Abstract
Adam Wright, Michael A. Gottfried, and Vi-Nhuan Le demonstrate empirically that minority teachers have a positive impact on the “social-emotional development” of American minority kindergarten children. Their analyses of 2010–2011 data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study focus on measurable effects in four social and affective domains: self-control, externalizing behaviors, interpersonal skills, and approaches to learning. This is a significant contribution to decades of qualitative and quantitative evidence on the effects of minority teachers and minority hiring policies, which have a difficult and politically charged history over the six decades since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. As Wright and colleagues observe, while the school-age population of minority children and youth—African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and migrant and refugee communities—continues to grow beyond majority in many urban schools, districts, and states, the teaching workforce remains predominantly White. They conclude with comments on the limits of the existing data sets and a call for more varied disciplinary approaches and resources for the study of teachers’ and students’ racial and cultural backgrounds. In another recent analysis of a national longitudinal database on effective teaching, Cherng and Halpin (2016) show that minority students consistently rate Black and Latino teachers higher across a range of measures. Both studies cite the extensive empirical literature that makes the case for what Wright et al. here refer to as “cultural synchrony”: aggregate educational benefits of alignment of the cultural and racial backgrounds of teachers with those of their students.
I recently have begun to understand this experience of teacher as cultural Other as a case in point of what W.E.B. Du Bois (1902/2005) describes as “double consciousness” in the Souls of Black Folk—discussed in this Centennial Issue in a powerful memoir by Edmund W. Gordon and L’Tanya M. Watkins. Du Bois’s model enables us to explain how minority students’ (who may be the majority in a school’s student body but remain minorities in a normalized, unmarked dominant culture) experience is mediated by how they are perceived in the eyes of an Other, how they are positioned on a taxonomic grid of specification by “achievement,” “ability,” “development,” “intelligence,” “giftedness,” and so on by a cultural institution that is visibly run through the eyes and actions of a dominant racial/cultural Other. 1 There is a compelling case that where institutions can create an isomorphism or cultural fit between teachers’ and students’ backgrounds, they are positioned to make a difference in both academic and nonacademic achievement and performance (Ladson-Billings, 1997). But there is complexity in such a shift: To see authority and judgment in the White institution wielded by someone of one’s own color, race, ethnicity, and form of “difference” has a host of potential educational effects, sociologically contingent and potentially contradictory. It nominally does so by changing the ethno/racial habitus of the teacher in the social field of the school. This in turn has the potential to alter the rules for the recognition and exchange of capital in that field (Luke, 2009).
In relation to the Australian context where I live and work, several findings of our large-scale empirical study of school and leadership reform in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education (Luke et al. 2013) are relevant to questions of cultural synchrony—or indeed, to questions of “cultural asynchrony” (Carbaugh, 2014): where intercultural communication and exchange breaks down, fails, or where it is institutionally or systemically precluded or blocked. First, while very high percentages of White Australian teachers interviewed and surveyed expressed commitments to social justice, Indigenous reconciliation, and anti-racism, their classroom practices tended to revert to deficit models of basic skills that did not acknowledge or engage with students’ cultural knowledges, capacities, and experiences. There appeared to be a gap between their professed beliefs about social justice, Aboriginality, culture, and history and their curriculum and pedagogic practice. This is a comparable phenomenon to that reported by Angelina Castagno’s (2014) ethnographic study of urban White American secondary teachers, whose liberal “good intentions” are set against and within deficit approaches to teaching minority youth.
Second, Aboriginal teachers reported curious blends of deficit attitudes towards them, set against typical, and often overwhelming, staffroom expectations that they would speak for and re/present all Indigenous peoples and communities and that they would assume primary responsibility for behavior management and community liaison responsibilities—even where they were working on others’ traditional lands. For their part, Aboriginal students spoke about miscommunication and misrecognition of their actions and motivations, thoughts, and knowledge by non-Indigenous teachers and the importance of Indigenous teachers and education workers in schools (Phillips & Luke, in press).
There are, of course, complex and intersecting experiences of diversity among those who might count as “minorities” of color: Indigenous and migrant, rural and urban, working class and middle class. Yet for many of us who were schooled as minorities of color in White-dominated systems, for many teachers of color, parents and caregivers, and community Elders and leaders—the impact of our/not their teachers on our/not their kids is not a matter of scientific evidence and proof (Delpit, 1995). It is lived and experiential, intuitive and common sense. In the Australian work, our research team shared with Indigenous communities findings about the importance of Aboriginal teachers, principals, and education workers with Indigenous researchers and teachers, Elders, students, and parents. A common response was of the order, “and so . . . what’s new.” As we presented our findings to our Indigenous colleagues and reference group, Will Davis, a leading Aboriginal educator and curriculum developer, said: “Our mob have known this forever, but now you’ve got the degrees and the numbers to show it.” 2
Trying not to be too defensive after having prepared 500 pages of technical prose for the Australian government, my response was something like: “Well, right—of course—but this is how it looks from the scientific standpoint with all its cultural limits, and we think there are some new explanations here.”
Consider for a moment what Will’s comments say about the relationship between the experience of minority children and youth, community knowledge/wisdom, and scientific evidence. My questions here are: Is this gap between minority community experience—often ethnographically described as “folk wisdom” or local knowledge (Levine, 2002)—and “scientific evidence” principally a matter of the time lag involved in empirical demonstration and research publication? Is it an issue of the limitations of prevailing scientific paradigms? Is it an effect of dominant ideology and the politics of knowledge?
A Memoir and Bibliographic Search
Those of us who grew up as minorities in these systems know it from experience and life history—it is in our bodies and memories. In the 1961–1962 school year, I met my first Chinese American teacher at Ivanhoe Elementary, Los Angeles Unified School District: Mr. Herbert P. Leong. This had an electric and indelible effect. He was my first teacher to speak an accented English—his skin color and look were the same as mine. Mr. Leong raised the intellectual bar for all of us, and on more than one occasion, he let me know—often without words—that he knew where I was coming from, what was negotiable and what wasn’t, and that he stood for what my family and community expected. Our parents and the Los Angeles Chinese community came to view him as a folk hero. 3
Hence, a first reading of the Wright et al. study generated my own generational “so . . . what’s new” response. It piqued a personal curiosity and my sociological imagination: What might educational research have said about my experience and that of other minority communities I grew up with in the 1950s and early 1960s? This is not just an exercise in nostalgia, for the year I was in Mr. Leong’s class marked the first Freedom Rides and Dr. King’s support for the movement in Albany, Georgia. As I was finishing elementary school, the federal courts ordered James Meredith to be admitted to the University of Mississippi. The movement was underway, our parents and teachers were talking about it, it was on the news and in our church; we felt it then even as kids, and the struggle continues today.
Turning my search engine to back issues of this most august of educational research journals, I began my search of AERJ in 1964, the first digitally archived issues. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, well into a decade of violent struggles and mass protests over civil rights. Yet during this period, the journal has no visible engagement with issues of race and education. Articles featured quantitative research around testing and measurement, educational psychology, and learning theories, with specific work on class size, eye moments, teaching boys to read, and indeed, “selected variables to abilities to handle a bowling ball” (Liba, Harris, & Sabol, 1965). The 1966 volume features the first piece on computer-assisted instruction and a review of Bereiter and Englemann’s prototypical work on “teaching disadvantaged children” (Hodges, 1966). The first published AERJ piece on “cultural differences in high school achievement” appears in 1967 (Stewart, Dole, & Harris, 1967).
The capstone AERJ publication of this Civil Rights period is the lead article in the January 1968 edition: “Social Class, Race and Genetics” by Arthur R. Jensen (1968). In this period from 1964 to 1968—the central period of the Civil Rights Movement and a key moment in American history, when hundreds of thousands of minority kids like me were moving through the system while minority teachers like Mr. Leong were beginning their career pathways—the first major publication on race and education, and specifically African American education, to appear in the American Educational Research Journal, is Arthur Jensen’s hereditarian explanation of differential educational achievement by minorities.
The answer to my bibliographic search was that my experience and those of fellow minority students and our minority teachers during that first wave of the Civil Rights Movement did not feature in the pages of AERJ.
Explaining Silence
In a recent New Yorker piece on Marx’s life and writing in 1848, Louis Menard (2016) points out that the challenge is to “historicize” the past rather than “presentize” it: that is, to explain the historical political economic, cultural, and social contexts of a text rather than to retrospectively apply criteria and judgment from the present. It is always risky to assign ideological intent or interest at work retrospectively, in hindsight, without a fuller account of the cultural and political contexts and due consideration of the lived experience of previous generations of scholars, writers, and researchers. The risk is a game of post hoc ideological pin the tail on the donkey—that is, it is to reinterpret the past through contemporary stance, standpoint, and class/cultural position. But at the same time, to assume a disinterested and neutral view of the history of our field would be naïve.
The trick is not just the unmasking of this or that former political leader or cultural icon or national hero as a slave owner or racist employer. This renaming, re-storying, and revision of received knowledge an important (“presentizing”) move as part of an agenda of recognitive social justice. Yet the focal critical analytic task is understanding why and how the initial masking and misrepresentation of inhumane, exploitative, and genocidal actions and events occurred in the first place, that is, to critically relocate human agency and action in relation to its own historic context. Knowledge is always tied to human interests. Knowledge is always made from historical standpoint and epistemic position. The construction and selection of official knowledge—whether in the curriculum or the academic journal—is culturally mediated and politically constrained action (cf. Apple, 2014). Further, what is not in the archive—silences, absences, and omissions—may tell us as much as what is said and written (Derrida, 1978).
To follow up, I reviewed other journals and work published in adjacent disciplinary fields. I narrowed the search on minority teachers and students just to the descriptor “Negro teachers,” where I encountered several well-cited articles published during the early 1960s in the Journal of Negro Education, Sociology of Education, Journal of Social Psychology, and Journal of Teacher Education. The topic of “the school board and the Negro teacher in California” (Record, 1963) was featured in the first volume of the newly minted journal, Equity and Excellence in Education, which continues its work to this day. It would appear that there was a notable emergent focus on race, teaching and teachers, students and performance in other journals and other social science research. But the pages of AERJ—the peak journal of the American Educational Research Association—remained largely silent about race and minority culture until Jensen’s piece in 1968.
Academic journals are gatekeeping institutions: technologies for the codification of fields of knowledge and truth. While I and a whole wave of postwar children of cultural minorities of color were moving through the educational system en masse, the journal and the field were focused on contemporary assessment and measurement paradigms; generic policy problems of class size, leadership, schooling, and curriculum; and the ongoing search for generalizable theories and models of teaching and learning. In a recent discussion of her transition from schoolteacher to doctoral student in the early 1960s, Courtney Cazden describes her arrival at Harvard to study language and social class based on her teaching of Puerto Rican students. She was advised that the available explanations were models of psychological and linguistic deficit (Cazden, in press). The doxa of educational science at a time of great social and cultural upheaval was a closer approximation of E. L. Thorndike’s educational science than that of Dewey (1938) or W.E.B. Du Bois (1902/2005).
A century after the founding of our field, a half century after the first wave of the Civil Rights Movement, we face a comparable academic, generational, and indeed, cultural and political crossroads today. In the face of racialized violence and heightened political conflict, there is renewed movement to counter persistent economic injustice and a powerful backlash against any gains won by cultural “minorities,” migrants and refugees, women, LGBTQ, and others over the past decades. In many communities, educational inequality is increasing, and schools and communities are facing urgent and immediate social and economic problems. At the same time, educational systems remain wedded to a model of education that has prioritized the search for generalizable, universal truths about teaching and learning to guide “evidence-based” funding and policy. The small local narrative of events and publications around the early 1960s that I have explored here offers a troubling picture of the uneasy relationships between everyday lived experience in schools, community contexts of economic inequality, cultural and political conflict, and the selective traditions of the evidentiary base of “facts” in the social fields of educational research. My aim here is to raise questions about the paradigmatic formation of “truth” in educational research, the role of journal publication in the time-based adjudication of what counts as knowledge—and the potentially asynchronous relationship of this canonical science to larger social movements and historical moments of struggle, conflict, and change.
Particularly with the normalization of neoliberalism and evidence-based policy, there is a complex push-pull relationship between educational research and educational practice that may have a host of unplanned effects. By definition, educational research—particularly the quasi-experimental design that is said to constitute the “gold standard” for policy evidence—is necessarily post hoc: Published research always reports and analyzes what “was.” This requires an extended time sequence of problem identification and definition, funding and grant application, experimental design and ethical clearance, meticulous data collection and analysis, distillation into text, refereeing/adjudication, and if it gets this far, intellectual property clearance and publication—albeit now proceeding with digital pace. At the same time, legislation and policy, systems and governance now aspire to this genre of “evidence” in order to rationalize and generate policies that aim to shape and form practice, with subsequent intended impacts on educational experience. In this welding of traditional science with neoliberal policymaking, post hoc empirical truths are put to work modeling and prognosticating the impacts of policy change on everyday reality and educational futures.
In itself, this contemporary logic of practice creates huge issues of time lag in the addressing of urgent problems in schooling, youth, and communities. Whatever its rationalist and liberal intentions, the collateral effects of this approach to educational change and reform are that it necessarily slows, constrains, or precludes local responses to pressing social and educational phenomena; moots the power of local community knowledge and experience; narrows the scope for more immediate local innovation; and, this is most troubling, any narrowing of its methodological doxa risks missing or misrecognizing new lived realities and experiences altogether. The risk is silence about what matters when it matters most.
This is about the scope and nature of what has counted and what has come to count as educational science, evidence, and research. After a century of published research on education—in the current context of Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and a refracturing of the polity and everyday life along lines of race and social class—critical debates around these relationships between experience and science, everyday life and institutional evidence, the local and the generalizable, what is made to count as evidence and policy, knowledge and ideological context, dominant methodological paradigms and Other kinds of truth and knowledge, research and innovation, and the real world and our peer-refereed versions of it are not just in order. They are well overdue.
A Postscript for Mr. Leong
For me, like many minority kids today, to have had a teacher who was visibly of my own cultural background, who looked and sounded like my parents, aunties, and uncles, has strengthened me to this day. In habitus and bearing, he was nothing less than kin. I have come to understand his work, and all of our work as teachers and scholars as cultural and intergenerational gifts. 4
Footnotes
Notes
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