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What is a perfect school? Ask this question and students will spend half an hour filling a white board with characteristics ranging from swimming pools to school busses, AP classes to athletic trainers, sports to SmartBoards, technology to teachers, and literally dozens of other items. And many think that all students, regardless of where they go to school, experience these opportunities. But of course they do not. Multiple structural inequalities both related to, and distinct from, the educational system result in two very different types of educational experiences for white students and students from non-dominant racial groups.Footnote 1 At the heart of this difference lay processes and mechanisms of racialization that not only perpetuate racial inequalities and identities but create a challenge for educatorsFootnote 2 who teach about racial realities in education, particularly when addressing these inequalities with white students.Footnote 3

The current generation of students, which has grown up with a rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Bush 2011; Glazer 1997), often believes that they are both sensitive to racial differences and post-racial, often using a colorblind rhetoric to argue that do not consider skin color in their daily lives; that they judge people based on “who they are” (as if race can be disaggregated from who people are) (Fox 2012). But as so many have documented, colorblindness not only inhibits deep understandings of structural inequalities, but perpetuates racist consequences of multiple “colorblind” policies (Gallagher 2003; Guinier and Torres 2003).

Throughout the semester, students are encouraged to think about how does race matter – for everything. When white students are asked if they believe that they do not see gender either, the impossibility of “not seeing” race often becomes clear, particularly after examining structural and personal examples of white privilege described by Peggy McIntosh (1997). Surmounting the pervasive racial rhetoric of colorblindness is paramount in describing the racial differences in educational experiences. Students become more adept at seeing how race directly affects their own lives through semi-weekly critical reading papers requiring them to link themes in the readings to their own lives.

Difficulties in teaching about racial inequality in the educational domain are heightened by the fact that, while few students likely have significant experiences with other social institutions (i.e. work/the economy, criminal justice system, etc), they have spent most of their lives in the educational system. As a result, many believe that they are experts when it comes to the American educational system. Indeed, they all are. But their expertise, regardless of their race, is often limited by individual experience and highlights the central role of the American educational system in reproducing racial identities and inequalities through selective knowledge dispersion, resources, curriculum, and in-school practices (Lewis 2003; Moya 2002; Weiner 2010). The truth is that very few students of any race understand the logic behind and mechanisms perpetuating racial inequalities.

Many white students are deeply attached to the hegemonic meritocratic ideology of the American dream, that with hard work everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in the United States. Central to this ideology is the belief that schools of equal quality for all students act as a mechanism of opportunity. Since students in predominantly white schools rarely critically examine racism and whiteness, particularly what it means to be white (Perry 2002), they often lack factual knowledge of racial differences in educational experiences. Failing to encounter explanations of historical or contemporary exclusion and inequality, many white students believe that those who do not succeed willingly gave up what they are privileged to have – a quality education. This asociological view of educational failure, as an individual, rather than a social phenomenon, inhibits critical thinking as to the causes of racial inequalities in educational and economic outcomes. As a result, white students resist viewing their own schools as segregated, and thus unequal. Inequalities, when they do exist, become grist for the “culture of poverty” mill, and thus opportunities for students to deploy centuries-old stereotypes of African Americans and Latinos that find them failing because they “don’t work hard enough.” Students from non-dominant groups, though often aware of differences, usually (but not always) lack knowledge as to the depth of historical and contemporary policies and practices that impede their educational success. Combined, these phenomena pose considerable challenges for educators. However, once subverted, this knowledge can facilitate students’ knowledge of durable inequality (Tilly 1998) promoted by two different educational systems and sustained by historical and contemporary racially exclusionary policies.

This chapter describes both theoretical and empirical concepts and activities addressed in a diverse, but predominantly-white, classroom to facilitate knowledge development of processes replicating racial inequalities in education. These experiential learning opportunities allow students to engage with concepts, particularly as they manifest in their own lives, to generate a deep understanding of how every child that encounters the American educational system, regardless of race, is impacted by educational inequalities. By the end of this unit, which can range from one day to a week or more, students will be able to clearly articulate multiple educationally-based racializing mechanisms; mechanisms that often exist as hidden curriculum and exclude minority youth from a quality education, upward socioeconomic mobility, and access to full citizenship rights (Blum 1998; Boykin 2001; Kymlicka 1995; Modood 2007; Weiner 2010; Young 1990). Students will also become aware of how their former lack of knowledge about these inequalities perpetuates large-scale inequality both in the educational system, and society-at-large.

