of differences. There is still much national
solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism available by hiding
class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. Freedom (to move,
to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world)
can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced. (Morrison, 1992, p. 63-64)
Morrison notes that the
presence of black people, along with gender and family, are inherent in the
earliest lessons children are taught regarding their distinctness. And that
"It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much
immigrant literature) understood their "Americaness"
as an opposition to the resident black population" (p. 47).
Education Policy
If such beliefs and
images are built into the national identity, what
ramifications would we expect them to have for educational policy? Presumably
policies would be based on maintaining separation, maintaining differences
based on racist images of the Africanist persona's presumed character traits.
Such policies would be consistent with race themes that reoccur in American
history and literature.
The teenagers in the New York suburb
believed that fiscal inequalities don't matter, that racial integration was
hopeless since it would be resisted, and that equity would not help minority
students since they are beyond help. They lack motivation, parental
care, and a healthy environment. They are throwaways, as the boy
declared. The historical image of African Americans is recognizable in the
beliefs of these white teenagers.
If such majority beliefs guide policies,
what would the policies be like? First, the policies would keep African
Americans separate and distinct from "white" Americans. Second,
they would be based on the presumed character traits of African Americans,
traits that differentiate them from whites;
presumably, traits which mark them as inferior. Their education would be
different from whites in important ways because of these traits. Third, since
they are not capable of self-governance they cannot be in control of their
own education. Fourth, since African Americans have limited potential,
investment in their education should be modest: no need to over invest since
what can emerge is limited. Fifth, such policies would attempt to appear
fair, to conform to the American Creed (e.g., Mrydal,
1964).
In fact, these are the types of policies
that have characterized the treatment of African Americans: exclusion,
differentiated curricula and treatment based on presumed inferior character
traits, control by others, and modest resource commitment, all justified as
being fair. Similar policies have applied to other minorities as
well—to Native Americans, Latinos, and others, though each group has
its own unique history and experience. I will illustrate these themes with
three examples (though the available examples are beyond cataloguing): the
education of African Americans in the South after the Civl
War, desegregation in Chicago in 1967, and retention ("failing"
grades) in Chicago in 1998.
The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
Anderson (1988)
documented the history of black education in the South between 1860 and 1935.
Contrary to popular belief, the ex-slaves were very keen on establishing an
education for themselves and their children since they saw education as the
way to attain freedom and escape poverty. Once freed, they immediately set up
schools for themselves. However, the southern planters, still in control,
resisted public education since it was a threat to their forced agricultural
labor supply, which depended on child labor. Furthermore, educated African
Americans were a threat to the myth of black inferiority since poor whites in
the South had no public education themselves. By contrast, northern
industrialists saw basic education as aiding worker efficiency—provided
it was focused on vocational training, the only kind of work African
Americans were capable of. While the ex-slaves wanted teachers, managers, and
businessmen trained academically to be leaders, the whites wanted vocational training
for them. Hence, southern and northern whites supported the Hampton Institute
and Tuskegee model of training. Both the control and goals
of African American education were imposed by whites. Hampton
Institute trained teachers, but the curriculum was focused on hard manual
labor and on instilling the proper political and moral attitudes so that
these teachers could train students for their proper role in
society—disciplined, low-skill manual laborers. The founder and
principal, a northerner, saw African American voters as immoral and
irresponsible; they should not participate in public life. Black masses were
weak, and black leaders were "ignorant, immoral preachers or selfish
politicians" (Anderson, 1988, p. 38). These ideas were embodied in teacher
training throughout the South by philanthropist money and influence.
By the early 20th century working class
whites finally had public elementary schools in the South—from which
African Americans were excluded. During this period, African Americans built
their own common schools with their own money and with contributions from
local whites and philanthropists. Again, whites insisted that African
American high schools be vocational schools to train workers for jobs that
African Americans held, not for jobs held by whites. However, the Great
Depression threw white workers into competition over previously black jobs,
and support for even vocational high schools ceased. Anderson ends his book
by noting the irony of scholarship which attributes
low African American educational attainment to initial differences in
cultural orientation towards education, and studies which blame black
dialect, oral traditions, and cultural separatism for preventing school
success. Since Emancipation the ex-slaves had done everything they could to
educate their children, and they were impeded vigorously at every turn by
whites determined to keep them in their place.
This history embodies key policy themes of
African American education over decades: exclusion and segregation, based on
images of African Americans as not very capable intellectually, as being
immoral, and as being not qualified for political governance. Control over
education was exercised by whites and resulted in differentiated curricula which trained African Americans for lower
positions in society.
