Core Comprehensive Exam

Core Comprehensive Exam

Sample Answers

#2: Four Concepts related to Educational Disparity

In July of 1966 the U.S. Office of Health, Education, and Welfare published the 737 page “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” study in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to assess the availability of an equal education across diverse levels of American society. The document, dubbed The Coleman Report, reported that African American and minority children entered school far behind white children academically and that the gap widened by and during the time they spent in high school (Lee, 2002). Over the past 45 years, and especially since the mid-90s, educators and researchers have striven to understand and bridge the “achievement gap” between minority and White students. In fact, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act purports in Title I, to “clos[e] the achievement gap between high- and low-performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers” (NCLB, SEC.1001.3). It is no exaggeration to say that this academic chasm is one of the most pressing problems facing U.S. educators today.

Yet fundamental questions remain unanswered about the origins and sources of the achievement gap, on one side of which minority students, and especially Black students, have languished; and the ambiguity of the problem points to serious societal gaps of other kinds. Certainly, the gap has origins in the history of our racially divided country: slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write; Native Americans were exterminated or forced onto reservations, their culture flayed from them in compulsory boarding schools; 597 Mexican-

Americans were lynched between 1848 and 1928 (Carrigan and Clive, p. 413); until the 1930s, most rural and many urban areas did not provide high schools for Blacks; today, underfunded schools put a solid education out of reach for many; from persistent racism springs a culture of opposition which equates academic success with “acting white.” The differences in achievement cross racial lines and are also associated with economic differences, but school failure seems disproportionately to affect students of color and immigrant groups--African Americans, Native American, Hispanics, and second-language speakers (Berlak, 2005, p. 227). Americans seem bewildered at the existence of an academic disparity, yet from slavery, to Plessy vs. Ferguson and Jim Crow, to white flight and under-funded inner-city schools, to inordinately high unemployment among Native Americans, to the newly signed SB 1070 in Arizona, we have created myriad other “gaps” in our culture and have separated ourselves in countless ways from minorities. Now, we stare across the various social, economic, and academic gaps as if dumbfounded at their breadth and depth. Understanding and mending the achievement gap involves exploring the complex web of causes from which it originates: disparities in social class, the role of school climate and differentiated curriculum, the gap between educational policy and practice, as well as the way that minority students "learn" to perceive themselves growing up in American culture, must all be considered as we maneuver this bridge over the gap in academic performance in American schools.

Richard Rothstein (2004) observes that when confronted with the achievement gap, policy makers and parents "almost universally" blame school failure: low expectations, poorly designed curricula, oversized classes and chaotic school climates, out-of-step administrators, and, perhaps above all, unqualified and unskilled teachers (p. 1):

After all, how much money a family has or the color of a child's skin should not influence how well that child learns to read. If teachers know how to teach...and if schools emphasize the importance of these tasks and permit no distractions, children should be able to learn...whatever their family income or skin color (p. 2).

No doubt, numerous variables such as these affect student performance, but more and more, researchers like Rothstein are uncovering the influence of social class on school learning.

Although Horace Mann and John Dewey had hopes that schools would equalize and "level the playing field" for various classes in American society (Nieto, 2004, p. 43), this goal has not been reached. Whether or not schools reproduce society and replicate its inequalities, as theorized by Bourdieu, Spring, Bowles, and others, or whether they simply fail to redress the inequalities in the society they reflect, the fact remains that students of diverse social classes perform at different academic levels. It is most likely no coincidence that while whites comprise 9% of the U.S. poor and blacks and Hispanics over 43% (Nieto, p. 45), there is a 27- and 26-point disparity on reading assessments for black and white, and Hispanic and white students, respectively, both in grades 4 and 8 (The Nation's Report Card, 2007). Although schools are no longer run according to a "Lancasterian method of lock-step marches...[and]...drills" (Spring, 1972 p. 47), the unequal ability of homeowners to fund school levies results in a tremendous disparity in funding. Unable to replace school buildings, inner city districts are still dotted with the "factory like fortresses" (Nieto, p. 47) that were built decades ago, while newer suburban schools tend to spread out over large, airy campuses. While Cleveland must lay off 546 teachers and laments class sizes of 45 or more students for the upcoming school year, the suburb of Solon just passed another levy by more than 62% to 38% and Westlake’s voters approved money to build a new high school.