1 The Content of Inequality

The “perfect school” activity, described above and below, allows students to draw on their own knowledge and experience while visualizing concrete resource inequalities manifest in American schools. Simply telling students that 95 % of minority students attend schools in low socioeconomic areas and thus suffer resource inequalities (Logan et al 2001) is insufficient for many students to fully comprehend the experiential consequences of this statistic. This activity allows students to see clearly that the very educational resources to which non-dominant groups have long demanded access, remain primarily in the hands of whites (Anderson and Ronnkvist 1999; Kozol 2005; Logan et al. 2003; Orfield and Eaton 1996).

As students fill the board with attributes of their perfect school, privileges of white students’ educational experiences become manifest. Indeed, many had access to most of what appears on the board – qualified teachers, advanced placement and college preparatory coursework, technological resources (such as computers, SmartBoards, and film/television studies), updated textbooks with diverse histories, healthy food, school busses, field trips, recess, clean air, heat and air conditioning, experienced and qualified teachers, clean bathrooms, playgrounds, pencils, paper, art supplies, and extracurricular activities such as band, National Honor Society, theatre, sports teams, and Model United Nations. Once the board is full, items absent from underfunded urban schools populated primarily by minority students are erased. Left on the board is a skeletal representation of education – classrooms, parking lots, a gym, teachers, bathrooms, desks, food, and security. During this activity, minority students, particularly those from low-income areas, often nod their heads, sometimes barely perceptibly, as the board is cleared of most resources. On one occasion, a student raised her hand and said quietly and simply, “That was my school.” Instructors should be ready for this, and similar, moment(s) when they occur.

The stark emptiness of the board, compared to how full it was a moment earlier, is often quite a shock to white students. Indeed, many are rendered speechless. Just a moment earlier, many had genuinely believed that because American children are legally required by their state to go to school until a certain age, that they have the same educational experiences; that all buildings with the word “school” on the front are equal. This activity highlights how most white students in segregated schools are prepared for college with the best resources American education has to offer while students from non-dominant groups are often left with the scraps from the educational table. In addition to visible items, i.e. new, abundant, and high quality “stuff” found in classroom, corridors, and on school campuses, resource inequality appears in the form of less qualified teachers and vocational curriculum.

Highly qualified teachers have the training, skills, and experience necessary to provide not only opportunities for students to learn material but encourage them to seek the highest goals possible. However, students from non-dominant groups are often taught by substitute or inexperienced teachers who lack subject expertise, and who are less warm and supportive towards, trusting of, and have lower expectations for their students (Alexander et al. 1999; Allan and Boykin 1999; Downey and Pribesh 2004; Ferguson 1998; Olson 2000; Peske and Haycock 2006; Solomon et al. 1996). Furthermore, white students often have teachers of the same race and class background, thereby inhibiting cross-cultural misunderstandings that occur between white teachers and students from non-dominant groups (NCES 2008). For example, when African American children collaborate on work, it is seen as cheating, rather than evidence of deeply embedded cultures of solidarity, and often find themselves pushed out of school through harsh disciplinary procedures (Skiba et al. 1997; Tenenbaum and Ruck 2007; Townsend 2000).

In classrooms where less qualified teachers are inhibited by structured curriculum designed to “teach to a test,” students rarely encounter opportunities to critically engage with course material. Unlike the intellectually engaging, hands-on activities and assignments that encourage creativity, independence, and critical thinking, found in most middle-class schools, vocational courses and curriculum track low-income and students from non-dominant groups students away from even considering the college degrees necessary to succeed in America’s highly technical service economy. Instead, students sew pillows, braid hair, learn to work a cash register, and complete tedious worksheets (Anyon 1980, 1981; Kozol 2005; Oakes 2005; Pachon and Federman 2005). In doing so, these courses track youth in urban schools toward low wage service jobs and increase their likelihood of dropping out (Haberman 1997).

Finally, the pedagogy of whiteness, an explicit curricular absence of non-dominant groups’ history and culture, leads students of all races to lack concrete knowledge of American racial history or contemporary realities (Kincheloe et al. 2000; Macedo 2006; McCarthy 1998; Pinar 1993; Shujaa 1994; Watkins et al. 2001; Zimmerman 2002). When discussing the histories of inequality, oppression, and resistance of Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos, students are often dismayed that they never encountered knowledge regarding the U.S. annexation of Mexico, discrimination against Jews, Italians, and Irish, Japanese internment, Native American genocide, or the Black Power movement. Absent this knowledge, whites are left unaware of inequalities while students of color disengage from course material. The absence or misrepresentation of non-dominant Americans and immigrants (as well as women, the working class, religious minorities, etc.) within the curriculum also explicitly signals who does, and does not, belong to the American community. In doing so, curriculum reaffirms links between whiteness and American citizenship, thereby relegating all members of non-dominant groups, whose history in this country is erased or made irrelevant, to minority status, undeserving of the full rewards, rights and privileges of American citizenship. In other words, a “color blind” account of historyFootnote 4 serves only to blind students to racial and ethnic inequality.

