Revolutionary Alternatives for Chicana/o Student Successby, Joe NavarroOctober 1, 2006
Chicana/o and Latina/o students are more likely to drop out of school than any other ethnic group in California schools. It is critical to understand the inequalities in the education system and its inability to meet the educational, academic, cultural and linguistic needs of Chicana/o and Latina/o students. They face an on-going educational crisis, making it necessary to develop meaningful, culturally relevant strategies for overcoming institutional racist policies and practices. However, I also want to acknowledge that African-Americans, Native-Americans and Asians suffer from racial and ethnic discrimination in the schools. There are many convergences between Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, African Americans and Native Americans that lead to similar, if not identical problems, such as high drop-out rates, underperforming schools, lack of resources, rundown schools, poorly trained teachers, being limited to drill-n-skill instruction and remedial education and segregation. I believe that many of the lessons from the Chicana/o and Latina/o experience can be applied to other racial and ethnic groups with similar conditions. I. IntroductionChicanas/os and Latinas/os comprise the largest ethnic group in California and in California ’s schools. According to the U.S. Census there are 10,966,556 (U.S. Census Bureau: Profile of General Demographic Characteristics: 2000) Latinas/os in California (32.4 percent of the population), of these are 8,455,926 are of Mexican descent (77 percent of all Latinas/os). In California ’s schools Latinas/os comprise 3,003,521(47.6 percent of all ethnicities) all students (Education Data Partnership: Students by Ethnicity: State of California, 2006-2005). This has profound implications for creating educational and occupational opportunities for Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, because the educational success of students strongly determines their future social, economic and political status. Chicana/o students in California ’s schools can make greater advances academically if they attend schools that provide a caring environment, which meets the academic, cultural and linguistic needs of the students. Schools that are staffed by administrators, teachers and other educational staff who are culturally and linguistically competent to work with Chicana/o students and who strive to create educational settings that provide a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum will be successful at retaining and graduating more students. It is critical to create educational settings, which are free of racist ideologies and practices and where the school staff views education as a holistic process for helping students become complete learners, whose education goals include becoming creative, critical and analytical thinkers. Improving the quality of education will require rethinking how education is contextualized, how teachers are prepared and how education is delivered in the classroom. Later in this article I will briefly outline the following concepts to consider: schools should strive to achieve a caring educational environment; students should be treated with respect, as individuals, as people of color, and as females; schools should strive to incorporate the Freirean principle of the dialogical process and inquiry; schools should strive to positively reinforce students’ identity, culture and families; the school education curriculum should include teachings about race, class and gender; schools should strive to help students become critical and analytical thinkers; and, in order to make all of the above possible, it will be necessary to create a learning environment that is free of harmful ideologies and practices by teachers and school staff. Revolutionary strategies for education must have long-term and short-term goals. From a long-term strategic point of view it must be recognized that schooling within the context of capitalism is designed to serve the needs of the capitalist class. Therefore any real hope of changing the education system would require a major overhaul of the education system that would have to be part of a broader anti-capitalist movement. From a short-term perspective, children are currently suffering as a result of capitalist stronghold on educational theory and practice. Therefore it is necessary to struggle for social change within the current education system. Because of the government’s role in promoting a racist conservative education agenda, which segments the population, causing some students to become more successful and others to fail, based on race and ethnicity, efforts must be made to fight for equality in education so that all students can receive a quality education. There must be overt and covert acts of resistance, on the part of students, families and educators to create liberated zones in schools and classrooms that can protect students from becoming victims of educational genocide. This means refusing to and opposing racist policies and meaningless curricula by fighting for policy changes or simply getting teachers to refuse to implement bad policies. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act asserts that one of its principal goals is to close the achievement gap between people of color and white students. Yet, nowhere in the NCLB is there any reference to the necessity of confronting racist practices or the differences in the learning environments of the predominantly white schools compared to predominantly people of color schools, which in-effect privilege white students. The Bush plans simply pays lip service to creating equality in education while pushing a series of reforms that demand accountability by imposing standards, mandatory testing and unachievable and non-funded goals. For Chicana/o students the NCLB has meant an increase of remedial education, learning by rote memorization, a lower quality education, pressure to drop out of school and being taught in school by demoralized teachers. Kohn argues that, “Minority Children from low-income families typically get the same kind of drill-n-skill instruction that low achievers do, sometimes because individual teacher arrange things that way and sometimes because it’s imposed on teachers in the form of heavily scripted programs like Success for All or Direct Instruction (Kohn 222).” Good educational practices that produce critical and analytical thinking and help students become problem solvers are being abandoned so that students can learn to be better test takers. Rote memorization is the simplest, most elementary level of thinking skills, compared to complex problem solving. Students are basically being taught to the test so that schools can avoid being targeted by the punitive actions of the state and federal government. The education system in California is fostering a passive learning environment, based on traditional teaching practices that promote white supremacy, dumbs-down the curriculum and ultimately deprives students of a quality education. We need an education system that helps students become analytical thinkers so that they can contribute to their families, communities and society in general. Furthermore, our education system should give students the foundation they need to look at society as it is so they can become agents of social change. In this paper I look at four essential points. First, I assess the historical conditions over the past thirty-five years that have contributed to the problems that Chicana/o students face in California ’s education system. Secondly, I discuss the political strategy of the right-wing conservatives in addressing the inequality in education between Chicanas/os as compared to white students. Thirdly, I discuss the question of who the education system serves. Lastly, I will explore and propose revolutionary strategies for achieving educational practices that enhance the possibilities of retaining and graduating Chicana/o students and teaching them higher order thinking skills to become critical and analytical thinkers. There are volumes of writings that address these issues, however many are written by scholars and researchers and are for the academic community and unfortunately tend to be rather lofty and abstract. My hope is to present a paper that is understandable and useful to grassroots activists who are engaged in the daily struggle to create a learning environment that is amenable to the academic success of Chicana/o students. I also hope to present a paper that will encourage dialogue on defining a revolutionary strategy to struggle for equality in education and a better quality education for other people of color. II. Historical Overview: Demanding Justice and Equality in EducationIt has been more than thirty-five years since the Chicana/o student blowouts throughout the southwest, when students walked out of schools demanding justice and equality in education (Rosales). During that period Chicana/o students fought against the intolerable racist climate in most schools. Since then, there have been struggles to change the education system including the development of a multicultural curriculum, elimination of harmful racist ideologies at schools, creating caring educational climates, broadening school textbooks to include the contributions of Chicanas/os and other people of color, and bilingual and bicultural education. Inspired by the momentum of the revolutionary national movements of the 1960s and 1970s, young Chicana/o activists fought for an education system that would give Chicana/o students improved educational opportunities. In opposition to deficiency theories that attempted to rationalize the oppression of Chicanas/os by blaming them for not succeeding in schools, activists sought to expose the racist practices in schools that systemically and systematically prevented Chicana/o students from receiving a quality education that was equal to Anglo students. Chicanas/os were more likely than any ethnic group to drop out of school in the 1960s and 1970s. This trend has continued through the 1980s, 1990s and still continues today. Chicanas/os have been historically subjected to institutional racism, discrimination and segregation in schools, resulting in limited educational and employment opportunities. While there is general agreement that Chicanas/os are more likely to drop out of school (González; Fry; and Duignan) and consequently experience less economic and social advancement, there is still disagreement about the causes and more importantly the solutions to improving Chicana/o educational success. The slight improvements in education that have been achieved, such as bilingual education, limited ethnic studies curriculum, college preparation programs, etc. were a result of militant struggles. However, it has been a continuous, uphill battle, where policy-makers and local school administrators have resisted every attempt to change the education system, and have actively sought to sabotage education reforms. Furthermore, the ideological and political climate that ushered in the conservative right wing, beginning with President Reagan, also reversed many of the education reforms in America . During the Reagan-Bush era—which escalated attacks on the nation’s poor, people of color, women, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, labor unions, immigrants and increased imperialist aggression in Latin America, and cuts in social programs—America’s education system also suffered greatly (Delgado Bernal 89). It was within this context that the culture wars took place, where the Reagan appointed U.S. Commission on Educational Excellence issued its apocalyptic proclamations about the U.S. education system. The education system became the target of the conservative right wing, which demanded a return to the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic. This effort was a Trojan horse, designed to undermine the