Researchers from A.W. Boykin to John Ogbu to Ruby Payne have tried to show that cultural practices are related to student learning and that cultural incompatibility may partly explain the differences in achievement. Students are inextricably bound to their culture, a product of their ethnicity and race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, and language, as well as of their social class. Since schools tend to function according to a set of middle class values and expectations, students whose homes and communities share these values "know the rules" and instinctively understand how to negotiate the school environment. Middle class parents speak and model standard English, the language of their classroom teachers, most of whom are also middle class (Nieto, p. 48). As Hirsch (2009) points out, poor and working class children, as well as children whose second language is English, enter school with a sparser vocabulary and, if Stanovich's "Matthew Effect" holds true, may never catch up simply because they lack the verbal repertoire to learn new words from academic discourse (p. 139). Middle class children also engage in the same type of "questioning rituals" with their parents as with their classroom teachers and are more equipped to participate in class discussions and to gain understanding of course material. For speakers of African American vernacular English, whose dialect and discourse style differ from those of middle class Americans, the divide is compounded. While use of black dialect is not necessarily an indication that one is working class or poor, the language has been linked by scholars like Labov (1972) with the inner city; its widening use by African Americans who have become part of the middle class highlights Ogbu's observations that the achievement gap is not relegated to urban areas, but has moved into suburbia as well.

Frameworks have been developed in an effort to understand and explain these group disparities in educational outcomes that are now so apparent; these concepts enable us to move inside of the experience of the various disadvantaged and advantaged groups within our educational system and to begin to map a path across the gap in academic achievement. The sociological concepts of cultural capital and of social/cultural reproduction have been adapted from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1973) who used the term “cultural and social reproduction” to explain the intellectual, educational, and social “goods” that are transmitted to children from their parents and culture ; these educational and social advantages allow children access to and mobility through the educational system and, in turn, provide momentum for an upward mobility throughout their lives. The implication is that dominant social groups and classes reproduce the systems and structures that preserve their privileged positions and societal status. Education becomes a primary transmitter of the value being reproduced, so schools are an active microcosm of the replication of both privilege and inequalities. Bourdieu (1986) articulated different types of cultural capital including embodied capital, such as language and class culture that children absorb consciously and unconsciously from parents and family; objectified capital includes physical objects, such as art and homes, which exude the values of the embodied capital; and institutionalized capital, which entails the academic qualifications and credentials that one acquires, in part by exposure to the other types of capital “inherited” from one’s background. Theorists who support this notion see an individual’s success as springing in part from the advantages gained by being part of a particular family, social class, and educational milieu; the idea that an individual needs only motivation and “merit” must, then, be tempered by the reality that certain individuals begin at a different starting line than others in the race for success in a world governed primarily by middle class values.

