Educational Foundations 

About: Educational Foundations is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Primary education. It has an ISSN identifier of 1047-8248. Over the lifetime, 303 publications have been published receiving 4833 citations.

Using Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and Racist Nativism to Explore Intersectionality in the Educational Experiences of Undocumented Chicana College Students

Abstract: Introduction One of the most powerful elements of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education is that it provides critical researchers with a lens not offered by many other theoretical frameworks--that is, the ability to examine how multiple forms of oppression can intersect within the lives of People of Color and how those intersections manifest in our daily experiences to mediate our education. A theoretical branch extending from CRT is Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), which examines experiences unique to the Latina/o community such as immigration status, language, ethnicity, and culture (Solorano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). A LatCrit analysis has allowed researchers to develop the conceptual framework of racist nativism, a lens that highlights the intersection of racism and nativism (Perez Huber, et. al., 2008). This article examines how a racist nativism framework can help understand the experiences of undocumented Chicana college students attending a public research university in California. First, this article will provide a brief description of how CRT and, in particular, LatCrit have allowed researchers to develop the frame of racist nativism. Second, the framework of racist nativism will be described, including how it is used in this study. Third, this article will describe the data collection strategies, methodological approach and analysis process used to gather and analyze 20 critical race testimonio interviews. Following this description, I will present the findings that demonstrate the ways racist nativism, class and gender have manifested in the educational trajectories of the undocumented Chicana college students. The Need to Examine Undocumented Latina/o Educational Experiences There is a limited but growing body of research on the experiences of undocumented Latina/o immigrant students in the U.S. (Abrego, 2002; Bastida et. al., 2007; De Leon, 2005; Fields, 2005; Gonzales, 2007; Guillen, 2004; Madera, et. al., 2008; Oliverez et. al., 2006; Olivas, 1995, 2004; Pabon Lopez, 2005; Perez Huber & Malagon, 2007; Rangel, 2001; Rincon, 2005; Seif, 2004). We know that thousands of undocumented students graduate high schools throughout the country each year, but most are in state of California (Oliverez et. al., 2006). We also know that most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are from Latin American countries, but Mexico in particular (Passel, 2006). The historical and continued efforts of U.S. foreign policy to ensure Mexican economic dependence on the United States suggests economic conditions in Mexico will continue to leave many Mexican citizens with no choice but to emigrate (Gonzalez & Fernandez, 2002). This means, until the U.S. enacts comprehensive immigration reform that offers the U.S. undocumented population with a path to citizenship, the number of undocumented Latina/o students will continue to grow. Research focusing on this group of students lags far behind this demographic growth. CRT, LatCrit, and Racist Nativism: An Intersectional Approach CRT and LatCrit. The overarching theoretical frameworks for this study are CRT, and in particular, LatCrit. CRT in educational research unapologetically centers the ways race, class, gender, sexuality and other forms of oppression manifest in the educational experiences of People of Color. CRT draws from multiple disciplines to challenge dominant ideologies such as meritocracy and colorblindness, which suggest educational institutions are neutral systems that function in the same ways for all students. This framework challenges these beliefs by learning and building from the knowledge of Communities of Color whose educational experiences are marked by oppressive structures and practices. The efforts of revealing racism in education is a conscious move toward social and racial justice and empowerment among Communities of Color (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001; Yosso 2006). LatCrit is an extension of the efforts of CRT in educational research. …

Other People's Daughters: Critical Race Feminism and Black Girls' Education.

