Abstract
Educational leaders attempting to enact equity-focused change in their schools are frequently met with fierce opposition by politically powerful parents whose children are well served by the status quo. The purpose of this conceptual article is to: (a) explore the utility of Critical Race Theory as a framework for helping K-12 school leaders anticipate and make sense of resistance to change efforts aimed at creating greater educational equity for underserved students, and (b) suggest ways that school leaders can more effectively engage in equity reforms in their schools. To do this, we examine a highly contested public debate over a recent equity-focused change effort at Berkeley High School (BHS)—a large, racially and socioeconomically diverse public school in Northern California. Using the events at BHS as an example, we argue that change efforts could be undertaken more effectively by: (a) identifying and addressing the underlying property interests up front, (b) anticipating how majoritarian narratives rooted in “colorblindness” and deficit thinking would be employed as a means for obscuring and maintaining unequal access to scarce resources, and (c) focusing on specific areas of interest convergence.
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Notes
Throughout this article, students/families/people of color will refer primarily to African American and Latino/a students and their families, as these represent the majority of families whose children are struggling in these contexts. However, there are also a small number of Native American families represented here and some Asian American families are also struggling.
We do not capitalize ‘white’ in order to maintain parity with the term ‘students of color’ or variations of that term. We use the terms ‘white’ and ‘whiteness’ throughout this paper with the understanding that in the U.S. today many of the privileges and positive presumptions of whiteness are sometimes extended to certain individuals and groups (e.g. Asian Americans), “despite the public recognition that, from a bio-racial perspective, they are not fully White” (Haney Lopez 2006, p. 151). We also do not intend to essentialize white people or people of color – there certainly are white people who fight against injustice and people of color who fight for power and privilege. However, we do want to keep central the racial nature of our argument, as we strongly believe that the issues presented here are issues of race, and not just power and privilege. Precisely how to disentangle power, privilege and whiteness is complex and beyond the scope of this article. However, we do acknowledge that complexity here.
An additional grade point is awarded to students who take AP classes. Students can also be awarded college course credit for each score of at least 3 (out of a possible 5) that they receive on the AP exams. Thus, students can increase their grade point average above a “4.0”, which is required for entry into several highly competitive, elite colleges. In most high schools, students need to complete “regular” high school chemistry before they can take AP “college” chemistry. The additional instructional minutes at BHS meant that teachers could combine the two, allowing students to move more quickly through the AP science curriculum. However, this also made the AP science classes extremely difficult, and anecdotally many students relied on extensive, expensive private tutoring.
It is important to note, however, that when counter-narratives emerge merely in reaction to majoritarian narratives, they can actually be quite counterproductive by creating a foil against which majoritarian versions of reality are given “air time” and ultimately publicly “re-legitimated” (Darling-Hammond 1997; Oakes 2005).
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Pollack, T.M., Zirkel, S. Negotiating the Contested Terrain of Equity-Focused Change Efforts in Schools: Critical Race Theory as a Leadership Framework for Creating More Equitable Schools. Urban Rev 45, 290–310 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0231-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0231-4