The range of Bourdieu’s concept is attested to by the fact that even theorists with opposing viewpoints can ascribe to the role that cultural capital plays in achievement. John Ogbu’s theories on the achievement of African American students are founded on the idea that Black culture transmits capital in the form of attitudes, expectations, shared history, and other cultural inheritance. Ogbu uses the term collective identity to indicates that a group acquires a sense of belonging, a feeling of "who they are," and that the members express their unity "with emblems of cultural symbols which reflect their attitudes, beliefs, feelings, behaviors, and language or dialect" (2004, p.3). This identity develops out of shared experience, often dramatically marked by upheaval, such as wars, migration, colonization, forced labor, shared status as outcast or Other. For oppressed minority groups, the collective identity is maintained, according to Ogbu by "status problems" and the group's response to status problems (p. 4). In supporting his thesis that Blacks share a collective identity forged out of status problems, Ogbu makes the striking assertion that "White Americans created Black Americans as a separate and enduring segment of American society through enslavement," and he outlines a number of components of these collective problems that are impossible for any minority to solve within the existing hegemonic structure: involuntary incorporation into society; systemic discrimination; social subordination; and expressive mistreatment (p. 4). In becoming "Other," the minority is seen as inferior in all aspects--food and clothing, values and beliefs, music and cultural expression, and language or dialect (p. 5). One two-part response of all members of the minority group, regardless of their individual attributes or learned resourcefulness skills, is to become bitter, blaming the majority in a general way for all of their problems, and to incorporate this sense of "opposition" to the majority into their collective identity. Their relationship to the whole, then becomes one of oppositional to non-oppositional (p. 5).

Ogbu provides a history of the development of Black opposition toward White culture in America. From slavery, to Jim Crow, to segregation, to the excoriation of African American vernacular, to a general denigration of all things "Black" by the White Americans, Blacks suffered intensely from the collective problems of all "Othered" minority groups and their collective [opposition] identity was forged in this crucible of conflict. Exacerbating this conflict was a phenomenon articulated by Dubois as the "twoness" to the Black experience--the sense of

dual identity that emerged during slavery when Blacks were expected to behave in a way that accorded with White's perception of them; but at the same time, Blacks were forbidden to adopt

White culture itself--to speak or act "White.” During this time as well, Blacks developed their own authentic Black culture. On the plantations, then, slaves were not permitted to read or write and could not speak or act as a White person--this would have been seen as an affront by the majority culture. Instead, slaves were expected to behave according to a White construct of what it was to be Black. On their own, however, Blacks behaved, spoke, cooked, sang, danced, performed music, and constructed stories that were authentically--and very privately--Black. The inauthentic, role-playing, or submissive slave garnered approval from the master, while the authentic African-American remained misunderstood and feared. The status problems of African Americans were uniquely complicated by this dynamic of duality.

After emancipation, their situation became only more frustrating. Now as freedmen Blacks were given signals by the larger society that they should actually begin to adopt the speech and culture of the White majority. Yet, even those who could and would do so encountered only rejection, regardless of the efforts they put forth. The advocates of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of "casting down your buckets where you are" to gain membership in the larger society through economic self-sufficiency via vocational and industrial education proved futile, as Black Americans realized over time that their efforts would remain unrewarded. Demanding equality, as advocated by Dubois and the NAACP, failed as well to usher in an era of acceptance into society as well. Ogbu notes four reactions to this rejection: going to extremes to become "whiter" in dress, speech, and mannerism; accommodating oneself to living in two worlds simultaneously; ambivalence toward white society, knowing what was expected but

refusing to assent; encapsulating into Black culture with as little contact with Whites as possible; or opposition to White culture--actively resisting White ways and the larger society (pp. 15-16).

The Black culture movement of the 1960s concretized this oppositional stance among Black Americans. The resulting "burden" on Blacks to act White is both rejected by many and decried in those who refuse to lay the burden down, continuing to try to become what Whites expect Blacks to be.

Ogbu addresses the manifestation of the burden to act White in his study on Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb (2003). Middle school students explain their belief that "acting White" is not normal behavior and that those who adopt White attitudes toward school--often called "Oreos" by their peers--were not behaving in a normal manner, perhaps in the same way that during the era of slavery, African Americans felt it inauthentic to adopt White ways (p. 179). Black parents studying for their GED in Oakland, California, Ogbu found, considered Blacks who acted and spoke "White" to be "uppity" and trying to appear smarter than others (2004, p. 26). In the suburb Shaker Heights, acting White became associated with such activities as speaking standard English, taking Honors and AP classes, "being smart during lessons," and making "too many" White friendships. In Oakland, the manifestation of Whiteness included

"talking proper," putting effort into academics--studying, doing homework, taking advanced classes, reading and spending time at the library--and having mainly White friends (p.29).

