Summary Of Chapter 11 Of Conforming Multicultural Education Policy And Practice

Chapter 11 of Transforming Multicultural Education Policy and Practice, written by Pedro Noguera and Esa Syeed, details the myriad of policies, ideologies, academic approaches, and individual actions that have built racialized structures within American culture and continues to ensure inequality in urban schools through race. They go on to call the reader to action; we, as educators, must actively strive for and demand anti-racist policy, (help to) create programs that recognize with race and trauma, sustain culture and community in our curricula, and be reflective of our practices and policies that lend us to serving the interest of dominant society (p. 307). Similarly, in Chapter 2 of Bettina Love’s text, Love outlines historical and contemporary

By laying out all the different roles, structures, and policies that work to uphold White Supremacist beliefs in the educational field, it exposes the fallacy of a successful and equitable education system. In doing so, the authors demand educators to contend with their personal responsibility and accountability. It is not enough to be culturally responsive; educators must critically engage with the education system, acknowledge the barriers that exist due to structural racism, work together to demand structural change that contends with race, and maintain a critical perspective that fosters a “healthy skepticism” that is “inherently hopeful” (p. 300). The authors demonstrate their willingness to do just that throughout the entire chapter by continuously calling attention to systemic issues and providing hopeful alternatives and suggestions to the reader. My main critique of Noguera and Syeed’s text is in their reference to “educational common sense” (p. 300). While I vaguely understand what the authors mean by “common sense,” the meaning was too nebulous without a concrete definition or further elaboration on Kumashiro’s use of the

Recognizing that “to mitigate their suffering and uphold Whiteness, dark families are given one short-sighted, often racist education reform model after another” is imperative to my effectiveness as a teacher (p. 27). While I agree with Love’s overall argument, I take issue with her use of the phrase “few bad apples” (p. 37). When using the phrase, Love is arguing that many “school districts’ spokespersons and President Trump portray these incidents as isolated events, the work of a few overzealous, culturally insensitive but ‘good’ teachers, students and community members” (p. 37). However, I would argue that the responses by many (be they school district spokesperson, news anchor, educator, or President) is not the “few bad apples” argument. In fact, they often normalize these actions by rewrites history/reality by forcing positve narratives. For example, Trump’s infamous claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville riots. The use of the phrase “a few bad apples” accidentally neglect that many acts of overt racism are often dismissed