Chicago Desegregation, 1967
Peterson's (1976)
analysis of desegregation of the Chicago schools examines policies in a
different time and place. In 1967, Chicago's schools were highly segregated.
African American students were 52.3 percent of the public school population,
but only 4.7 percent of African American students were in schools more than
50 percent white. Only 28 percent of white students were in schools more than
5 percent African American.
The busing plan developed by the Chicago
superintendent of schools was modest: to bus 1,000 African American students
to schools in two neighborhoods with white student populations of 10,000.
This was part of a larger plan of magnet schools, educational parks, and
financial incentives to promote racial balance. Initially, the busing plan was approved by the school board "in
principle." But it was never implemented. African American
leaders saw the plan as too modest. Whites in the affected neighborhoods were
outraged by even this much integration, and they mobilized into an
uncompromising resistance.
Although those supporting the plan were
able to gain the endorsements of civil rights groups, newspapers, the
teachers union, and the Catholic church, opposing whites were able to enlist
the support of the powerful political machine itself, especially US
Representative Pucinski, who represented ethnic
neighborhoods. Demonstrations, picketing, and intense lobbying were part of
the campaign against the busing of African American students. Peterson (1976)
labels the decision process of the school board "ideological
bargaining." Opponents took "principled" stands on issues which they were unwilling to compromise. They used
public channels of communication to politicize the issues before the general
public, so that outside parties became involved. The school board members
themselves voted the beliefs with which they had started. Only one board
member was moved to change sides, though his vote was critical in neutering
the busing policy.
The principle on which the opposition to
busing rested was that of "neighborhood schools." Those in the
neighborhood should be able to send their children to nearby schools and
control those schools. Others should stay out. Mayor Richard Daley left it to
the school board to settle, but he indicated he favored neighborhood schools
so that parents could "...see their children home for lunch, and discuss
what happened in school with them" (quoted in Peterson, 1976, p. 160).
The overall guiding policy for the city
was "racial balance," which meant that policies should keep the
racial distribution in the city as it was. Otherwise, it was feared, whites
would move to the suburbs, thus making the city increasingly minority.
Neighborhood schools were seen as facilitating racial balance. But when plans
were made to maintain this racial balance by introducing African American
students into a few schools in modest numbers, the white population wanted
none of it. Something similar happened in other cities. Again, the same
features apply as for policies in the South: exclusion from the mainstream,
vigorous opposition by whites, and control of African American education by
whites. Whether students were subjected to a differentiated curriculum is not
discernible from Peterson's analysis, nor are we told the presumed traits of
African Americans. Finally, this neighborhood policy was seen as fair since
any people could have their own neighborhood schools in principle.
Chicago Retention, 1998
Thirty years later,
Chicago schools were more than 80 percent minority. The racial balance
policies had not kept whites in the city, nor white
children in the public schools. Whites had fled the city or put their children
in private schools. What also had occurred was a radical restructuring of the
schools, a decentralization to the local school
forced by the Illinois legislature, which had become frustrated by the
inability of the Chicago schools to stay within their budget. Acting on the
ideas of Designs for Change, an educational activist group, each school
became governed by a local school council. This decentralization was an
attempt to wrest control of the local schools away from the central
bureaucracy, an idea that would appear to conform closely to the
"neighborhood school" principle, the presumed basis for blunting
desegregation years before.
However, what happened in the late 1990s
was that Mayor Richard M. Daley, son of the former mayor (Richard J. Daley),
took control back from the local school councils. New legislation gave the
Mayor control over the schools. Daley recentralized the schools and appointed
his aide as head. The major educational reform policy became
"retention," making students repeat a grade if they did not attain
a specific cut-off score on a standardized test. More than 12,000 elementary
students were retained in grades 3, 6, and 8 in 1996 and 1997. Schools with
the highest rates of failure were 69% African American, 27% Latino, 3% white and 94% low income. In the
1997-1998 school year, Chicago's Transition Centers (special high
schools for the retained) enrolled 929 African Americans, 330 Latinos, and 34
whites.
Furthermore, a new curriculum consisting
of more than 4,000 lesson plans based on the standardized achievement tests
was implemented, and teachers were monitored to ensure that they taught these
lessons. Such practices are far removed from the "neighborhood
schools" principle. Again, the idea of minorities running their own
schools did not seem viable to white authorities.
