Advancing Race and Ethnicity in Education

Richard Race, Vini Lander, Richard Race, Vini Lander

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137274762
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica comparata

This timely collection focuses on domestic and international education research on race and ethnicity. As co-conveners of the British Education Research Associations (BERA) Special Education Group on Race and Ethnicity (2010-2013), Race and Lander are advocates for the promotion of race and ethnicity within education. With its unique structure and organisation of empirical material, this volume collates contributions from global specialists and fresh new voices to bring cutting-edge research and findings to a multi-disciplinary marker which includes education, sociology and political studies. The aim of this book is to promote and advocate a range of contemporary issues related to race, ethnicity and inclusion in relation to pedagogy, teaching and learning.

1

Identity Performance and Race: The Use of Critical Race Theory in Understanding Institutional Racism and Discrimination in Schools

Alice Bradbury

Introduction

In this chapter, I explain two ways in which Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers useful contributions to the field of race and education and, more specifically, to discussions of institutional racism and classroom discrimination. I begin with some background on CRT and its use in education, both in the United States and increasingly, in the United Kingdom. I then set out the first illustration of the use of CRT in education, which focuses on the use of storytelling or chronicles in CRT scholarship and their use in examining the operation of processes of institutional racism at a national, local or school level. The second illustration concerns the use of theories of ‘identity performance’ from the work of CRT legal scholars Devon Carbado and Gulati to interrogate practices of discrimination at the micro-level of the classroom. By no means do I mean to suggest that these are the only productive uses of CRT, only that these appear to be two examples of the use of the theoretical and methodological tools offered by CRT.

A wider aim here is to make a claim as to the use of theoretical tools, both those offered by CRT and other theoretical frameworks, in studies of race and education. The issue of discrimination in schools based on race has long been a concern for those working in the sociology of education, and a range of research – dating back decades – in domestic and international contexts, has focused on the ways in which teachers’ attitudes, education policy and classroom practices have worked to create and maintain disparities in educational attainment at all levels of the education system (see, for example, Coard, 1971; Wright, 1992; Gillborn, 1995; Connolly, 1998). As a researcher, my concern has been to contribute to the increased understandings of this picture, by considering practices in primary and early years education which effectively discriminate on the grounds of race (and other axes of identity, which are not my concern here; see for example, Bradbury, 2011, 2013). This research aims to add to a complex picture of how race works in schools which, although long-established, seems to evolve and remake itself as the political and social picture changes over time. My wider claim in this chapter is that in order to make sense of the various forms of data provided by research, in all their complexity and yet relative familiarity (at least in terms of the overall effects of racism), we need the insights offered by critical theoretical perspectives, such as Critical Race Theory. These perspectives provide ways of thinking about how children and young people are discriminated against in schools and, in turn, provide ways to think about how this can be challenged and resisted.

Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a broad range of ideas concerning race inequality, a theory which originated in legal scholarship in the United States. Increasingly, CRT is used in many social-science disciplines, including education, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Dixson and Rousseau, 2006; Gillborn, 2006a, 2006b). CRT emerged as response to Critical Legal Studies (CLS), a legal movement which rejected traditional legal scholarship ‘in favor of a form of law that spoke to the specificity of individuals and groups in social and cultural contexts’ (Ladson-Billings, 2004, p. 52). Although CLS focused on the impact of legal discourses relating to inequalities, there was a relative neglect of race and racism, so CRT provided an alternative theorisation which centred on race and its role in society (Crenshaw et al., 1995). In this section I consider the basic tenets of CRT and how these have been applied to the field of education.

A fundamental tenet of CRT is a description of racism as endemic, ‘deeply ingrained legally, culturally, and even psychologically’ (Tate, 1997, p. 234). Within CRT, racism is not considered as limited to isolated episodes of individual prejudice or violence, but as ‘normal, not aberrant’ (Delgado, 1995) in every-day life. There is a focus on lived experience, the micro-practices of discrimination and disadvantage that people from minoritised groups experience on a daily basis, and their cumulative effects. These are what Delgado (1995) calls ‘business as usual’ forms of racism, established, unseen and unchallenged.

The language of CRT reflects this focus on the operation of power in relation to race; the term ‘White supremacy’ is used not in relation to extremist groups but as a description of ‘the operation of forces that saturate the everyday mundane actions and policies that shape the world in the interests of white people’ (Gillborn, 2008, p. 35). Research and scholarship thus focuses on the ways in which institutions and practices work to maintain and reproduce White supremacy in all fields of life. This links to a concurrent focus on White privilege – the benefits of Whiteness in all aspects of everyday existence – which McIntosh describes as an ‘invisible package of unearned interests’ (McIntosh, 1992).