Abstract: The intellectual product of the minority feminist scholar should incorporate in a formal fashion the ethical and moral consciousness of minority women, their aspirations, and their quest for liberation. Her partisanship and advocacy of a minority feminist jurisprudence should be frankly acknowledged and energetically defended. Because her scholarship is to be grounded in the material and ideological realities of minority women and in their cultural and political responses, its operative premises must necessarily be dynamic and primarily immanent; as the lives of minority women change, so too should the analysis. --Regina Austin (1995, p. 426) The above quote is extracted from legal scholar Regina Austin's 1995 article, "Sapphire Bound!" In the article Austin calls for minority female scholars in the legal field to straightforwardly, unapologetically, and strategically use their intellectual pursuits to advocate on behalf of poor and working class minority women. At-risk of being stereotypically identified and labeled as overly aggressive, overbearing, loud, audacious, or in other words, the "angry Black woman" (e.g. a bitch), Austin encourages minority female scholars to redefine the Sapphire stereotype to testify to the social and political circumstances impacting minority women. She believes that legal scholars, like herself, embody the necessary attitude and agency it takes to bear the burden of collective struggle alongside, with, and on behalf of other minority women. The legal scholar suggests that collective struggle is overdue considering the marginalization of poor minority women, especially of Black women, in the U.S. political economy. Even though Austin is arguing from the perspective of a woman of color, with experience and interest in the legal field, her comments are also relevant to conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical efforts in the field of education. In this article, we are mainly concerned with Austin's (1995) personal and professional insights for its implications and relevancy to urban girls, in particular, African American girls being schooled in urban school communities. There is a need for more scholarship in the field of education that looks at the educational experiences and schooling processes of African American girls. Because feminist epistemologies tend to be concerned with the education of White girls and women, and raced-based epistemologies tend to be consumed with the educational barriers negatively effecting Black boys, the educational needs of Black girls have fallen through the cracks (Evans-Winters, 2005). Like Austin suggests above, there is a need for more minority female scholars in the field of education and other related areas, to directly confront, unabashedly, the social and educational needs of minority girls of color. Female scholars of color have documented the unique challenges young Black women encounter in many of our urban schools, due to their raced, classed and gendered status. Research with Black Girls in Mind Fordham (1993) has suggested that students and school officials alike have stereotyped African American girls as loud, aggressive and masculine. However, Fordham suggests that many Black girls have embraced a loud and tough persona in order to be heard and not overlooked in classrooms and school buildings that tend to ignore them and marginalize them as students. In later work, based on data from ethnographic work at a U.S. high school, Fordham (1996) made the claim that high achieving Black girls and their male counterparts may take on a race-less persona to attain academic success. A race-less persona refers to the absence of behavioral and attitudinal characteristics related to a particular race; thus, Fordham's claims have suggested that Black high achieving students do well because they reject an ascribed Black identity. In contrast to Fordham's (1993; 1996) findings, Carla O'Connor concludes in her research findings that high achieving African American girls actually embrace a strong positive Black female identity. …

They (don’t) care about education: A counternarrative on Black male students’ responses to inequitable schooling

