To the Editor:
My career as a teacher was focused upon the education of language minority students at first in Southern Chester County and then in West Chester. I taught from a critical perspective but most significantly I dealt with my colleagues both teachers and administrators from a critical perspective. If the school districts where I taught had provided equitable resources to my students, I would not have had to resort to critical practice. The lineage of education philosophy that I followed was Marx, Fanon, Freire, Giroux. Critical Theory is different from Critical Race Theory. Critical Theory is Marxian. Simply put...the basic tenet of Critical Theory is that all of the world's problems are based upon economics; for Critical Race Theory, all of the world's problems are based on race. Critical pedagogists view knowledge the same way that Marxist view capital. The struggle in schools is against the unequal distribution of knowledge capital.
The West Chester Area School District (WCASD) always prided itself on being on the cutting edge. Being on the cutting edge means that you have reduced the lag time between a theory's development and its application. I taught at East High School over ten years ago. Recently, Dr. Scanlan said that the WCASD does not teach Critical Race Theory (CRT). The WCASD does not teach CRT to its students but it did teach CRT to its teachers at least at East High School it did under the guise of a program called Courageous Conversations.
The WCASD is a decentralized school district. That means that building principals have autonomy to act as long as they stay with the guidelines of district policy. Teacher training is one area where building principals can choose the direction of their buildings. Our principal, Richard Dunlap and few staff members, had been trained in Courageous Conversations. Dunlap was the superintendent of the Upper Darby School District who disappeared for about two weeks after proposing to desegregate the school district. It's not easy advocating for minority education. Dunlap and a few staff members brought back what they had learned from their Courageous Conversation's training and shared it with the rest of the building faculty and staff. At the time, Dunlap was looking for ways to close the achievement gap between White students and Black and Brown students. What follows is my take, an excerpt from a 90+ page essay that I wrote on the training and alternative remedies for closing the achievement gap.
Last, I am disappointed in the Daily Local News for printing essays by people like Dr. Eck and Will Wood who have no idea what Critical Race Theory is nor how protectionist school districts can be in hiding from the public how values-laden programs can infiltrate their schools. Scanlan was right. Teachers did not teach CRT directly to their students but some of the ideas from the teacher training program Courageous Conversations did trickle down into the classroom and they also influenced the interactions between staff members. “Let's have a conversation,” was code that a teacher reprimand was forthcoming and not bringing conversations to closure simply meant that those initiating the conversation simply had the first and last word. I know this because I lived it. I believe the Daily Local News is a political instrument who like the school district institute protectionist policies to maintain the status quo. Why else would you print essays on CRT as bland, confused, superficial, and un-entertaining as those by Eck and Wood.
Sincerely yours,
Richard T. Beck
A Critique of Courageous Conversations
by
Richard T. Beck
Like many public schools in the United States, our high school is troubled by the minority achievement gap: African American and Latino children perform less well than white children do on standardized tests. My school district is the largest school district in a county with the highest income measured per capita and by median household income in the state, and as of 2009, has the 21st highest gross adjusted income in the nation. Yet, when the data is disaggregated, African-American and Latino students perform worse on standardized tests than their lower income White peers. It appears then, that something other than socioeconomic factors are the cause of the achievement gap.
Our school introduced Glen Singleton’s diversity training program, Courageous Conversations, in an attempt to close the achievement gap. Courageous Conversations is a homogenized application of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theorists believe that the single cause of all the ills that have befallen African Americans is due to White Privilege. Singleton’s application delivers this message softly, more like a team building exercise. Singleton’s homogenized version fits well into affluent, disinterested conservative communities whose benign interest in race and the effects of race in the day to day activities of their children in public school barely goes beyond making sure that the cookies and cakes they made for fundraisers are equally distributed. These parents see the public school as a safe holding tank where their children are insulated from the meanness of the have-nots before transiting to college. They do not expect much to be learned there or their children’s perception of their world to change very much. They like to remind teachers that because they are on the public dole, their kids are entitled to inflated grades and self-esteem at any price. This nonchalance prevails as long as there is no intimation that their school taxes will be increased. Then, they vote out the incumbents and install Neoconservative change agents on their school boards whose all encompassing solution to the issues in public education is privatization and more competition. Courageous Conversations will never touch their children for they already have the worldview, the network, and the means that guarantees them the privilege to take the first step up on the social ladder of success. Affluence breeds its own kind of impoverishment.