education reform efforts to force schools to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of students as a principal strategy for improving the educational success of people of color. The question of “success” has been contextualized by the conservatives as chasing the American Dream, or more appropriately the myth of meritocracy, which argues that those who study the hardest and work the hardest will be rewarded in the marketplace. The fact is that the hardest working people are the poorest people in America , and even when people of color become more educated they still face racism and discrimination. In our society, people of color are the most likely to fail in school and drop out because they struggle daily to survive in schools that do not nurture the cultural and linguistic learning styles Chicanas/os, African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans, immigrants or any people of color. They attend schools that have demonstrated that they lack the capacity to teach people of color and have failed to significantly diminish the high dropout rate and levels of low-achievement, which is evidenced in the higher participation by people in remedial education programs. Teachers receive their training in universities that do not address questions of racism and ethnic oppression in schools. Universities do not prepare teachers to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of students. Additionally, teachers bring to school their own cultural biases, which they consciously and unconsciously impose on their students, with varying in degrees of disrespect and contempt for the cultural realities and lifestyles of students of color. As McLaren puts it, “Classroom reality is rarely presented as socially constructed, historically determined, and mediated through institutionalized relationships of class, gender, race and power (McLaren 35-36).” Not only are people of color learning in racially and ethnically segregated schools, but they are also learning in substandard schools, with substandard resources, and often with the most under-trained teachers. The result of this is that people of color are not prepared for higher education or well paying jobs. Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, African Americans and Native Americans are deprived of educational opportunities, relegating them to being the most exploited people in America . III. What is the Conservative Right-wing strategy for Education? In 1983 the Reagan appointed Commission on Educational Excellence issued its report, A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education), which became the catalyst for the conservative education agenda. Since then the federal and state government, along with the Business Roundtable ( Kearns ) have increasingly implemented education reforms that impose mandates on school districts that focus on toughening standards, rigorous standardized testing and a series of punitive actions that include cuts in badly needed funding for schools and school districts that fail to meet the mandates. In some cases it means takeovers of school districts, which complies with Bush’s agenda to privatize education. Bush has consistently sought to undermine public education by imposing vouchers and outright imposition of trusteeships where private corporations run school districts. Under the guise of closing the achievement gap, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the most recent implementation of the conservative right-wing strategy to control education. By exploiting the concerns of parents who are afraid that the education system is severely flawed, the NCLB has instituted a series of mandates that pressure schools to limit what they teach. Each state must comply in order to receive Title I federal funding to meet the needs of struggling students, who are defined as disadvantaged. States have developed aggressive standards and are required to provide accountability through high stakes testing. Through a complicated formula, student test results are compared to previous years and are required to meet ridiculously high goals so that all students will supposedly meet the same goals by 2010. All students regardless of their socioeconomic background, English language abilities, including students with identified learning disabilities are required to perform at the same levels. Students are classified into sub categories based on significant numbers of students in each category. If there are significant numbers of English Language Learners, economically disadvantaged, learning disabled, ethnicities and male and female students, each group is measured according to their test results. The whole school and each sub category must meet their targeted goals. Furthermore, the NCLB has eliminated Title VII in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which funded bilingual programs, and has replaced it with Title III, which only funds materials for English language materials for English language learners. English language learners must take high stakes tests in English to demonstrate proficiency in language arts. In an effort to close the achievement gap, the No Child Left Behind Act forces schools to put immigrants, and people of color in remedial education, through drill-n-skill instruction, relying on rote memorization and forcing students to memorize meaningless disconnected facts. Contrary to receiving a quality education that is equal for all students, people of color are being deprived of a holistic education that promotes higher order thinking skills, and which include music, art, drama, physical education, science and especially culturally and linguistically relevant subjects. Consequently, in California , schools with mostly immigrants, Chicanas/os, African Americans, learning disabled students and poor students receive the lowest test scores. Schools with predominantly white affluent students earn higher test scores. Students with varying degrees of resources, including cultural, linguistic and