Abstract: The images created of Black men in our society often confine them to environments shaped by drugs, crime, athletics, and academic failure. In education, we have contributed to this negative portrait by the disproportionate amount of research that emphasizes remediation and disadvantage. (Fries-Britt, 1997, p. 65) Whatever the source, some teachers have unsubstantiated, unquestioned, and inaccurate thoughts and beliefs about Black male students; put simply, these thoughts can be harmful and quite detrimental ... Black male students can and do succeed in every type of school across the world. Their success in urban schools is not an exception. (Milner, 2007, p. 245) Anyone who takes time to read about them could confidently conclude that Black male undergraduates are troubled, their future is bleak, they all do poorly, and there is little that can be done to reverse longstanding outcomes disparities that render them among the least likely to succeed in college. (Harper, 2009a, pp. 699-700) Perspectives on Black male hopelessness and underachievement are evidenced by the numerous publications that highlight their educational upbringing in insufficiently resourced and culturally unresponsive K-12 schools (Noguera, 2003; Toldson, 2008); their low rates of high school completion (Lynn et al., 2010; Schott Foundation, 2010); their underpreparedness for the rigors of college-level work (Bonner & Bailey, 2006; Palmer, Davis, & Hilton, 2009; Palmer & Young, 2009); their patterns of academic and social disengagement, inside and outside the college classroom (Cuyjet, 1997; Kimbrough & Harper, 2006); and their low rates of baccalaureate degree attainment (Dancy & Brown, 2008; Harper, 2006a, 2012; Strayhorn, 2010). Moreover, Black male students across education levels reportedly place considerable effort into being perceived as popular and "cool" by their peers (Osborne, 1999; Stinson, 2006), and prioritize athletic aspirations above academic achievement (Benson, 2000; Harper, 2009b; Sellers & Kuperminc, 1997). While many of these issues are indeed quantifiable and much has been written about them, they work together to convey a dominant message in academic and public discourse pertaining to Black male students: they don't care about education. Kunjufu (1995) noted that Black boys effectively stop caring about school around the end of elementary school. He contended that teachers halt their efforts to nurture and promote achievement among Black males as early as fourth grade, thus inciting apathy and disengagement among those students. In his visits to K-12 classrooms, Kunjufu noticed that White teachers taught in ways that failed to stimulate enthusiasm for learning among Black boys, curricula at most schools were non-Africentric and disproportionately focused on memorization instead of problem solving, and few classrooms were led by Black male teachers. Visiting an average of four schools per week, Kunjufu saw no male teachers in any of the classrooms he assessed during an eight-year period. Instead, "men can usually be found as janitors, physical education teachers, or administrators" (p. 38), he observed. These explanatory factors for Black male students' disinterest in education have been linked to unfavorable psychological and educational outcomes (Howard, 2008; Jackson & Moore, 2008; Milner, 2007; Thomas & Stevenson, 2009), and used to help explain the shortage of Black men who pursue bachelor's degrees in education and subsequently go on to become K-12 teachers (King, 1993; Shaw, 1996). As noted in a 2010 report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, only 47% of Black male students graduated from high school in 2008 with peers in their entering cohorts. Subsequently, Black men's degree attainment across all levels of postsecondary education remains alarmingly low--especially in comparison to their same-race female counterparts (see Table 1). …

Understanding Education for Social Justice.

Abstract: What does it mean to foreground social justice in our thinking about education? It has become increasingly common for education scholars to claim a social justice orientation in their work (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Ayers, Hunt, & Quinn, 1998; Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002; Marshall & Oliva, 2006; Michelli & Keiser, 2005). At the same time, education programs seem to be adding statements about the importance of social justice to their mission, and a growing number of teacher education programs are fundamentally oriented around a vision of social justice (see, for example, Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002; McDonald, 2005; Zollers, Albert, & Cochran-Smith, 2000). Murphy (1999) names social justice as one of "three powerful synthesizing paradigms" (p. 54) in educational leadership while Zeichner (2003) offers it as one of three major approaches to teacher education reform. The phrase social justice is used in school mission statements, job announcements, and educational reform proposals, though sometimes widely disparate ones, from creating a vision of culturally responsive schools to leaving no child behind. Despite all the talk about social justice of late, it is often unclear in any practical terms what we mean when we invoke a vision of social justice or how this influences such issues as program development, curricula, practicum opportunities, educational philosophy, social vision, and activist work. In the abstract, it is an idea that it hard to be against. After all, we learn to pledge allegiance to a country that supposedly stands for "liberty and justice for all." Yet the more we see people invoking the idea of social justice, the less clear it becomes what people mean, and if it is meaningful at all. When an idea can refer to almost anything, it loses its critical purchase, especially an idea that clearly has such significant political dimensions. In fact, at the same time that we are seeing this term in so many places, we are also seeing a backlash against it; for example, just recently the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education removed social justice language from its accrediting standards because of its controversial, ambiguous, and ideologically weighted nature (Wasley, 2006). Among the critiques, education that is grounded on a commitment to justice and the cultivation of democratic citizenship "is increasingly seen as superfluous, complicating, and even threatening by some policy makers and pressure groups who increasingly see any curriculum not tied to basic literacy or numeracy as disposable and inappropriate" (Michelli & Keiser, 2005, p. xix). Despite some of the current confusion and tensions, there is a long history in the United States of educators who foreground social justice issues in their work and who argue passionately for their centrality to schooling in a democratic society. We see this in a variety of places, for example in Counts' (1932) call for teachers to build a new social order, in Dewey's work on grounding education in a rich and participatory vision of democracy, and in the work of critical pedagogues and multicultural scholars to create educational environments that empower historically marginalized people, that challenge inequitable social arrangements and institutions, and that offer strategies and visions for creating a more just world. Describing education for social justice, Bell (1997) characterizes it as "both a process and a goal" with the ultimate aim being "full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs" (p. 3). Hackman (2005) writes that "social justice education encourages students to take an active role in their own education and supports teachers in creating empowering, democratic, and critical educational environments" (p. 103). Murrell (2006) argues that social justice involves "a disposition toward recognizing and eradicating all forms of oppression and differential treatment extant in the practices and policies of institutions, as well as a fealty to participatory democracy as the means of this action" (p. …