Within CRT, ‘race’ is consider to be a social construct: there is no such thing ‘ontologically prior to its production and instantiation in discourses’ (Carbado, 2002, p. 181). ‘Race’ is a construct applied to human bodies, and acted upon as such. This conception of race rejects the idea of fundamental physical differences, but accepts the importance of visual racial markers in affecting individuals’ lived experiences. Some literature influenced by CRT reflects on the flexibility of racial terms over time and in different contexts (Allen, 2009; Gillborn, 2010; Rampersand, 2011); and links can be made to work outside CRT focused on the political motives of changing racial categories and hierarchies in terms of the continuation of White dominance (such as Ignatiev, 1995; Nayak, 2009).

As I demonstrate further in my first illustration, some CRT literature also employs non-conventional formats, such as the use of chronicles and story-telling, in order to examine the ‘myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race’ (Delgado, 1995, p. 14) through a focus on experience (see, for example, Bell, 1992; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Gillborn, 2008). The aim is to provide a counter to supposedly-scientific notions of neutrality within research, to ‘add necessary contextual contours to the seeming “objectivity” of positivist perspectives’ (Ladson-Billings, 2004, p. 53).

In the United Kingdom, the main proponent of the use of CRT in education has been Gillborn (2008), who uses a CRT framework to explore the issue of institutional racism in the United Kingdom’s school system (see also Gillborn, 2006c). This work follows a body of literature in the United States from a wide range of CRT scholars focused on education (Tate, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Dixson and Rousseau, 2006; Taylor et al., 2009), and forms part of a wider adoption of CRT within the field of education worldwide (Ladson-Billings, 2004; Gillborn and Youdell, 2009). Gillborn’s work, and specifically his use of counter-stories, is central to my first illustration of the use of CRT in education.

Using stories to examine institutional racism

Over the last two decades, discussions of racism in schools have moved away from the idea of individual acts of racism – what Gillborn (2002) calls the ‘rotten apple’ notion of racism – to more nuanced analyses of practices and systems which unintentionally discriminated against children and young people from minoritised¹ communities. This has been aided by the definition of ‘institutional racism’ provided for the Macpherson Inquiry into the police investigation of the death of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence – a definition which has been used widely by academics and commentators since:

[T]he collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (Macpherson et al., 1999, p. 28)

This shift in focus towards unwitting acts which nonetheless result in outcomes which disadvantage minoritised communities has affected research into discrimination in schools, and the analysis of this research. For a time at least, this definition reinvigorated interest in this issue (Blair et al., 1999; Gillborn, 2006b). However, attempting to research unintentional actions and their outcomes brings with it problems of interpretation, as was seen in methodological debates of the 1990s (Connolly and Troyna, 1998; Foster, 1990, 1991; Gillborn, 1990; Wright, 1990). There has also been resistance to accusations of institutional racism in the education system and, since the late 2000s, there has been a shift in public and political concern away from the issue of race in education, with an alternative focus on the ‘White working class’ as the victims of the education system (Sveinsson, 2009; Gillborn, 2011; Reay, 2009). The success of some groups of minoritised students from the ‘model minority’ Indian and Chinese communities has also been used simplistically to argue that there is no institutional racism in education (an issue discussed in more detail below). Yet, disparities in attainment have continued from early years to higher education (DfE, 2010a, 2010b; DfE, 2012), and contemporary research continues to suggest that discriminatory practices occur in complex ways which conform with with Macpherson’s definition of institutional racism (Bradbury, 2011, 2013).

The continued resistance against claims of institutional racism is based on both the misreading of the term as indicating specific acts of crude racist behaviour and, simultaneously, a reluctance of individuals to acknowledge how their ‘unwitting’ acts might combine to create systemic processes which discriminate. This is where, I would argue, an approach taken by CRT scholars can help in illuminating our thinking about intentionality in discussions of institutional racism. The concept of institutional racism has expanded the popular conception of how racism can operate even when ‘not in the minds of those involved’ (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000). CRT scholars take this further by asking educators to consider how racism can operate within the ‘normal workings’ of the education system – in everyday practices and systems in schools. One way to explore this is through the use of counter-stories to illustrate how racist outcomes can result from apparently innocuous practices or reforms. Gillborn (2006c) used a story about an imaginary, explicitly racist society to consider changes made to the assessment of children in the first year of school. In this story, a ‘despised group’ are doing well in a test, and so the government changes the test so that they no longer have a higher level of attainment.