economic must perform at the same academic levels. The California legislature and California Department of Education have become willing accomplices in this oppressive debacle. By creating unreasonable standards and rigorous high stakes standardized tests, California schools are subjecting children (beginning at the second grade) to enormous pressure. By kindergarten children are assessed at their schools for reading and math skills. When they enter the first grade, at the beginning of the school year, schools notify many parents that their children are already “at-risk” of retention based on beginning of the year assessments. By the second grade students take state tests. If students are non-English speakers they are still required to take the tests in English. Learning disabled children must perform at the same levels as everyone else. Many California school districts have resorted to scripted curriculums, forcing teachers to deliver the lessons strictly as directed in the teaching manuals. Schools have minimized or eliminated physical education, art and music. Social studies and science are often taught only as appendages to language arts. Many schools have focused their instruction on language arts, math and test taking strategies. In this sense schools are dumbing down the curriculum to help students decode words so they can become better test takers. Another popular strategy for California school districts is purchase test taking preparation materials, so that students will become familiar with test taking vocabulary, reviewing questions that are similar to the test questions and filling in the correct bubbles. Test taking, test preparation and remedial education have meant multi-billion dollar profits to the companies that create tests and the businesses that cater to schools that are unable to meet the federally and state mandated test scores. A recent scandal and reports of corporate corruption and the Bush administration and its support of the Reading First program and the consequent criminal investigation by congress highlight the collusion between Bush and wealthy corporations (CNN/Associated Press). For Chicanas/os, Latinas/os and other people of color, this means more remedial education throughout their educational experience. At the very end of it all, when students have fulfilled their graduation requirements by taking all the necessary classes and passing them, they are required to pass an exit exam. If Chicanas/os are deprived a meaningful quality education and lack the necessary problem solving skills they need because of institutional racist educational practices, inadequate facilities, poor resources, one-size-fits-all curriculum and they cannot pass the exit exam, the students will suffer the consequences. Despite the valiant efforts and broad based grassroots organizing campaign of Californians For Justice to force the California Department of Education to stop the exit exam, the California Department of Education has vowed to continue imposing the exit exam in order for students to graduate. Even though students fulfill all other graduation requirements including passing other school exams, many will not graduate. In other words, if schools fail to meet the needs of students, students will fail. Students and parents are told that students will be given several opportunities to pass the exit exam. Schools are offering after school, weekend and summer courses—more remedial education—to help students prepare for the tests. However, if students believe they cannot pass the exam, they will simply drop out. The current test-driven culture of California schools is extremely divisive and demoralizing. Test scores only reaffirm what is already known: affluent white students have higher test scores than low-income people of color. Teachers who teach in schools with white affluent kids are perceived as being better teachers than teachers who teach in low-income schools with people of color. The daily haranguing in the media of low performing schools also sends a message to people of color that they are inferior learners. Who Does the Education System Serve?It must be understood that under the capitalist system—where the market rules—the education system is an important vehicle to meet the needs of capitalism. The U.S. education system segments the population into various levels of exploitation. It determines who works the most and the least and who will be the most exploited. Chicanas/os and Latinas/os end up in the most exploited sectors of society. The condition (social and economic status) of Chicanas/os in our society is affected by their educational backgrounds in addition to the effects of discrimination in employment, housing, health care, policing and the criminal justice system. Undereducated Chicanas/os end up in the jaws of the criminal justice system, not necessarily because they commit disproportionately more crimes, but because the criminal justice system unjustly targets Chicanas/os disproportionately more than white people (Milovanovic and Russell; Walker, Spohn and DeLone). It is questionable that Chicanas/os can actually achieve an equal quality education within the context of the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism was founded on cruel oppression of many people. The genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement and exploitation of Africans, the theft of Chicana/o and Native American lands, exploitation of immigrants and, generally the exploitation of all working class people were all essential features of U.S. capitalist expansion. U.S. capitalism was built on the blood and sweat of people of color and is fundamentally a system of white supremacy. This affects all spheres of life in America , including education. Unless this contradiction is fully addressed and confronted, there will be no hope of eliminating racist and ethnic oppression in education or any sphere of life. How does it work? Chicanas/os have historically been segregated in schools. Through outright