Ogbu's historical explanation of Black resistance to education is rooted in the notion that African American students inherit from their history, families, and culture the dynamic of opposition that fuels their resistance to academic achievement. Interestingly, because he has done research in affluent urban/suburban school districts, Bourdieu’s theory informs Ogbu’s to an even greater degree. The students Ogbu observed and studied inherit two kinds of linguistic capital, a sub-set of the embodied capital of which Bourdieu speaks: they are conversant in the language of African American vernacular as well as in the middle class parlance of the school district. The students’ parents may be working class or more educated middle class, but the upward mobility that their suburb affords is part of this embodied capital as well—the parents have either become more educated and more “fluent” in middle class values, or they have learned to pass these values on to their children. They are living in more middle- and upper-middle class home, passing on the objectified capital that comes with them, and they have learned or are learning to negotiate the institutions of education they have come to value, passing along this institutionalized capital as well. Ogbu’s research demonstrates the validity of Bourdieu, yet interestingly even theorists who contest the views of Ogbu adhere to the concept of cultural capital.

Galletta and Cross (2007) see the cause of the achievement disparity between Whites and minorities, particularly Black students, in the policies and practices of the school district, rather than in the “legacy of slavery” thesis of Ogbu. Though they acknowledge the validity of the extreme hardships that the legacy of slavery fomented, they also note the degrees to which Blacks during and after slavery worked to achieve an education. Slaves developed memorization skills and hid spellers under their hats to study in the Sunday “pit schools “ to maneuver around anti-literacy legislation. Communities of freed Blacks built schools during the Common School movement that began in the 1840s to rival those of Whites, and through the Great Depression, they double-and triple-taxed themselves to continue to education their children. Galletta and Cross (2007) point out that had Jim Crow not impeded their efforts, Blacks would be disproportionately represented across all educational levels. These researchers see an “oppositional” attitude of Black students, but attribute it to policies and practices within schools that consciously or unconsciously continue to exclude students of certain minorities—from racially identifiable course leveling to attitudes of teachers and students that conveyed a message that Blacks didn’t quite “belong” in the advanced tracks of Whites. Galletta and Cross ((2007) , in acknowledging the extent to which slaves and freedmen strove to achieve educationally in the era before Plessy vs. Ferguson, see the incongruity in Ogbu’s idea that the primary residue of the slavery and post-slavery era would be an opposition to academic education as a form of acting White.

In an interesting parallel, Oliver and Shapiro (1995) also see the achievement problem among Black students as less about race and more about social class. Acknowledging the history of oppression through slavery, Jim Crow, and the institutional racism that followed, they echo William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race (1978) in exploring the nature of the “mixed legacy” of slavery that we continue to harvest. For them, race is a “lingering product of an oppressive past,” but its effects now manifest as social class differences that impede Blacks from attaining the education and work skills that would equalize the classes. They trace the road to inequality through the broken promises of the 1862 Homestead Act that excluded Blacks from benefits that would have helped them transition into yeoman farmers during Reconstruction, through the suburbanization of the 1930s to 1960s that created isolating ghettos, to the discriminatory mortgage lending of the 1970s and beyond that prevented Blacks form re-locating out of the urban areas in which they were entrenched. The effect today, even as Blacks have made inroads in professions and to some degree in educational achievement, is that a wealth—rather than income—disparity has left Blacks lagging behind Whites and other minority groups. That is to say, while they have achieved a degree of income equality, Blacks continue to lag behind in the objectified capital of which Bourdieu speaks, and in their continuing isolation from the larger society, they fail to build up embodied cultural capital to a degree that would enable them to break out of the “communities of despair” in which Oliver and Shapiro note some continue to exist.