A second group that Singleton appeals to by toning down the provocative and controversial voice of Critical Race Theory is uncritical teachers. Glen Singleton’s program is palatable for the tastes of teachers, especially young teachers of the X and Y generations, who have very little knowledge of philosophy or educational theory or whose demonstrable acts of social activism only went as far as voicing their disenchantment with the menu at the Student Services Building. These teachers who have entered the profession over the last twenty years missed the professors who professed the value of a liberal arts education but caught the wave of the influence of neo-conservatism on college campuses that would wean them on the Business Model of education and the saving grace of technology. These teachers have been trained in the tacit application of skills based education with an emphasis on technology designed to prepare students to be automatons, entrepreneurs, or cannon fodder for the 21st century world of work. Uncritical rigor breeds its own kind of impoverishment.
Courageous Conversations encourages White teachers to face up to the effects of the social construction of race and its subsequent result White privilege. The Courageous Conversations’ approach wants us to believe that the minority achievement gap can be closed by making White teachers face up to their own White privilege and inherent, but not necessarily intentional or pathological, racism. By confessing their individual and collective social guilt, and by recognizing the means by which American institutions have systematically prevented African Americans from accumulating real wealth, White teachers are supposed to translate their newfound enlightenment as accomplices in African American disenfranchisement into a different way of instructional delivery to African American students.
The desired outcome is a New African American student, one who is just as unethically privileged as White students, who scores high on tests that do not measure learning, and who score high enough on these tests to remove their school from No Child Left Behind’s Most Wanted List. The problem, according to Singleton, what causes African American underachievement, is the attitudes of White teachers, the way White teachers communicate to their students, and their outdated worldview that White teachers should have a colorless classroom based upon equality and access. Instead of teachers denouncing that race has influence on academic achievement, teachers are to adopt the view that race does influence academic achievement. It is like White homeowners denouncing that they are racists but at the same time adopting the view that the race of their neighbor has an influence on the value of their home. Same logic, same stultifying conceptual framework.
The real problems related to African American underachievement are not related to the intangible constructs of achievement and privilege that have been embedded in the collective American consciousness but rather the real, present day, unethical conferments of privilege. The real, tangible problems related to African American underachievement are the use of standardized testing to track and place African American students in less rigorous classes, and a less than courageous curriculum that is molded by committee and like Singleton’s Courageous Conversations, made palatable for the delicacies of a litigious, upwardly mobile White middle class. If there is White privilege, we need not look much farther past curriculum. Curriculum is the engine that drives the machine not privilege and achievement.
First, privilege is tied to achievement. The two are linked in the rhetoric of meritocracy. Achievement will carry with it privilege, be that achievement attained by an African American person or a White person. Privilege whether conferred ethically or unethically cannot be severed from its trace, that is, achievement. Even if a person has a privilege that is perceived to be unethically conferred, the question will always arise, What did that person achieve to deserve that privilege? Now if you want to talk about unethical privilege granting, take a look at the reason for standardized testing.
There is no privilege and no achievement in getting a high standardized test score. Neither white nor black students believe standardized test scores are a mark of achievement and not many teachers do either. If you want to deconstruct the construct of merit, take a look at the short term goals that are a hallmark of postmodern America and ask from where did education borrow this paradigm? A standardized test score is a contrived, inauthentic measure of achievement that is supposed to make somebody accountable for another person’s achievement on a test that nobody believes measures achievement. Hence, neither white students nor black students see any merit in scoring well on the tests and not many teachers see any merit in teaching to the test either unless their students’ scores have an effect on their working conditions.
A second disturbing construct implicit to the Courageous Conversations’ argument is that African Americans are a problem. According to Hartlep, “Educational policies and practices have [] traditionally viewed low-income students and students of color from deficit points of view” (2009). African American students are not a problem any more than their upwardly mobile affluent White peers. White students explain their world in terms of their country’s hegemony and racial supremacy as if they themselves were the center of the universe and heirs to the world’s clock. African American students explain their world in terms of résistance to hegemony and ressentiment toward white racial supremacy. Both worldviews are horizon limiting and impoverishing.
Courageous Conversations is using the same working paradigm that the White dominant society uses when they claim to provide a solution to a problem related to African American students. Have the founders of Courageous Conversations ever asked themselves, Why are African American students or for that matter African Americans always considered a problem? Perhaps, the paradigm from which they start is tainted by the hegemony of a White dominated society. Third, if we want to solve the problem of African American underachievement look to the reasons why we have a standardized test to measure whatever they are supposed to measure. The reason why we have standardized tests is the problem not the White or Black students who take them nor the White teachers who refuse to resist and administer them.
I fear Courageous Conversations may become so entrenched in mindset of teachers, that our obsession with race may close the doors to other more concrete, mainstream, and better tested approaches that might also contribute to closing the achievement gap. Test results do not measure the symptoms that cause underachievement. At best they indicate that a problem exists but they do not pinpoint the cause of the problem.
Critical Race Theory has neglected to ask what other disciplines think about the concept of race. According to anthropologists and social theorists like Lieberman, Stevenson, and Reynolds, the concept of race no longer enjoys scientific consensus nor does the concept of race have a firm base in theory and data as applied to the human species.
Race, conceptual child of the colonial era, remains a sterile idea, while variation, gradation… is a useful approach for future anthropological research and teaching about human hereditary traits. The taxonomy of races, so deeply imbedded in popular thought, can be replaced by the concept of ethnic group, embodying the capacity of humans to learn any culture. (1989)
The justification for the implementation of training programs like Courageous Conversations rather than transformative approaches to address educational problems may be because transformative approaches cost money, take time to implement, require long term commitment, and improvements are not often quantifiable by 12th grade. I tremble because once in Courageous Conversations there is no way out of the argument. It is a one-way street. If you are a White teacher, you either admit to being a racist or you are a racist. It is racial absolutism and we all know from the history of the 20th century the results of absolutist paradigms. No matter whether you are with the courageous conversationalists or not, White teachers are the enemy.
Besides closing the doors to other solutions to the minority achievement gap, Courageous Conversations may open the doors to racial hysteria. Every miscommunication that arises in school might be a context for a courageous conversation. Like so many earnest progressive programs created in good faith to level the playing field or remedy a lack of ingression, Courageous Conversations may become instrumentalized within our school as a means of empowerment, not for African American students as it ethically should be, but for those opportunists who would exploit the sensitive nature of the questions of race and use their leverage to get a leg up on the totem. We all know how Sexual Harassment policies that have very little to do with sex and much to do with empowerment, have muted conversations and aggrandized petty arguments and slights into litigious nightmares. Anybody who has worked within a school understands how departmentalization turns special interest groups into competing tribalized clans especially in times of limited resources.
In respect to racism, Courageous Conversations is correct, it will take many generations before we fully recover from racism as a nation. Accepting the Courageous Conversations’ tenets that there are unique White constructs, worldviews, and ways of thinking that perpetuate White privilege, does that mean we should buffer our African American students from them? Isn’t it more important that we inoculate them from White privilege, build up their defenses toward it, so that when they do encounter it, they are better prepared to deal with it? Are African American students that fragile? Is a politicized standardized test score that is an artificial measure of learning so important to the public image of our school that we send our African American students out into the world lacking the advocacy skills for what they will surely need to confront the racial obstacles they will surely encounter? Are we muting their critical voices before they have the opportunity to be change agents as adults? If so, is Courageous Conversations another form of institutional protectionism?
Future Implications. University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Lieberman, Leonard, Blaine W. Stevenson, and Larry T. Race Anthropology: A Core Concept without Consensus Reynolds Source: Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 67-73 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195682
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