Where Is the Real Reform? African American Students and Their School’s Expectations for Academic Performance

Abstract

Although education reforms have been designed to improve academic achievement for all students, there may be intervening factors, such as teacher expectations, that interfere with the success of these initiatives. This ethnographic case study examined student and teacher perspectives on an urban high school reform, and how that reform was experienced within the classroom by African American students. Findings suggest that these African American students felt a strong sense of positive identity with their small school, despite racist public perceptions of it. Within the classroom, students continued to face persistent low academic expectations despite the school’s pursuits of equity.

Disrupting the Ideology of Settled Expectations: Forging New Social Movements to Dismantle the Educational Racial Contract

“…However, Mills (1997) clarified that this supposedly race-neutral contract is a part of the false consciousness written by the powerful that fails to account for the consequences of Whiteness in the creation and distribution of knowledge, materials, and opportunities. In schools-even though all children have access to an education-many educators still operate through the default assumption of racial and economic classifications as key predictors of students' intellectual capabilities (Liou & Rotheram-Fuller, 2016). Teachers' inequitable expectations of students serve as a sorting mechanism (Weinstein, 2004), where Students of Color are disproportionately negated to a substandard education, a structure known as the "educational racial contract" (Leonardo, 2013, p. 605).…”

Managing Whiteness: The Call for Educational Leadership to Breach the Contractual Expectations of White Supremacy

“…We should assume that merely illuminating the educational opportunity gap and students’ limited access to resources and services are insufficient without examining the role of White supremacy as a conscious and unconscious force in the institutional processes that render racial difference. Despite the workings of opportunity-focused, desegregation legal cases seeking to remedy educational inequities through the Fourteenth Amendment (Valencia, 2005), schools continue to reproduce race and social class in ways that seriously impact one’s learning and life chances (Liou & Rotheram-Fuller, 2016). Scholars have pointed out the significant limitations of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954; Bell, 1980; Ladson-Billings, 2004).…”

“…As a violent, painful pedagogical process, this distorted logic is consistent with educators’ lowered expectations for students of color (see Rist, 1970). As students of color are more likely to encounter teachers with low expectations for learning (Bernal, 2002), education, as institutional violence, has been a destabilizing process that adversely influences students’ self-belief as academic achievers (Liou & Rotheram-Fuller, 2016). Furthermore, even a critique of lowered expectations can play into the terms of the racial contract if “expectations” are normed relative to a curriculum that perpetuates White supremacy and colonialism ideologically.…”

A Framework for Rethinking Educational Leadership in the Margins: Implications for Social Justice Leadership Preparation

“…As some scholars have implied (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Calabrese Barton, Drake, Perez, St Louis, & George, 2004), CHAT, as traditionally conceived, often lacks a consideration of racism and White supremacy. CRT and related scholarship illuminate the systemic nature of racism, demonstrating that schools often reproduce racism and inequity through deficit perspectives of students of color, discourses of meritocracy, racist language ideologies, and inequitable distributions of educational resources (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Liou & Rotheram-Fuller, 2016; Martinez & Martínez, 2016; Yosso, 2005). Also, the theory demonstrates the necessity of the experiential knowledge of people of color to understand and analyze racism (Yosso, 2005).…”