Racializing educational change: Melting pot and mosaic influences on educational policy and practice

Abstract

This article racializes educational change by examining literature on the history of educational approaches to diversity in the United States and Ontario, Canada to demonstrate how their respective national myths for engaging with diversity-the melting pot and mosaic-have impacted their educational policies and practices over three definable eras of educational change. The educational policies and practices of the two countries are evaluated in relation to four significant and-within the existing literature-widely used political and educational strategies for responding to racial and ethnocultural diversity in schools. The paper cautions that the current era of curriculum standardization and high stakes assessments that reflects a melting pot approach to education reinstitutes and reinforces an inequitable vertical mosaic structure of schooling experiences and outcomes for diverse student populations. It urges policy makers to consider how the current movement toward post-standardization, which reflects a mosaic approach, is presently influencing educational policy and practice in international contexts and achieving more just and effective learning outcomes for diverse student groups.

On identity, diversity, and educational change

“…The melting pot stresses one culture as a necessity for national unity whereas the mosaic portrays cultural pluralism as an asset and a source of national strength. Yet in both countries, the realities of contemporary social practice diverge from both national myths and approximate what has been described as a vertical mosaic (Skerrett 2008c). The vertical mosaic was a groundbreaking concept first coined by John Porter (1965) who debunked the myth of Canada as a classless society or flat mosaic and showed that Canadians' class positions were related to the cultural groups to which they belonged.…”

“…These patterns are evident as well in the United States. Thus, in effect, a vertical mosaic exists in both countries (Skerrett 2008c).…”

“…The societal myths for addressing diversity have their correlates (though not replicas) in competing educational models for addressing student diversity (Skerrett 2008c). In the past half-century, there have been four approaches to the globally pervasive challenge of educating increasingly racially and culturally diverse student populations: monocultural education which includes significant school effectiveness and effective schools research and practice, multiculturalism, antiracist education, and the current monocultural restoration movement of standardization.…”

“…Antiracist education thus arose to counter what its advocates considered the apolitical, anti-confrontational approach of multicultural education (Skerrett 2008c). Focusing more explicitly on the interconnected webs of injustice among schools and other social institutions, antiracist education addresses, interrogates, and seeks to disrupt racism in school and society through curricular, pedagogical, and organizational practices.…”

“…Finally, I have considered how increasing curriculum standardization and accountability systems in both contexts in the late 1990s and beyond accelerated a return to monocultural education which reified a melting pot, and less mosaic-like, approach to educating diverse student populations (Skerrett 2008c). The monocultural restoration is evidenced by market pressures that have increased the monocultural content of increasingly standardized curriculum and high stakes tests in both the US and Ontario (Skerrett and Hargreaves 2008).…”