In my story, the despised group is excelling at a test that every pupil must take. ... But if the dominant group cannot restrict entry to the test, it seems that only one course of action remains; change the test. The test must be redesigned so that the despised group no longer succeed.

Simple.

But, of course, such a crass and obviously racist set of events could never occur in the real world. There would be an outcry. Wouldn’t there? (Gillborn, 2006c, pp. 324–326)

Gillborn used this story – which I have truncated here – to discuss the results from the Foundation Stage Profile, which was an assessment used in Reception (children aged 4–5) in England from 2003. These results showed a pattern of attainment by an ethnic group that was similar to that at older key stages, including lower attainment by Black ethnic groups (to use the Department of Children Schools and Families (DCSF’s) terminology). However, some of the data collected through local systems of assessment before 2003 indicated that Black pupils had high levels of attainment at age five. But, just like in the imaginary racist society Gillborn describes, there was no outcry about the new pattern of results. This does not suggest, he argues, that the change was done deliberately, but it is significant that the results are the same:

But there is no evidence of conscious intent: there is no conspiracy. It is more frightening than that. Rather than being generated by a deliberate strategy (one that is readily open to exposure and reversal) these changes appear to have resulted from the normal workings of the education system – a system that places race equality at the very margins of debate and takes no action when Black students are judged to be failing. (Gillborn, 2006c, p. 334)

Gillborn uses a simple technique of telling an imaginary story to illustrate the seriousness of the outcomes that can and do result from systemic reforms for minoritised young people. I took up Gillborn’s story in my discussion of an ethnographic research project examining the same assessment for five-year-olds (which was renamed the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile in 2008) and the classroom practices it produced (Bradbury, 2011, 2013). I used the story to analyse the creation of a system in which low results could be maintained over a period of time. This story was informed by the findings from long-term ethnographic studies of two Reception classrooms in inner London, but was again based on an imaginary racist society:

A new test is introduced; the despised group do badly, and the status quo is preserved. But, the new test is for very young children, and so has to be based entirely on teachers’ judgements and observations. There is a risk that the despised group might start to get better scores. How to control the teachers, and ensure the scores are kept down? (Bradbury, 2011, p. 671)

I used this story to consider the impact of the practices identified in the data collected in real schools. I focused on two processes, both of which I identified in the data from the Reception classrooms I studied. First, the discourse of inevitable low attainment was reinforced through policies which singled out particular groups of pupils and whole clusters of schools as needing additional help. As the assessment was based on teacher’s judgements alone, these low expectations were obscured, and even expected. A second process, in the language of the story ‘ensures that if the teachers do start to give children from the despised group high scores, this can be monitored and prevented’ (Bradbury, 2011, p. 671). Moderation systems conducted by the local authority deemed results from one inner city school to be ‘too high’ and therefore inaccurate enough so as to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Identity Performance and Race: The Use of Critical Race Theory in Understanding Institutional Racism and Discrimination in Schools
• 2  British Muslim Schools: Institutional Isomorphism and the Transition from Independent to Voluntary-Aided Status
• 3  Educational Inclusion: Meeting the Needs of All Traveller Pupils
• 4  Race and Ethnicity in US Education
• 5  Journeys to Success: An Appreciative Inquiry into the Academic Attainment of Black and Minority Ethnic Students at a Post-1992 London University
• 6  Initial Teacher Education: The Practice of Whiteness
• 7  Beyond Kung Fu and Takeaways? Negotiation of British Chinese Identities in Schools
• 8  Overcoming Disciplinary Boundaries: Connecting Language, Education and (Anti)racism
• 9  Multiculturalism and Integration
• 10  The Schooled Identities of Australian Multiculturalism: Professional Vision, Reflexive Civility and Education for a Culturally Complex World
• 11  Using Specialist Software to Assist Knowledge Generation: An Example from a Study of Practitioners Perceptions of Music as a Tool for Ethnic Inclusion in Cross-Community Activities in Northern Ireland
• 12  The Sheer Weight of Whiteness in the Academy: A UK Case Study
• 13  The Multicultural Dilemma, the Integrationist Consensus and the Consequences for Advancing Race and Ethnicity within Education
• 14  Resilience, the Black Child and the Coalition Government
• Index