School Reform for Social Justice?*
Should public schools in a democracy prepare students for what is or what should be?
This question about the fundamental role of public schools in a democracy has been asked repeatedly by reformers since John Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed” appeared in 1897. The question continues in reformers’ quest for Kipp-like schooling for poor children of color and charter schools with the phrase “social Justice” in their title or those reformers who swear by common core standards making U.S. schools competitive with Shanghai and Singapore, and, of course, advocates for transforming schools into high-tech havens. Tracking the use of the phrase “social justice” in English language publications since the early 1900s, according to Google’s Ngram viewer, the graph line indicating increased use of phrase climbs steeply since the early 1990s.
Finally, add those champions of “critical pedagogy” to that list of what public schools in a democracy should be doing. Beyond preparing students with the language, social, and academic skills for a highly competitive labor market (e.g., “Everyone Goes To College,” Common Core Standards), “critical pedagogy” and its various incarnations seek to equip low-income minority students with the language skills and academic content to analyze the culture and structures of power in the U.S. and use both to gain access to equal opportunities and alter the trajectories of their lives with confidence rather than embarrassment (see Ball and Alim pdf Preparation, Pedagogy, Power, and Policy). Proponents of Black English, for example, (see PDF Critical_language_awareness ) state that “[o]ur pedagogies should not pretend that racism does not exist in the form of linguistic discrimination. Nor should they pretend that linguistic profiling does not directly affect the personal and family lives of our students who speak marginalized languages.” An arsenal of sociolinguistic approaches exists to answer the question: “How might the vernacular of African American children be taken into account in efforts to help them do better in schools?” Scholar John Rickford at Stanford University has spelled out different strategies and their classroom applications. All of these efforts seek to disprove that low-income minority African American, Hawaiian, Mexican American language practices brought into classrooms are deficits; they can be, in the hands of knowledgeable and skilled teachers–strengths.
That mission requires schools to attack political, social, and economic inequalities. For that to occur, a critical mass of teachers holding these beliefs CONTINUE READING: School Reform for Social Justice?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
