The achievement gap is one of the most talked-about issues in U.S. education. The term refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latina/o and White, and recent immigrant and White students. This article argues that a focus on the gap is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at the “education debt” that has accumulated over time. This debt comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components. The author draws an analogy with the concept of national debt—which she contrasts with that of a national budget deficit—to argue the significance of the education debt.

From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools

At the dawning of the 21st century, the term “social justice” is appearing in numerous public texts and discourses throughout the field of education. However, and as Gewirtz argued in 1998, the conceptual underpinnings of this catchphrase frequently remain tacit or underexplored. This article elaborates Gewirtz’s earlier “mapping” of social justice theories by examining the tensions that emerge when various conceptualizations of social justice collide and, in turn, their implications for the field of education. By presenting a model of the complex, fraught interactions among diverse claims about social justice, the author seeks to promote continued dialogue and reflexivity on the purposes and possibilities of education for social justice.

More Than Words? Delving Into the Substantive Meaning(s) of “Social Justice” in Education

Educational policy might productively be conceptualized with an ecology metaphor. Each policy, thus considered, exists within a complex system that reflects varied international, national, regional, and local dynamics. Using this metaphor provides policy analysts with a view of the regularities and irregularities of any policy, its process, its texts, its reception, and its degree of implementation. The characteristics of policy ecologies alert analysts to the possibilities of great transformation, for good or ill, and give them a way to conceptualize how such transformations occur. Perhaps most important, using an ecology metaphor suggests specific ways that progressive researchers might positively intervene in the policy process.

An Ecology Metaphor for Educational Policy Analysis: A Call to Complexity

The author of this study examines six students' construction of historical knowledge as shaped by school and family. The author explores students' perceptions of the disjunctions and interactions between the two sources of historical understandings. Students representing a range of social studies achievement and ethnic backgrounds were selected from grade 11 classes in a large, urban, multicultural school. Classroom participant-observations and two in-depth interviews with each student provide the data. The students' patterns of historical understanding are analyzed with particular attention to the following elements: historical significance, historical evidence and authority, and historical agency, empathy, and moral judgment.The author suggests that family experiences and other sources of information outside school strongly influence the way in which students understand history. He explores some of the problems generated when the complexities of historical meaning making remain unrecognized in s...

Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting

Background/ContextRecent racial incidents on college and high school campuses throughout the United States have catalyzed a growing conversation around issues of race and racism. These conversation...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016146811011200108

Strange Fruit Indeed: Interrogating Contemporary Textbook Representations of Racial Violence Toward African Americans

The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking

The Great Speckled Bird: Education Policy-in-the-Making.

Gilbert T. Sewall (12/9/93) President, Center for Education Studies, American Textbook Council. Henry Kiernan (11/29/93) Supervisor of the humanities at the Southern Regional High School district in Manahawkin, NJ and associated with the National History Standards Project at UCLA. Peter Sgroi (11/25/93) Teacher of American history, New York, secondary level. N.B. (Tad) Martin (12/13/93) Retired history teacher, member of the Educational Excellence Network (cofounded by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn) and the National Council for History Education. Bill Honig (n.d.) Former California State Superintendent of Instruction. Diane Ravitch Assistant secretary of education and director of OERI in the Bush administration.

An Exchange of Views on "The Great Speckled Bird.".

Response by Waugh and Cornbleth

I ncreasingly, people are aware that political interests skew the playing fields of the U.S. economy, polity, and society, and that the so-called free marketplace of ideas, policies, and practices—educational and otherwiseis not free. Yet our approaches to policy analysis too often downplay the politics of education policy making and the questions of who benefits and at whose expense. Instead, we engage in technical examinations of policies already made, their implementation, and their effectiveness. One result is that our policy studies are too far removed from the everyday life of schooling and policy making as well as from the larger society in which most demands for educational change origi­ nate. Without denying the importance of systematic attention to policy imple­ mentation and effects, we would argue for more, systematic attention to politi­ cal questions of what policy gets made and how—questions of what we call policy-in-the-making. Our purpose here is to illustrate this point with instances of multicultural history-social studies curriculum policy making in California and New York set against the broader movement for na­ tional history standards, assessments, and perhaps a national curriculum. We can, of course, only sketch the outlines of a larger project in the space available here (see Cornbleth, 1992; Cornbleth & Waugh, in progress; Waugh, 1991). Our data come from participant (New York) and nonparticipant (California, national) observations of the curriculum policy-making processes, interviews, and the documentary record, 19871992; our analysis is in the tradition of critical interpretive field studies. Two interrelated movements frame our account. One is the renewed \"America debate\" about how the United States of America should be re­ defined as we approach the next cen­ tury. It is a debate about what it means to be an American in the 1990s and the vision of the nation to be passed on to the next generation, both formally by means of school curricula and informal­ ly via popular culture. We purposefully use \"America\" rather than the more specific United States or United States of America when referring to debates about U.S. national identity and (re-)definition because the critics and opponents of a more inclusive, multi­ cultural conceptualization of U.S. na­ tional identity have cast the issues in the language of American and unAmerican. This usage dates to tìie colonial and early national periods of U.S. history, for example, the myth of American exceptionalism (see Appleby, 1992). The multicultural facet of this debate concerns the extent to which, and how, different racial and ethnic peoples and perspectives, cultures, and histories— the great speckled bird of multiculturalism—should be included in a revised national story. The question becomes important especially as that story enters school classrooms, sanctioned by state and perhaps national education policy, course guides, and examinations. The public schools have long been arenas in which battles are fought over national values and priorities (e.g., Cremin, 1990; Kliebard, 1992). Not unexpectedly, two of the places where the America debate has emerged most boisterously are New York and California, the states with the largest numbers of immigrants and the widest variety of peoples. The second movement is the continuing struggle for knowledge control within academic communities of historians (see, e.g., Appleby, 1992) and with respect to school curricula (e.g., Cornbleth, 1990,1992; Kliebard, 1986). To control school or curriculum knowledge is a means of exercising power beyond school walls by shaping how we understand ourselves, others, our nation, and our world. Curriculum knowledge affects individual and collective identity, capacity, attitude, and action. In the present illustration of how control is sought and power is exercised, we are particularly interested in the activity of a small but well-funded and media-sawy group of neo-nativists to preserve a rather narrow conception of America and what it means to be an American.

Research News And Comment: The Great Speckled Bird: Education Policy-in-the-Making

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