Scholars have tried to understand the impact of race and racism on the educational experiences of African American students for several decades. Unable to make causal claims of racism as directly contributing to achievement gaps, scholars have documented inequitable access and opportunity as both a historical phenomenon (Anderson, 1988;Ladson-Billings, 2006) and a contemporary manifestation of social processes that appear to create disproportionate outcomes for African American students relative to their White peers across a number of domains. Indeed, an inference that one can draw from the qualitative and statistical data is that race does matter when it comes to the education and educational experiences of African Americans and other students of color. Overwhelmingly, the data suggest that despite making gains in terms of high school graduation and college attendance, students of color-particularly African Americans-still face schooling environments that are often racially hostile or, at the very least, places that refuse to address
Research on Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) to date has mostly focused on identifying the aspects of education that already work for Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. Building on this important literature base, this qualitative study examines the implementation , rather than the identification , of CRE practices. The seven New York City public schools that participated in the study were making school-wide changes for CRE as part of a program for Competency-Based Education (CBE) for personalizing learning for students. Both CRE and CBE are employed in schools to address common issues associated with educational inequities such as irrelevant lessons, teacher biases, one-size-fits-all instruction, and systemic racism. Based on interviews with teachers at the study schools, our findings demonstrated that teachers translated CRE theory into their CBE practice in three key ways: (1) deficit practices, where instructional choices were treated as neutral; (2) access practices, where instruction was differentiated but was not culturally responsive; and (3) transformative practices, where student agency challenged traditional structures. We argue that for schools and educators to meaningfully grapple with the issues of power they seek to address by engaging in CRE, they must embrace and nurture a more radical CRE imagination that leads to deeper school transformation.
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