Understanding how these phenomena, increase drop out rates among students from non-dominant racial groups while facilitating white student success is essential for students’ deeper comprehension of how schools explicitly reify the racial hierarchy, privileges, and meanings attached to identities.

2 The Racial Logic of Educational Inequalities: The Role of “Place”

Although recognition of unequal conditions is important, knowledge of these tangible inequalities in schooling is insufficient for students to understand long-term inequality. Students must understand why these inequalities exist and persist, namely through funding structures rooted in property tax revenues (a “colorblind” policy), and exacerbated by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top regulations that inextricably link race and social class. These policies find white children receiving thousands of dollars more in funding, per child, than do Black and Latino students (cf. Kozol 2005). Because school funding is based on property taxes, schools in districts where the values of homes are high receive more money while districts where home values are low, or where renters predominate, receive less money per child. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top penalize schools with low test scores through the loss of school funding. For example, in Connecticut, due to property tax differences, students in predominantly white Greenwich, where the median family income is $122,719 received, on average, $17,500, in 2009–2010 while those in predominantly minority Bridgeport (median family income $34,658) received $13,000 (www.census.gov; www.greatschools.org). Individual schools in Bridgeport may experience decreased school budgets considering eighteen are not making “adequate progress” (Lambeck 2010). These explicit funding differences represent implicit social conceptions of race, which find white children valued more highly than those from non-dominant groups (Cornell and Hartmann 2007).

Underlying racial differences in educational experiences is “place” and the history of American suburbs, where many white students grew up and went to school, that has exacerbated both residential and educational segregation (depicted magnificently in the “The House We Live In” segment of Race: The Power of an Illusion shown to students early in the semester during discussions of how European ethnics became white, and accessed, accrued, and maintained their white privilege). Beginning in the years after World War II, FHA housing loans granted to white veterans compounded segregation imposed by nationwide sundown towns and restrictive covenants that made Black and Latino homeownership impossible (Loewen 2006; Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver and Shapiro 2006). Simultaneously, urban redevelopment policies redlined minority neighborhoods and displaced minority renters and homeowners, crowding them into already congested areas, low quality housing stock and high-rise housing projects abandoned by suburbanizing whites. As a result, members of non-dominant groups have been unable to own homes as the same rates as whites. Those who were able to purchase homes did not see their values, and thus their family’s net worth, increase exponentially in the last half century as it did for whites.Footnote 5 This wealth inequality inhibits members of non-dominant groups’ ability to participate in the same type of intergenerational transfers of liquid and non-liquid assets and residence in areas with high quality schools that allow white parents to pass on their educational attainment and socioeconomic status to their children (Blau and Duncan 1967; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Conley 2009; Haveman and Wolfe 1995; Jencks 1977; Kao and Thompson 2003; Sewell and Shah 1968; Sewell et al. 1976; Shapiro 2004; Smith et al. 1997). Since many parents mortgage their homes to pay for their children’s education, parents from non-dominant groups, lacking homes to mortgage, cannot promote this higher educational option to their children at the same rates as whites. Combined, these phenomena have promoted and, in some cases, exacerbated urban-suburban residential segregation and school spending patterns than that have outlasted the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and left America’s schools more racially distinct than in the years before this decision.

Following this introduction to the causes of residential segregation and wealth inequality, to which many students have direct personal experience as suburban residents, they are made aware of these phenomena in their own lives in two ways. First, a list of suspected sundown towns in the states drawing the most students is read.Footnote 6 Next, students are asked about the racial composition of their own high school (vis a vis a short homework assignment requiring students to generate this data using their high school yearbook or a reliable websiteFootnote 7). Most students not only hear their towns listed as former sundown towns, but see the consequences in their own schools, many of which are not only segregated, but hyper-segregated (enrolling greater than 90 % of one race).

Prior to this exercise, few students identify their schools as segregated, a term often reserved for schools attended by students from non-dominant groups, but instead view them as “normal.” Essential to teaching about racial inequality in education, is white students’ recognition that attending “normal” schools was actually a privilege to which they, as whites, had access (McIntosh 1997). Thinking critically about larger social processes of institutional racism, white students recognize, sometimes for the first time, that there were African Americans or Latinos in their schools, but many were recruited from urban schools, could not participate in extracurricular activities, or could only play certain sports, were rarely in the same college preparatory classes, and were sometimes completely invisible until graduation day. In other words, students of color, if they were in their schools, may not have been integrated into the schools.