While Hispanics, for example, face similar dynamics of racism, Moje and Martinez (2007) observe that a tension between what they term “home fronts” and what Mary Louis Pratt (2002) has called “contact zones” helps to mitigate the effects of discrimination and to mediate persistence and academic achievement. Latino youth are able to forge an ethnic identity on the homefront as they interact with various generations of their family, from whom they gain linguistic and embodied cultural capital in their Spanish first-language and Hispanic traditions. The enactments with family and peers help the youth to create a more resilient hybrid-identity, as Mexican- or Salvadoran-American for example, but it is also a double-edged sword. As the young people move into the larger world of the dominant culture, they encounter contact zones, zones of interaction in which they see themselves as others see them, in context where power is unequally distributed, and they can suffer conflict as they grapple with the dual identities they forge. While the contact zones can also occur on the homefronts, where Hispanic youth can also feel ridicule for “arrogantly” trying to achieve what is seen as the goals of Whites, their ethnic cultural capital can also fortify their efforts to negotiate the larger world and their attempt to gain in the institutional capital of the dominant culture.

Lareau (2000, 2003) examines the dynamics of working class and middle class families in a way that sheds further light on the relationship between achievement and cultural capital and social stratus. She founds some of her insights on Bourdieu's notion that "particular linguistic structures, authority patterns, and types of curricula" favored by schools are the very ones that middle and upper-middle class children learn at home (2000, p.8). Children from these homes, then, are given what terms differential advantages because they are raised according to the dominant set of cultural repertoires that middle class schools expect them to understand (2003, p. 5 and 4). Their parents adhere to a model of controlled/concerted cultivation. Children, raised accordingly participate in a number of extracurricular activities, organized and overseen by their parents. These children are treated in some ways as "peers" of their parents, who share ideas, discuss plans, and elicit feelings from their children in order to mold their attitudes and behavior. These middle-class children may miss out to a degree on kin relationships and leisure time, but they appear to garner important institutional advantages, acquiring skills from the concerted cultivation model that are of potential valuable when they enter the world of work as adults. Importantly, they move out into the world with a sense of entitlement, able to take a proactive approach in their interaction with institutions; since they know the "rules," they learn to "shift interactions to suit their preferences" (2003, p. 4). Middle class kids learn early that their opinions and desires matter; they learn their right to question their teacher, their doctor, and other authority figures. Children like Melanie Handlon and Garrett Tallinger lead more or less

hectic lives, filled with myriad activities, from sports to music to scouting; their parents' schedules revolve around them. The parents of Garrett are like other middle class parents; they read, as part of the example they set for their children. They engage him in the process of questioning his experiences by sharing their own, and they elicit opinions and ideas as with a relative equal. They typically answer questions with questions, in order to help their children to reason things out for themselves. They also know the value of language. Above all, they guide him into activities that develop his abilities. The school that Garrett attends is typical of his class: it is located in a quiet residential area and suffers far fewer deficits than schools in less privileged areas. His school is almost 90% white. There is no shortage of teachers or supplies and less bureaucracy to deal with. Parents are highly involved and have as strong sense of empowerment to monitor and criticize teachers; they instill in their children a sense of the right to question and critique teachers, as well as to make demands. Many students are beyond level in reading. Academic achievement is not a major issue, except perhaps as individual difficulties surface--and are dealt with through a plethora of the resources and accommodations that an affluent school district has to offer.

Less cultural capital is transmitted to children of the lower- and working-class, whose set of learned resourcefulness skills differs from those of higher classes. The method of child-rearing favored by these parents, termed the accomplishment of natural growth model, provides children with long stretches of leisure time, child-initiated play, clear boundaries between adults and children, and daily interactions with kin. The children of the working class and poor have greater economic constraints but, ironically, they often have more “childlike” lives--greater autonomy from adults and more control over their extended leisure time. Instead of reasoning

with their children to mold behavior, parents give directives. These parents may not consider concerted development through organized activities to be essential. They may deem corporal punishment an effective means of discipline. Since this model is not the one that dominates middle class institutions, such as schools, these parents are often less empowered to interact comfortably with the teachers and administrators at their children's schools. It is not so ironic, then, that the parents of Billy Yanelli sound like children themselves when they exclaim that they "hate" school, for in relation to the larger society their negotiation skills are like those of children. Their sentiments toward school, however, may be, in part, for good reason. Lower Richmond, where Billy Yanelli and Tyrec Taylor attend is not atypical of many lower- and working class schools. Its description sounds as if the building could have housed the National Cash Register Company or some other factory at the end of the nineteenth century:

Located on a narrow street in a large...city, the school looks forbidding: it is three stories tall and is surrounded by a high, gray chain-link fence. [It] is old, with a dirty beige exterior and few windows...To the side...of the school [is] an asphalt playground...; in front, there are trees and a patch of grass, but the children may not play in this area during school hours...Just inside the entrance to the school, a security guard sits at a desk (2003, p. 15).

Like some other working class parents, Billy's remain uninvolved in his school life; they are distrustful of the school administrators and feel intimidated and powerless before them. They see the school as unfair, for it disciplines their child for aggressive acting-out behaviors that they encourage. Their alienation and corresponding resistance to the school ethos may stem from the disconnect between their working class world-view and that of the middle class teachers and

administrators who work in their school system. Instead of nurturing in lower- and working-class children a sense of entitlement, the mores of the schools compete with those of the home to foster a sense of distance, distrust, and constraint. The values of social interaction that the these children learn are less prone to award them upward mobility in academic and work environments in the world beyond their neighborhood--in the institutions whose values are more in line with those of the middle class. They will find it a much greater challenge to be admitted into a competitive university or to succeed on a future job interview. In the larger world, those raised in lower- and working-class environments will most likely respond with greater constraint, less flexibility, and more distrust than their middle class peers. Their experiences, in other words, do not augment their reservoir of cultural capital. The disparity between parents’ style of child-rearing and the model of child-formation adhered to in schools, as a result, may prevent children of the lower- and working class to move far beyond the economic level of their parents.

Bourdieu’s concept that cultural capital transmitted in various forms from one generation to another either advances or impedes one’s movement through the dominant culture help explain a great deal about the challenge that minorities face in trying to achieve educationally. If culture encompasses shared values, beliefs, and attitudes, then it is a conduit for shared achievement and shared societal success. To come from a background or out of a history of cultural difference, then the initial dissonance so often created when cultures overlap can be a true obstacle to progress. Individuals whose cultural capital differs from that of the dominant culture carry a set of tools which, though valid and valuable, can actually hinder their achievement. This is nowhere more true than in school and institutions of learning, where middle-class values dominate. Bourdieu’s metaphor—that attitudes and traditions, objects, and the ability to negotiate institutions are “capital”—is particularly apt in helping Westerners, dominated by capitalistic values understand that even the more abstract components of our identities comprise a set of currency that we use to attain status, well-being, and a stronger sense of self in the world. Though Bourdieu’s is a Marxist critique of the phenomena that social classes and culture reproduce through institutions such as schools, it does provide insight into the mechanisms at work in our more and more pluralistic world.

The force of cultural capital and social reproduction help to explain three other related dynamics that shed light on the disparity in U.S. educational achievement throughout its history. They have been catalysts of the historic discrimination, deculturalization, and institutionalized racism that have marred the development of the nation. Those who have leveled discrimination against various minorities and the underclass have found ways to work from the inside out. In chapter two of Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould discusses the biased assumptions of 18^th and 19^th century scientists regarding the propriety of racial ranking and the various machinations they engaged in to justify placing whites above blacks on an intelligence hierarchy. Those scientists who upheld the “harder argument” for polygeny—that blacks emerged from a separate species than whites—reveal a blatant cultural bias which justified excluding black from equal participation in society. The notion that different individuals are biologically determined to be superior or inferior goes back at least to Plato, who in The Republic distinguishes between those born with gold, silver, or lead souls and who then assigns each to superior and inferior positions in society. Though Plato labeled it a “noble lie,” his essentialist theory becomes a basis for the later science of biological determinism.

