Constructing an Educational “Quality” Crisis: (E)quality Politics and Racialization Beyond Target Beneficiaries

Abstract

In this critical, political discourse analysis, we trace how two concepts, equity and quality, became discursively linked and contested in the administration of postsecondary education policy over time (1968–1994)—a developmental process we refer to as (e)quality politics. By engaging in a historical analysis, we investigate (a) the racialized political origins and discursive processes by which arguments over educational “quality” are advanced as part of an antiequity policy paradigm and (b) how this paradigm reinscribes racial inequity into administrative and organizational action over time. We illustrate how, once an (e)quality politics paradigm is established, racialized policy designs can persist, even in the absence of explicit references to racialized social constructions of target populations in later periods of policy development.

“All Students Matter”: The Place of Race in Discourse on Student Debt in a Federal Higher Education Policymaking Process

“…Through CDA, we center racial discourse, addressing the tendency of policymakers to sidestep conversations on race and racism and its endemic role in society (Bonilla-Silva, 2006;Carter et al, 2019). This pattern holds in educational policymaking where conversations around problem identification and proposed solutions are found to be race-evasive (Gándara et al, 2023;Garces & Bilyalov, 2019;McCambly & Mulroy, 2024) and tend to use proxy terms such as "underrepresented," "low-income," or "first-generation" to veil racialized concerns and comments (Pollock, 2004). In our analysis, we draw on four elements from CRT (Ladson-Billings, 2008)-emphasizing the permanence of race, challenging ahistoricism, considering interest convergence, and conducting scholarship that leads to justice-as well as Bonilla-Silva's ( 2006) four racial frames-abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (see Table 1).…”

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

“…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?…”

“…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.…”

“…Moreover, the authors show that race-evasive 1 and supposedly objective language is used to justify policies and programs that disproportionately negatively impact students of color.Through their thoughtful analyses, the articles implicitly and explicitly highlight several key questions. While I will focus my remarks on a small subset of those questions, I want to start this commentary with a guiding principle that was raised by McCambly and Mulroy (2024). The authors ask us to discern "which policy designs pose a threat to equitable futures, and which bring us closer to justice" while also challenging us, as a research community, to consider how our research should inform policy design.…”

The Vital Necessity of Critical Education Policy Research

“…Dhaliwal and colleagues (2024), for example, use CDA to explore how discourse around CP shapes and is shaped by ideology by seeking to uncover the rationales that are present in education policy and practice. CDA also emphasizes the importance of considering the socio-historical context in language analysis, as exemplified by McCambly and Mulroy (2024), who explore the racialized origins of the quality movement in higher education. This approach allows researchers to explore how language is shaped by and, in turn, shapes social, political, and cultural contexts.…”