segregation (through placing students in schools that are predominantly Chicana/o) and tracking (the practice of limiting Chicana/o students in remedial and vocational education) students are placed in educational settings that determine their educational outcomes. Recently the Harvard Civil Rights Project has reported that Latinos and African Americans have been increasingly segregated in schools that are predominantly people of their own race and ethnicity (Orfield and Lee). This is significant for a number of reasons. First, segregation continues the pattern of unequal education (Gilbert Gonzalez), by schooling children in substandard buildings, with underqualified and inexperienced teachers and insufficient resources (Raúl Gonzalez). Second, segregation maintains the system of tracking, where students will remain in remedial and vocational tracks instead of university tracks. And finally, segregation in school districts that are controlled and operated by racist and culturally narrow-minded school officials and school boards, will still deprive students of an education that honors their heritage, cultural backgrounds and a curriculum that is historically and culturally relevant to them. In other words, the question of segregation is a complex issue. Segregation must be looked at from the perspective of self-determination of Chicanas/os. Do they choose to be educated in substandard schools that offer a racist curriculum and are run by white supremacists? The answer to this is a resounding, no! If Chicanas/os struggle for the right to attend schools that are predominantly Chicana/o, with adequate resources, in a non-racist school, which offers them a quality education, and gives the students the skills they need to become critical and analytical thinkers, that would be a different question. The reality is that the majority of Chicana/o students attend public schools. Any significant efforts to improve the education of Chicana/o students must be based on changing the curriculum, leadership and educational practices of local schools and school districts. However, with the passage and implementation of the No Child Left Behind act and California state education policies, local districts have less authority and autonomy regarding the curriculum and standards. The federal government and state governments tie local education funding to meeting federal and state mandates, which include standards, curriculum and standardized testing. The national education agenda has been hijacked by the National Business Roundtable (Emery and Ohanian); a national business group that openly and successfully lobbies politicians to restructure education. V. Revolutionary Insights and Perspectives on education…Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. --Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx 123-124) Since the time of the writing of The Communist Manifesto, Marxists have defended the demand for, “Free education for all children in public schools (127).” However, it must be recognized that under capitalism the schooling process will be constantly under pressure to meet the various needs of capitalism. Education is a political process, as the No Child Left Behind clearly demonstrates and if there is going to be a successful campaign to reform the education system so that it will provide an equal education for all students then a coherent vision for education must be espoused that will be supported on a broad scale. Pauline Lipman discusses the importance of criticizing public education and defending the institution of public education. She states: Critical scholarship over the past 30 years has illuminated the ways in which public schools reproduce race, gender, and class inequality. It is important to criticize public schools while defending the institution of universal public education and its democratic potential. With all their profound failures, public schools can be forums for democratic public debate about not only what kind of education we want, but what kind of society we want. (14) The current education reform movement relies heavily on a standardized curriculum and high stakes assessments (Raúl González). But Chicana/o student achievement is affected by numerous factors, which have to do with school environment, racial and ethnic climate, teacher attitudes and other factors, which cannot be measured by standardized tests. In this section I will present some educational approaches that are derived from critical pedagogy.VI. Critical Pedagogy: A Theory of Liberation Critical pedagogy arms educators with the tools for challenging racist educational institutions and provides a theoretical context in which to provide Chicana/o and Latina/o students—and other people of color—with an educational environment which is free of harmful, racist ideologies. Theories for critical pedagogy began with—but certainly are not limited to—the revolutionary perspectives of Paulo Freire. As he noted in a conversation with Myles Horton, “I can tell you more and more, in different parts of Brazil , the people are working and reinventing me, adapting to the new circumstances of the country and putting into practice some of the ideas I have defended until today (Horton, Freire 209).” Any revolutionary theory must evolve; otherwise it will remain static and become outdated and useless. Critical pedagogy is a learning process that is holistic, where teachers and students are empowered. Learning draws from other movements of social change and is based on intellectual openness. It is a process of mutual engagement for improving our society and challenging the status quo (hooks). Freire’s vision of pedagogy benefited from his understanding of the dynamics of his society, which could also be applied to other nations that experience oppression based on class, race and gender (Gandin and Apple), because it recognized that the actual process of education itself could contribute to oppression or liberation. Men (and women) are able to reclaim their