LACK OF DIVERSITY AND EQUALITY IN EDUCATION

Lack of Diversity and Equality in Education

Abstract

The issues of cultural representation, selection, and production in education are exemplified at their sharpest by the debates on the school curriculum. Three approaches to discussions of Culture and school curricula can be characterized: (i) the derivation of curricula from analyses of culture (the cultural representation model); (ii) the critique of cultural reproduction through school curricula (the Ideology-critical model); (iii) the generation of curricula to further social justice (the cultural production and empowerment model). These approaches reinterpret a Weberian analysis of the links between culture, social status, the economic order, and the distribution of power in society (see Weber's analysis of society in terms of Class, status, and power (1922)).

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Historical Development6

Models and Approaches to Multicultural Education10

From Theory to Practice15

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy17

Critiques of Multicultural Education19

New Theoretical Approaches21

Resegregation and Accountability Pressures42

Future Trends45

Conclusion47

References49

Lack of Diversity and Equality in Education

Introduction

Multicultural education is an idea or concept, a process, and an educational reform movement that assumes America's diversity should be reflected in the staffing, curriculum, instructional practices, policies, and values of our educational institutions (Banks & Banks, 2006; Grant & Ladson-Billings, 1997). Although the United States has always been diverse, between 1923 and 1965 restrictive policies limited immigration, particularly from countries outside of Europe.

In the last three decades U.S. society has become increasingly both multicultural and multilingual. The 1990s witnessed a rapid influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, and a recent survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are 11 to 12 million new immigrants. More than 20% of children in the United States are either foreign-born or have a parent who was born abroad. Although more stringent security and immigration screening was instituted after 9/11, refugees from conflict-ridden countries like Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, and Myanmar continue to enter the country in steady numbers.

Instead of moving to traditional gateway cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, recent refugees are settling in midsized cities like Seattle, St. Paul, Atlanta, and Buffalo where the cost of living is more affordable.

During this century several attempts have been made to derive curricula from an analysis of culture. Some of these reveal the intertwining of culture and social Class. T.S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) argues for the preservation of a “High culture” classical and academic curriculum (for example, the arts, philosophy, manners, the accumulated wisdom of the past) which is taught to a social elite and which helps to preserve an elitist society. Culture, in this definition, is a social accomplishment, a locater of class.

In the United Kingdom this was echoed in Bantock's Towards a Theory of Popular Education (1975) in which a “high culture” curriculum was to be the preserve of a social elite while a “folk curriculum,” rather than an academically “watered down” curriculum, was to be made available to the working classes, comprising recreations and pastimes, dance, media studies, family life, affective/artistic/physical (as opposed to cognitive/intellectual) curricula, design, and ...