As early as 1799 in his Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, Charles White wrote in defense of polygeny. He shockingly asserts that “I shall now endeavour to prove [italics mine] the general gradation in man” (Fulford, Romanticism and Science p. 243) and asks “Which are…the…animals…most remote from humanity? The most incapable of human ideas and sensations? Beyond all doubt, those which in their form least resemble man” (p. 247). Attempting to demonstrate that Blacks are not human—that they are “graded” or ranked lower than the human being—White presents a series of complex charts showing that in their smaller

skulls, longer arms, flatter feet, as well as in their superior power of mastication and in numerous other categories, the African is closer to the “brutes” and furthest from resemblance to humans. White feels the need as well to note that the sexual organ of male Africans is larger than that of Caucasians, but he is careful to point out that the testes and scrotum of Blacks are smaller; White seems relieved to be able to conclude that this denotes “another remarkable instance of gradation,” (p. 253). Though White did not use his conclusions to force a political ideology, he allowed his aesthetic bias to inform his scientific research. He concluded that the “noble gait” of European men and the “soft features of European women” were the aesthetic ideal and found what he was looking for in his various measurements of physiognomy.

Like White, Louis Agassiz was influenced less by ideology than by personal views regarding religion and aesthetics:

[I]t is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their long curved nails…I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. (Gould, p. 45).

The father of American biology and Harvard professor was repulsed by the appearance of American blacks and felt that the two races “cannot have originated in single individuals” (p. 46). Scientists like White and Agassiz did not force a specific political agenda, such as slavery, based on their aesthetic or creationist views, yet they did forcefully advocate social segregation. As a separate species, blacks could not, according to polygenist scientists, be considered the social equals of whites. Their bias was most likely unconscious—based on deeply rooted assumptions about physiology and metaphysics—yet, the science of White, Agassiz, and others

like them, demonstrates the protean nature of “objectivity.” For them, the objective truth that blacks and whites are separate species was measurable, and as demonstrable as a mathematical axiom.

The educational psychologist Cyril Burt, whose work spanned the greater part of the 20^th century, did not see himself as an interpreter of reality, but as a data-based empiricist. If Spearman was the “architect” of the hereditarian theory of intelligence, Burt was the foreman of the crew that built the hereditarian house—and factor analysis served as its foundation. Driven by his apriori conviction that intelligence was innate, Burt set about to prove it, using a “ludicrously small” sample of Oxford school boys whom he subjected to twelve test of mental functioning and more extensive testing with Liverpool schoolboys in order to obtain empirically verifiable estimates of intelligence. Finding the performance of the upper class boys to be superior, Burt concluded that such “proficiency…depended[ed] upon some quality innate” (Gould, p. 277) and that the boys came from more intelligent parents. Burt did not argue that races differed in inherited intelligence; rather, he argued that the different social classes reflected inherited ability (284); the poor were poor, according to the Social Darwinist Burt, because they had inherited inferior intelligence. Burt backed up his argument with intensely reasoned factor analysis and his “genuine achievements” in this area were “substantial” and respected: “His complex and highly densely reasoned book on the subject (1940) was the crowning achievement of the Spearman school” (285). His work was therefore heralded by heredetarians as a political coup d’etat and served as the backbone of the 11+ examination in England that channeled the intellectually inferior into vocational schools, while the intellectually superior 20% were streamed toward universities—all of this decision-making determined with empirical accuracy at

age 11! To Burt, this threshing out was a means of saving British civilization, of “’warding off the ultimate decline’” of the society (293). Burt, like Charles White and Louis Agassiz, was not accused of conscious bias—he believed, as did his predecessors, that intelligence truly was inherited, that the Spearman g could be reified and empirically located and analyzed. