The Next Chapter of Critical Educational Policy Research: Research Informing Policy Design

(Re)designing Policies to Prioritize the Needs of the Most Vulnerable Groups of Students

I recommend that a fundamental design principle in education policy formulation should first and foremost center the needs of the most vulnerable student populations (e.g., students of color, low-income students, students with disabilities, LGBTQ populations, and students without stable housing). The Curb Cut Effect exemplifies the impact of designing for the most vulnerable populations. As originally designed sidewalks did not have the end of curbs cut, they changed in the 1970s to give people with disabilities access to sidewalks (Johnson & Fox, 2003). Of note is that their intended effect went beyond individuals with disabilities; today, these cuts benefit everyone, including people pushing strollers, kids riding their bikes, the elderly using walkers, and those rolling a bag.

Jaquette and Salazar (2024) and Nichols and Dixon-Román (2024) suggest the need for this design principle in the design of education technology platforms and tools. Both papers describe how these platforms and tools prioritized the needs of the technology (e.g., interoperability and scale without regard for more equitable access) above all other considerations, hence becoming de-facto policy actors. Education technology products can ostensibly prioritize the needs of their tools under the guise of algorithmic objectivity. In reality, they incorporate racialized inputs and, thus, create outputs that perpetuate, legitimize, and extend racial disparities. Although they have the potential to produce positive results for all students, including the most marginalized, this can only occur within the confines of technical tools and algorithm-based decisions that limit the choices available to educators in their use (Williamson, 2019). For example, if data exists in a product or platform that is not compatible with existing systems, then it is unlikely it would be integrated. We can look at past modern policies (e.g., No Child Left Behind, teacher evaluation policies) to understand that even if a policy has the potential to do “good,” unintended consequences can disproportionately affect the most vulnerable students, and even the intended consequences may go awry (Cuevas et al., 2018; Dee et al., 2013; Paufler, 2018). Indeed, in a system saturated by the assumptions and interests of the most powerful groups, especially white, ² straight, and middle-class individuals, such unintended consequences are oftentimes baked into the system.

Examples from other authors in this special issue also demonstrate what happens when students of color’s interests are put last. Vue et al. (2024), through critical discourse analysis, describe what it looks like to center the emotions of “white” individuals, which results in white students avoiding discussions of race to ease their own discomfort. They explore the discourse around recent bans on critical race theory (CRT). Opponents of anti-CRT policies argue that banning CRT is a missed opportunity for white individuals, who, if engaged in discussions about race, could develop a critical consciousness. Instead, CRT bans are justified using the tactic of neutral discourse to rationalize making decisions based on emotions, but only white emotions. Similarly, “love” for the United States is used as a rationale to defend race-evasive ideals, ignoring the fact that the United States has always centered the needs and interests of white people and frequently uses white children as a key symbolic group to be protected/saved (Crenshaw, 2023).

These harms are perpetuated, in part, by such race-evasive discourse. Jaquette and Salazar’s (2024) and Nichols and Dixon-Román’s (2024) analyses find that race-evasive language like “access” and “quality” is used to champion education platforms and tools, and to rationalize the implementation of technologies that replicate the status quo. Echoing these observations, Dhaliwal et al. (2024), Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024), and Vue et al. (2024) find similar race-evasive discourse used to advocate for corporal punishment (CP), school resource officers (SRO), and CRT bans include key terms like “rational,” “safety,” “love,” “order,” “discipline,” “protection,” and “logical.” Evidence from these papers strongly suggests that SRO programs, CP policies, and CRT bans do not provide “safety” for students of color, nor do they “protect” them or “love” them. Instead, they primarily protect white students and teachers.

Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024) and Dhaliwal et al. (2024) use varying types of critical analysis to provide ample evidence that SROs and CP are disproportionately associated with negative outcomes for vulnerable student populations. SROs and CP are justified under the guise of neutral discourse: to “protect” students and keep them “safe,” to provide “order” so that students can learn, and to enforce “discipline.” Zabala-Eisshofer and co-authors (2024) examine the SRO researchers’ recommendations and conclude that they do not always reflect the findings of the studies. More importantly, they note that SROs are often treated as a permanent fixture in schools, and rather than abolish them—given the hugely negative impact they have on students of color—87% of recommendations point to reform. Dhaliwal et al.’s (2024) quantitative analysis concludes that, on average, Black students and students with disabilities are about 1.5 times more likely to experience CP than their white peers.

CP and SROs should be eliminated from all schooling, and calls to dismantle these policies will require new policies to replace them, which leads to a second recommendation.

Identifying Policy Designs for Racial Justice Within Our Larger Systems

To address the question of whether it is feasible to design safe and welcoming spaces for children of color within the confines of mainstream education, we can look both to successful programs outside mainstream school systems as well as existing and past culturally affirming practices and examples. In both settings, in contrast to SRO programs, CP policies, and CRT bans, students of color’s needs and interests are centered. Daramola (2024) presents two case studies that highlight Black families spearheading the creation of micro-schools and virtual summer school programs during the pandemic. Outside the confines of the racialized current reality of schooling, the programs centered Black communities through student enrichment, family support, educators of color, relational discipline, autonomy, and cultural relevancy. Parents reco-unted that when their children were in these spaces, they no longer worried about behavioral issues, feelings of not belonging, and unpleasant school-family interactions. We can also turn to other examples in history when Black communities have created welcoming and enriching spaces, such as the Freedom Schools created during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer to teach critical inquiry, organizing, and Black history (Hale, 2016). A modern resurgence of Freedom Schools is run by the Children’s Defense Fund, which currently serves over 170 sites in 29 states (Children’s Defense Fund, n.d).

Examples within the mainstream system also exist. Community schools have roots in serving Black students dating back to the early 1900s when they were run and served by Black communities. A resurgence of community schools occurred during the 60s and 70s as a way to address social issues (Maier et al., 2018). In 2020, the National Educators Association Foundation launched an initiative to open community schools in the U.S. South, with 13 currently in operation (Kotting, 2022). Aside from whole-school reforms, policy design can also pull inspiration from existing culturally responsive practices, including recruiting more educators of color, incorporating students’ home language (e.g., heritage language, vernaculars, codeswitching, and translanguaging) into instruction, setting discussion norms to facilitate critical consciousness among many others (del Carmen Salazar & Lerner, 2019), and teaching ethnic studies like Arizona’s Mexican American studies program (López et al., 2022).

Best Approaches for Racial Justice?

The prior question, about drawing from mainstream and alternative systems to promote justice in schools, parallels the important provocation raised in the title of Audre Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This also relates to the third question of knowing what approaches should be used to make the strongest policy arguments for racial justice. For a response, I turn to another quote that is used in the article by Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024). The quote is by Mark Morris (1976) who argues that “Abolition is a long-range struggle” and “requires a host of in-between strategies and reforms” (n.p.). These scholars suggest that we should use all tools and harness all resources.

Nonetheless, further research is necessary to understand whether it is possible to use all policy tools and resources, including those using race-neutral and race-explicit rhetoric in their promotion and design. Have there been examples when policies using race-evasive language positively impacted communities of color without perpetuating racism? Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024) note an exception in the literature when majoritarian logics were used to support counternarratives. They cite Na and Gottfredson’s (2013) study where the absence of proof that SROs lower crime and bullying does not lead to direct calls for SROs abolition. Instead, the study prompts a push toward considering alternative, more effective interventions. While the author’s ultimate goal is not explicitly stated, the authors arrive at race-neutral recommendations about implementing alternative interventions that, by default, eliminate SROs. And if new interventions are centered on students of color, these interventions may have the potential to positively impact them.

Future research should also simultaneously explore the reverse: policies that explicitly address race in their designs and understand the underlying reasons why they succeeded or failed. McCambly and Mulroy (2024) describe an equity-explicit policy, Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, that through manipulation of political discourse, became a “quality”-focused initiative and, thus, was used as a tool for racial exclusion and disinvestment. Do contrasting cases exist where race-explicit policies lead to their intended outcomes of improving the lives of communities of color?

Safeguarding Against Further Harm

The contributors of the special issue examine how policies cloaked in neutrality are often leveraged to justify measures that harm students of color and center the interests of white individuals. The policy insights that emerge are clear: repeal CRT bans, eliminate SRO programs and CP policies, and look to examples of creating healing and affirming spaces outside and within the sector. However, what is less clear are practices, policies, and safeguards that we can put in place to avoid and prevent other harmful policies that use the same or similar rationales from emerging. Future research should examine existing practices and policies designed to safeguard against the emergence of harmful policies using similar justifications, and how we can learn from them.

In terms of education technology, and the articles in this special issue that focused on this topic, the policy arena becomes more complex because market actors come into play, who have little interest in putting the needs of the most vulnerable into their design. Profit too often comes first, and profit frequently coincides with the interests of the most powerful. Of critical concern to education policy, Nichols and Dixon-Román (2024) highlight the complex ecologies that exist within platforms and the ways these nuances can affect public policy and our schooling process. Researchers, users, and stakeholders must not accept education technology products and platforms at face va-lue but rather interrogate them to understand implications and constraints in place that prioritize the tools’ needs over-serving and centering the most vulnerable populations.

To produce evidence for pathways to achieve social justice, we researchers need to study our larger, structural systems and how to best make change within them while also imagining a world that could operate beyond them. For the policy field going forward, McCambly and Mulroy (2024) argue that, for example, we cannot simply disaggregate outcomes to reach equity, but we must interrogate the metrics themselves and call into question the methods we use to assess justice. Nichols and Dixon-Román (2024) and Jaquette and Salazar (2024) push us to go beyond the learning process itself and to interrogate the role and power of (education) technology. The question researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders will need to grapple with going forward is whether we can ever achieve truly equitable outcomes in a system shaped (consciously and unconsciously) by the needs, desires, and fears of white powerholders. One thing is clear: reformist solutions that tinker with existing systems and practices (like SROs, platforms, CP, etc.) frequently re-encode racism in a new, more palatable language. My hunch is that future research will also provide more evidence that race-evasive language within policy design is not an effective approach to achieving racial equity. Real policy advancements are likely to primarily arise from the insights and achievements of marginalized and disadvantaged communities themselves, not the supposedly objective insights of specialists and technicians.

Finally, the next wave of critical policy res-earchers should further investigate how we use the research we conduct to yield the most impactful policy recommendations. A rich literature ex-ists on evidence use in education policy; yet, too often, scholars fail to consider ways to communicate about their research beyond typical academic circles. Zabala-Eisshofer and colleagues (2024) presented a research strand that is new to me—the study of the critical development of “research and policy recommendations from re-search.” I contend it is our responsibility as social science researchers (knowledge producers) to make policy recommendations for policy stakeholders even if those recommendations, like any other form of data, are imbued with our bias and values (which we can clearly articulate). We must reflexively and carefully translate our research into practical and usable knowledge; otherwise, we risk engaging in research that lacks real-world application. This practice of pushing for real policy impact would allow future social scientists to delve deeper into optimizing the use of our research to inform the development of effective policy recommendations for all students instead of a select few.