humanity by understanding their social conditions and recognizing their oppression. The struggle begins with men’s recognition that they have been destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation—all arms of domination—cannot be the instruments of their rehumanization. The only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed. In a humanizing pedagogy the method ceases to be an instrument by which the teachers (in this instance, the revolutionary leadership) can manipulate the students (in this instance, the oppressed), because it expresses the consciousness of the students themselves (Freire 55-56). Paulo Freire not only criticized the elite nature of the education system in Brazil , but also advocated the idea that education is a tool for liberation. He challenged the practice of education as being an “act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor (58).” He refers to this process as “banking education (60).” Freire’s approach to educational reform began with identifying with the fundamental flaw in teaching that he described as “banking education” (59). He described it this way.
He was a proponent of the idea of “problem posing education,” which he described as “humanist and liberating (74),” because students are able to discuss and analyze their own social condition and determine the solutions that are needed to change society. Freire discussed the importance of problem posing education, because learners are partners in the education process. In the problem posing (1970 66) process, learners help to decide what is taught. In Freire’s vision of critical pedagogy, teachers become students as well as teachers, and teachers and students become co-investigators (68). This is done through dialogical relations (66) where teachers listen to students, they dialogue, and together they define the curriculum. In his educational research Kohn found that, “students learn most vividly and have their best ideas when they get to choose which questions to explore (150). On one hand, Freire saw the critical pedagogy as a response to an oppressive system where access to or denial of education contributes to the oppression of people. Freire viewed critical pedagogy as a “humanist and libertarian pedagogy (40),” where people commit themselves to social transformation in the trying to achieve permanent liberation. Therefore, Freire saw critical pedagogy as political. On the other hand Freire presented critical pedagogy as a revolutionary educational theory that would change the way teachers teach and students learn. From his perspective teachers and students could become students and teachers (66). Freire’s profound insights have inspired a movement of educators who are seeking to redefine the role of teaching in schools, colleges and universities. Critical pedagogy looks at education as a way of giving oppressed people their humanity. From the concept of conscientiçao (19) Freire recognized that oppressed people need to develop a critical consciousness about their reality, and strive to achieve their humanization. The struggle for humanization, as noted by Freire, is a result of being inspired by oppressed people’s consciousness about inequality, oppression and dehumanization. Utilizing the ideas of critical pedagogy I have extracted and synthesized (in brief statements) the following concepts:1. Schools should strive to achieve a caring educational environment. This would create an environment, which is full of praise of student effort and achievement, an atmosphere where students feel safe, and a learning space that is free of racist attitudes. In a caring educational environment teachers and school staff provide students with encouragement and supportive guidance. Additionally, the teachers and staff create a school climate that is welcoming to students’ parents and is able to communicate with the parents in their primary language. (Cushman; Green; Kohn; Olivos; and Valenzuela) 2. Students should be treated with respect, as individuals, as people of color, and as females. Teachers should not use demeaning, derogatory, racist or sexist terminology or literature. Teachers should demonstrate respect of students by acknowledging their cultural and linguistic insights and contributions. On a basic, human level, students should be spoken to in a manner that is respectful, letting students know that their ideas are taken seriously, and so students will feel comfortable taking risks (i.e. not be afraid to be ridiculed for giving the wrong answer). (Achinstein and Barrett; Bartolomé; Cushman; Green; and Valdés) 3. Schools should strive to incorporate the Freirean principle of the dialogical process and inquiry. Students should be considered partners or accomplices in shaping the curricula. Through inquiry students should define the questions and issues that lead to what is taught in the classroom, so that what is learned is meaningful to students. As students get older and they are able to question the condition of their own existence and of the condition of inequality in society, student inquiry should be encouraged by teachers as a means of understanding complex social relations in society. In this process, teachers not only teach the students, but they also learn from the students. (Freire; Gandin and Apple; and Horton and Freire) 4. Schools should strive to positively reinforce students’ identity, culture and families. It is critical to encourage students to bring their cultural identities and languages to the school and make them feel welcomed in the classroom. Schools should regularly teach about different cultures throughout the curriculum. Schools should create a learning environment that embraces the cultural experiences and beliefs of students. Multicultural education should be taught, which would be multidisciplinary and would include but not limited to history, social studies, literature and art. (Cushman; Franquiz and Salazar; Green; Nieto; Valdés; Valenzuela) 5. The school education curriculum should include