Retaining students has proved to be one of
the worst educational practices. The research evidence against it is
overwhelming. Retained students do not achieve more academically and are much
more likely to drop out of school later (Shepard and Smith, 1989). Often they
become stigmatized by their failure. In one study, flunking a grade increased
the chances of an African American male dropping out of school by 38 percent
and a white female by 17 percent, all other factors being equal (Grissom and
Shepard, 1989). Those being retained are mostly minority males.
New York City had a similar retention
program in the 1980s in which the school district held back twenty-five
percent of students in fourth and seventh grades. The program resulted in no
greater academic gain and in higher drop- out rates for those students
retained, who were more than 80 percent minority. Nonetheless, in the late
1990s retention was the popular program of choice for minority students in
large cities across the country. The Chicago program was
praised as exemplary by President Clinton in his 1999 State of the Union
address, and Clinton proposed similar retention policies all across
the country enforced by federal sanctions.
Massive retention policies display
features similar to other educational policies for minorities. First,
students are excluded from the mainstream. Second, they are taught a
differentiated curriculum. In the case of Chicago, the curriculum is based on
the standardized test being administered to retain them. Unfortunately,
teaching a particular test often does not generalize to other forms of
academic achievement (Linn, 1998). The differentiated curriculum is based on
the presumed characteristics of those retained, i.e., their
low achievement levels and it is justified by objective test scores.
Third, the process is controlled by whites running the
system.
While William Julius Wilson suggests that
Americans will not support policies seen to benefit minorities primarily,
Americans do seem to support policies which are
detrimental to minorities. They would not support massive retention if it
were applied to majority populations. The Chicago suburbs fail less than one
percent of their students. If one looked at the explicit rationales for
Chicago's neighborhood schools and Chicago's later retention program, one
would be puzzled by apparent contradictions. Yet both sets of policies are
fully consistent with the underlying beliefs about minorities and with the
education policies applied to minorities.
The Current Educational System
Although American
racism has improved discernibly over the past several decades and minorities
have more rights than they used to, basic beliefs remain in place. In a
national survey of racial attitudes, Schuman, Steeh,
and Bobo (1985) concluded:
Relations between blacks and whites in this country have
been based since the beginning on a conception of two socially distinct
groups defined largely in terms of physical characteristics....There
is no evidence that this virtually absolute differentiation of the American
population has been reduced by any of the changes of the past four decades.
Indeed, it may even have increased.... America is not much more color-blind
today than it ever was.... (Schuman, Steeh, and Bobo, 1985, p. 201).
Carmines and Stimson
(1989) demonstrated how race became the major domestic partisan issue in
American politics after 1964. It was not a partisan issue before because
whites were agreed about the place of African Americans: African Americans
were disenfranchised. However, economic change led to the development of a
new African American leadership class and the Civil Rights movement.
Beginning with the 1964 Johnson and Goldwater Presidential contest, race
became a major issue separating Democrats and Republicans, albeit in
disguised form. The issue was expressed in the form of whether the federal
government should take steps to alleviate racial problems or whether this
task was beyond its proper scope ("The government cannot solve all our
social problems".)
It would be amazing if such deep-seated
beliefs did not affect education policy. In fact, I believe that education
policy has been profoundly shaped by these beliefs. Americans have defined
their educational system in such a way as to ensure that African Americans
(and often other minorities) are treated in an exclusionary way—which
is to say that they are saddled with an education which is inferior, and this
inferior education contributes to whites seeing them as having undesirable
attributes and as being unable to govern themselves.
Here are some education policies that
produce these outcomes, even though the policies may have been implemented
from motives other than racial ones:
- School
organization—Schools are organized into separate governing entities which effectively encapsulate and isolate
African Americans and other minorities in large numbers. Large school
districts are overwhelmingly minority, and these
districts are rarely controlled by the minorities. White
politicians and policymakers effectively control the fate of minority
children.
- School
finance—Schools are financed through local sources in large part,
which ensures resources are hugely unequally distributed among school
districts, with minority schools faring particularly poorly financially.
Kozol (1991) has illustrated these
inequalities dramatically.
- Curricula—Schools
with large numbers of minorities receive educational curricula unlike
those in majority schools. These curricula are geared to
"slow" students and are repetitious and boring, based on
presumed lesser abilities of minority students (Levin, 1993).
- Ability
grouping—Within local schools students are separated into differentied groups, and the low-ability groups
contain disproportionate numbers of minorities (if there are any) who
receive differentiated curricula (Oakes, 1985, Wheelock, 1992).