3 Experiencing Educational Racialization

Once students understand the structure and logic of racial inequality in the schools, the final activity allows students to experience it, not as a racial voyeur into low-income schools, but as a disadvantaged subject of racialized policy. Students of all racial backgrounds spend a considerable amount of time studying for standardized tests, either in school or after school with expensive tutors or in test prep class, few have considered what they are being asked and why. This activity requires students to think critically about different groups’ experiences with both standardized tests and curriculum in general. Specifically, it requires students to consider how they might have been privileged or disadvantaged (depending on their cultural, class, and national background) as a result of (often hidden) bias in standardized tests.

Although literature consistently documents that standardized tests are culturally biased against lower class, racial, ethnic, and language minorities (www.FairTest.org; Gould 1996; Jencks and Phillips 1998; Neill and Medina 1989),Footnote 8 white students experience difficulty understanding how this occurs. Indeed, students who attend schools with electives ranging from science, history, art, music, theatre, and film production, are often unaware of the emphasis on testing that has done away with not only these subjects, but also recess and field trips. These tests have a long history in America, beginning at the turn of the century when they were used to determine which immigrant children would be placed in “retarded” classes (those with students more than 2 years behind grade level). Little has changed in the last hundred years as these tests continue to be used to determine which students belong in “Special Education” classes. However, college students today, due to the same cultural and temporal biases that existed for their historical predecessors, experience tremendous difficulty in successfully completing a replica of these early tests.

A test given to Army recruits, and then modified for immigrant youth, requires students to fill in the missing item in 20 pictures (a stereophonic horn on a phonograph, a filament of a light bulb, the leg of a crab, and a house’s chimney, without smoke) in 3 minutes, in a crowded room with dim lights (cf. Gould 1996, pp. 237–241). Many students taking the test today, regardless of their social class, age, race, or gender, cannot even finish the exam in the time allotted, much less correctly complete all the pictures. These college students, who are twice as old as most students originally completing this test, would have been labeled as, and placed in, “retarded” or special education classes, had they taken it alongside their historical peers 100 years ago. This activity depicts how questions on tests are arbitrary and designed by people familiar with certain objects, cultures, and ideas. Asked to consider how test questions they might have had on the SAT might be biased toward low-income, non-dominant group, and immigrant children today, students quickly realize how biased modern tests may be, that they test what students have had the opportunity to encounter, and that students may find it difficult to solve word problems when they include words with which they are unfamiliar.

This activity removes much of the advantages to which whites have been privileged throughout their educational careers. By experiencing disadvantage based on one’s cultural history and class background, students become aware of how whiteness exists as invisible class and racial privilege that allows them to succeed, while simultaneously minimizing competition from equally intelligent students from non-dominant racial groups. Seeing the ways in which their future contributions to American science, business, humanitarianism, and politics, might have been staunched by a simple test expands students’ awareness of how much we, as a nation, lose when tests create a barrier to high school graduation, college attendance, and large-scale participation in American social institutions for generations of students of color.

4 Conclusion

Central to teaching about the links between race, educational attainment, and racial identities are lessons in how schools replicate and retrench inequalities, rather than acting as the mythical bootstraps that allow any child, from any background, to achieve the American Dream. Experiential learning opportunities can aid instructors in confronting deeply embedded ideologies that perpetuate white privilege through the idea of an American meritocracy. While challenges for educators loom large, these lessons have the potential to restructure all students’ understandings of deeply embedded social inequality and promote social justice.

Challenging deeply embedded privileges and ideologies of meritocracy, colorblindness, and whiteness, though difficult, benefits students of all races and national backgrounds. While white and middle-class students will gain knowledge of an educational system that they heretofore may have been unaware, students who may have been subject to this education, will have the intellectual tools to critique and subvert this form of racism in classrooms where they will become teachers or those of their own children. This awareness also has the potential to promote a new generation of students who are more supportive of integration, both theoretically and through specific interventions, government initiatives to promote historically disadvantaged groups’ success within the educational domain, society-wide programs to enhance socioeconomic equality, and inclusive policies toward immigrants and their children. Recognizing how the American educational system provides access to social, political, and economic success for whites while erecting barriers to these privileges to minorities, such that resource inequality and devalued identities are linked and perpetuated, students are often fired up to confront these challenges in their own lives, classrooms, and peer groups.