Sample Essay On Exploration Of Race In Schooling

How did pulling away from the critical race theorist change education? The critical race theorists began to pull away from Critical Legal Studies because the legal framework restricted the ability to analyze racial injustice. Most of the critics that were launched were in black and white terms. In the field of education, there are five factors of critical race theorist that get used. They function to inform theory, pedagogy, research, policy, and curriculum. The challenge to the dominant ideology, commitment to social justice, inter centricity of race and racism, centrality of experiential knowledge and utilization of interdisciplinary approaches. Most people in the academy and the community organizing the service who look to challenge social inequality usually recognize the tenets of CRT (Yosso, 2006).
According to Yosso (2006), critical race theorist in education is a theoretical and analytical framework, and they challenge the way race and racism influence educational structures, discourses, and practices. It is conceived as a social justice project that works towards the liberatory potential of schooling. It acknowledges the contradictory nature of education where schools often oppress while they maintain the potential to empower and emancipate. Either can be nurtured and instilled in the learners. Critical race theorist in education disproves dominant ideology and white privilege while centering and validating the experiences of People of Color.
Looking through a critical race theorist only means that deficit theorizing and data is limited by its omission of voicing for People of Color. Public education in the United States plays a major role in shaping the society. Schools often assume the positions as agents of political, economic, and social concerns. The issue of American education usually underscores the complex and a controversial relationship of education and society. Ethnicity delineates a person’s place of origin, nationality and cultural background. Today institutions are striving to provide equal opportunities for education to all students despite their race or cultural background. The government has also tried to provide same resources and facilities in all schools even in different racial environments.
One of the most common ways that contemporary racism occurs in schools in the US is through deficit thinking. Deficit thinking asserts the belief that minority families and students are responsible for displeasing academic performance for various reasons. The reasons include students enter school without having cultural knowledge and skills and parents do not value or support their children’s education. Racialized assumptions about Communities of Color usually lead to schools defaulting to the banking method of education. The schools efforts aim to fill up passive students with forms of cultural knowledge that are termed to be valuable by the dominant society. Deficit approaches about schooling begin with overgeneralizations about family backgrounds. These approaches are also limited by the framework to interpret individual views about educational success. In addition, they are shaped by linguistic and sociocultural experiences and assumptions related to appropriate cultural outcomes.
Educators assume that school work and the parents, students, and community should change in order to conform to the already effective and equitable system. Research shows that deficit thinking allows the US society and schools and those who work in schools mirror the beliefs. They argue that the reality challenges personal and individual race, gender, and class expressed by educators. Critical race theorist can offer such a good approach by identifying, analyzing, and challenging the distorted notions of People of Color (McDaniels, 2015).

References

McDaniels, C. (2015). Equality of Educational Opportunity: Race and Finance in Public Education. Retrieved from http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1992/1/92.01.07.x.html
Yosso, T. (2006). Whose culture has capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education,(8)1, 69-91.