- Retention—Flunking
students on a massive scale is done in districts with large numbers of
minorities. Being retained does not increase learning but rather
significantly increases the student's chances of dropping out of school
eventually (Shepard and Smith, 1989).
- Testing—Achievement
tests legitimate these activities to make differentiation appear fair.
Students are selected for ability groups and retained in grade by test
scores. If students are selected by objective assessments, how can the
practices be unfair? The way tests are used contributes much towards
legitimating racial policies, even as test publishers publicly deplore
such uses (Haney, 1993).
Each of these educational practices can be explained and
justified without reference to race. Local schools, local financing,
standardized testing, ability grouping, retention, and differentiated
curricula can appear to have little to do with race. They could stem from
American beliefs in autonomy, freedom, and meritocracy. But a prolonged
examination of how these policies function together—and who they are applied to—reveals that the policies
effectively segregate, differentiate, and provide minorities with an inferior
education. The operation of the system as a whole has racial consequences
even if those administering it do not have that in mind.
No other developed countries incorporate
all these practices in this fashion. Most countries have common curricula,
much more equitable funding, and central distribution of resources. Few
countries employ ability grouping at the primary levels, and no developed
countries that I know employ massive retention based on single test score
cutoffs.
The structure of our entire educational
system has been strongly influenced by the beliefs that people hold about
minorities, particularly about African Americans. No doubt there are other
contributing causes for these policies as well. No policy ever results from a
single cause. Nonetheless, American education as a whole functions as a
racist system, whatever its virtues might be.
References
Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of blacks in the
south, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Bailyn, B. (1986). Voyagers to the west: A
passage in the peopling of America on the eve of revolution. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Carmines, E. G. and Stimson, J. A. (1989). Issue evolution: Race the
transformation of American politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Grissom, J. B. and Shepard, L. A. (1989). Repeating and dropping out of
school. In Shepard, L. A. and Smith, M. L. (Eds). Flunking
grades: Research and policies on retention. London: Falmer.
34-63.
Haney, W. (1993). Testing and minorities. In L. Weiss and M. Fine (Eds.). Beyond
silenced voices. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 45-73.
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities.
New York: Crown.
Levin, H. L. (1993). The economics of at-risk students. In E. P. Hoffman
(Ed.), Essays on the economics of education. Kalamazoo, MI: W. E.
Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 11-33.
Linn, R. L. (1998). Assessments and accountability. Center for Research on
Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Boulder: University of Colorado.
Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary
imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Myrdal, G. (1964). An American dilemma. 2 volumes. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Jacobson, M. F. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European
immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality.
New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.
Peterson, P. E. (1976). School politics, Chicago style. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schuman, H., Steeh, C., Bobo,
L. (1985). Racial attitudes in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Shepard, L. A. and Smith, M. L. (Eds.). (1989). Flunking grades:
Research and policies on retention. London: Falmer.
Wheelock, A. (1992). Crossing the tracks. New York: New Press.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
About the Author
Ernest R. House
Email: Ernie.House@Colorado.edu
Ernest R. House is a professor in the School of Education at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, he was at the Center for
Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation (CIRCE) at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.He has been a visiting
scholar at UCLA, Harvard, and New Mexico, as well as in England, Australia,
Spain, Sweden, Austria, and Chile. His primary interests are evaluation and
policy analysis.
Books authored include Evaluating with Validity (1980), Jesse
Jackson and the Politics of Charisma (1988), Professional
Evaluation: Social Impact and Political Consequences (1993). His
most recent book, Schools for Sale was published in 1998.
He is the 1989 recipient of the Harold E. Lasswell
Prize presented by Policy Sciences and the 1990 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Evaluation Theory, presented by the
American Evaluation Association. He was editor of New Directions in
Program Evaluation (1982 to 1985) and columnist for Evaluation
Practice (1984-89). Major studies he has directed or particpated
in include evaluation of the Illinois Gifted Program for the Illinois
legislature (1968-1972), assessment of the Michigan Accountability Program
for the National Education Association (1974), critique of the National
Follow Through Evaluation for the Ford Foundation (1977), audit of the
Promotional Gates Program evaluation for the Mayor's Office in New York City
(1981), assessment of environmental education policies in Europe for OECD
(1992), and evaluation of science, engineering, and technology education
programs across federal departments for the Federal Coordinating Council for
Science, Engineering, and Technology in Washington (1993).
No comments:
Post a Comment