Examining Parent Involvement in Reversing the Underachievement of African American Students in Middle-Class Schools

Abstract: Introduced in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was hailed as the most significant education legislation since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The legislation purported to be a "landmark in education reform designed to improve student achievement and change the culture of America's schools" (U.S. Department of Education, 2003, p. 1). Shortly after the enactment, the bill was scrutinized by school officials and policy makers and later criticized for multiple reasons, such as a lack of funding, an overemphasis on testing, and inconsistency in standards at the federal, state and local levels (Dingerson, Beam, & Brown, 2004). Despite the criticism that NCLB has received over the past five years, there are some promising features of the legislation that seek to involve various historically excluded stakeholders in the educational process (Fege & Smith, 2002) and empower parents with decision-making power (Rogers, 2006; U.S. Department of Education, 2003). Central to its mission was the assurance of academic success for all students through authentic partnerships between schools, parents and communities. Parent involvement is specifically addressed by the authors of NCLB and loosely described in the legislation as a partnership that envisions parents with governance power within a democratic process (Rogers, 2006). While the provision seeks to mandate parent engagement in schools, what remains unclear under NCLB's parent involvement mandate is the extent to which parents are actually engaged in schools. One consistent critique of NCLB posits that it falls short in providing enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance at the state and local levels (Davis, 2004). School systems cannot be sure that schools are actually complying with the federal mandate. Moreover, school officials cannot determine the roles race and class play when parents do make efforts to assume leadership roles in schools. Therefore, we, the researchers, seek to gain insight into these issues through this work. As the authors of this study, we examined the school experiences of middle-class African American parents and students, because they are largely overlooked in the professional literature when it comes to underachievement and parent involvement. Although NCLB highlights parent involvement and school accountability through the use of test data, we posit that non-White and non-Asian students in middle-class schools are frequently overlooked in the reporting and investigation of school achievement, particularly as it relates to parental involvement and engagement. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Ladson-Bilings & Tate, 1995; Solorzano, 1998) as a conceptual framework to examine parent involvement as it pertains to African Americans in middle-class (1) schools, we attempt to account for an explicit intersection of race and class to be used in our analysis. CRT allows for the incorporation of counterstorytelling as a methodological tool so that parent voice can be a focus of this study. Because NCLB's emphasis on providing equal access to quality instruction to students of color, low income populations, and students with disabilities, it is clear that schools must be in compliance with this mandate. Further, educators must provide focused attention and additional resources to subgroups who fail to reach established performance benchmarks (U.S. Department of Education, 2005). To this end, schools are required to show evidence of "continuous progress" towards academic goals by meeting an annual benchmark for all subgroups within the school and demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP). The AYP benchmarks can include standardized test scores, graduation rates, attendance and other indicators determined by the state. Schools that fail to meet AYP targets for any subgroup or other school-wide benchmarks are designated as "in need of improvement." As a result, high achieving schools are unable to laud the overall success or high academic scores without a full accountability of the academic performance of all its subgroups (e. …