teachings about race, class and gender. Students should learn about the history of conflicts in the United States and the role of U.S. imperialism in the world and how that has affected the condition of people. Students should learn that society is stratified according to race, class and gender. Students should be given opportunities to explore these issues by looking at historical and contemporary evidence by studying actual events. (Bartolomé; McLaren and Muñoz; Sleeter, Torres and Laughlin; and Solórzano and Delgado Bernal) 6. Schools should strive to help students become critical and analytical thinkers. Students should be able to question complex questions, such as, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism and injustice, and be encouraged to seek solutions. History and social studies subjects should be presented to students from a variety of sources so they can utilize information to make their own judgments, which would allow them to become agents of social change. (Cammarota; McLaren, Martin, Farahmandpur and Jaramillo; McLaren and Muñoz; Quezada and Romo; Revilla; Solórzano and Delgado Bernal) 7. In order to make all of the above possible, it will be necessary to create a learning environment that is free of harmful ideologies and practices by teachers and school staff. It is essential to train teachers who will be better prepared to deal with the diverse student populations, and be respectful of the students’ cultural backgrounds and families. (Achinstein and Barrett; Bartolomé; Berta Avila; Franquiz and Salazar; Quezada and Romo) The question is, how would this look in practice? There are a couple of dimensions that need to be addressed here. First, is the question of creating a strategy that includes a cooperative partnership between teachers, parents and students. Second, is thinking about ways in which educators can offer practices which resist the oppressive practices and policies of schooling. The reality is that education is political. Local school boards have little to do with creating policy and making decisions about implementing the curriculum. Now the federal and state governments provide funding for school districts with strings attached. The curriculum, educational materials, how often students are tested and the purpose of testing is determined by federal and state mandates. Local school boards are more like technicians that figure out how to implement the mandates. Often parents, especially people of color, feel frustrated by the failure of education and respond positively to calls for increased testing as if testing were a final solution to inequality. However, parents can become activists for better quality education. Parents are usually invited to help with helping teachers to prepare projects, help children with homework at home, discipline children who misbehave in school, or raise money to pay for badly needed school supplies. Parents can—in addition to helping students with homework and encouraging their children to become better learners—become involved in schools on a broader level. For example, parents can join school committees that discuss the curriculum; organize parents to attend school board meetings as advocates for their children; challenge elected officials who support the No Child Left Behind Act; and, support elected officials who endorse education reform measures that increase funding and measures, which provide a meaningful education for children. Parents can also become active in forcing schools to end racist practices and policies. On a broader level, parent activists, community activists and teachers can build alliances to struggle for a better learning environment, which meets the academic, cultural and linguistic needs of students. Being involved in education should not be restricted to in-school functions. Parent involvement also includes being critical of and often opposing school and district practices and policies. Students can provide a powerful voice in identifying the deficiencies of schooling in their own education, defining what success in education means to them and offering solutions for improving the quality of education. Soliciting their input, as Marcos Pizarro does, gives us invaluable insight from the perspectives of students who struggle to define their own racial identities, being Chicana/o and Latina/o, in a society that favors Anglo-European-American values. Chicana/o and Latina/o students are often cognizant of how race and ethnicity affect their educational experiences, which are often negative (Pizarro). Activists and researchers play an important role in developing progressive and revolutionary pedagogical theory that can be utilized in grass roots organizing and educating communities about the racist nature of the educational system and the importance of active-resistance to bad policies like the No Child Left Behind Act, high stakes standardized testing and the high school exit exam. Coalition building and grass roots organizing also provide a vehicle for the purpose of forcing the state and federal government to adequately fund schools and force local school districts to improve the quality of schools, from the condition of buildings to providing adequate and appropriate resources. Some examples of organizations and resources include (but not limited to):
Organizations, Activists and Researchers Who Are Dedicated to Educational Justice
Applied Research Center http://www.arc.org/ Californians for Justice http://www.caljustice.org/cfj_main/ Coalition for Educational Justice http://www.cejla.org/ Education Not Incarceration http://www.ednotinc.org/ MAESTR@S, an Institute for Raza Liberation through Educación/ Marcos Pizarro http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty_and_staff/faculty_detail.jsp?id=971 Peter McLaren http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/pages/mclaren/ Rethinking Schools http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ Teachers 4 Social Justice http://www.altrue.net/site/t4sj/
California schools have become obsessed with testing, where schools test children often so they will be prepared to take state standardized tests and teachers meet regularly to examine test scores to guide their teaching. No longer do teachers teach to the whole child, where children learn a variety of subjects that include art, music, science, real authentic social studies, and character building. Many teachers claim that the fun has been removed from teaching. For children the drone of drill-n-skill instruction and rote memorization has made learning less interesting and literally no fun. In a state where large populations of Chicanas/os, African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and Anglos live and whose lives have been shaped by a concrete set of historical conditions, it is important to give children analytical skills that help them analyze the causes of inequality and discrimination so they can think about how to build a better society. In my experience as a teacher I have utilized real world events to get first and second grade students to think about social issues. For example, when I teach children about holidays, I include holidays like Mexican Independence Day to honor the traditions and culture of Mexican children in my classes. We discuss the holiday and who Mexican people are. We discuss the symbolism of the Mexican flag, its roots in Aztec tradition and how the Aztecs built a great civilization that was destroyed by Spanish conquistadores. We discuss the three hundred years it took for the indigenous based people of Mexico to create an independent nation. We also discuss how the U.S. took half of Mexico ’s territory. Finally, we discuss why it is important for people of California , Arizona , New Mexico , Colorado and Texas to celebrate Mexican holidays. Another example of this is the study of African Americans. In school we are encouraged to talk about Martin Luther King, Jr. the peace maker. However, I want students to understand that people were kidnapped from their lands, separated from their families, chained, whipped, brutalized and forced to spend months at the bottom of a ship in total darkness. We discuss photos that depict the brutality and students respond to it. Of course, they are horrified that humans can be treated this way. They want to know what the people did to be punished. We learn that they had done nothing wrong. In discussing Dr. King, we learn that Black people were prevented from eating in restaurants, shopping in stores, barred from schools, parks, movie theaters, swimming pools and other establishments. In looking at photos of people being beaten or hosed, including the assault and arrest of Dr. King, the students ask, why? We learn that they simply tried to go to the same places as white people. Children instinctively have a sense of right and wrong and are able to sort out the feelings of discomfort they feel when they recognize oppression. Through exploration, they develop a sense of justice. One final example is in learning about Native Americans, I try to engage students in discussions about learning from specific Native American cultures, such as the Yaqui, Tarahumara or Apache. Students are encouraged to think about concepts like living in harmony with the earth, why the drum is an important part of Native American culture, why the circle is an important symbol, how Native Americans have historically taken only what they need from the earth. Students gain an understanding that there were many different indigenous civilizations in north and south America. My students are also challenged to think about how indigenous people have been labeled as savages but that there is evidence that they have always been highly civilized. The students also discuss why roughly 19,000,000 people were reduced to little more than 300,000 by the 19 th century since the point of contact with European settlers. Also, we discuss what it was like to be put on a reservation and be denied the right to be a citizen in your own land. I have only taught in primary grades, and I do not believe in politicizing children. Yet, I have found that when presented with information honestly, young children will weigh the facts and become analytical thinkers and arrive at their own conclusions. It requires thinking outside the mandated curriculum and searching for alternative sources. The students do not have to agree with me. I just want them to think and analyze. One father told me that he was impressed by the fact that he could have deep discussions with his first grader about Martin Luther King, Jr. VII. ConclusionChicana/o students are suffering from current educational practices. All the hype about the No Child Left Behind Act and California ’s rigid policies to close the achievement gap by making rigorous standards, which will be verified through rigorous testing is proving to be mythology with good publicity. Revolutionary approaches to teaching must be employed to improve the chances of Chicanas/os and other people of color to receive an education that gives students critical thinking skills that will help them analyze our society and become agents of social change to improve our society. The struggle for improved education requires long term strategic goals, which align the education struggle with all social movements to oppose social, economic and political oppression and fundamentally change our society to meet the needs of all people. That means changing the political context that determines the purpose of education, so that education will no longer be a system of segregation and segmentation and an institution that enhances the needs of capitalism by supplying undereducated people of color to be the most exploited sector of society. Instead the purpose of education should be to create a generation of critical and analytical thinkers who possess the tools to view society with a critical lens and think about how to create a just society. Sources
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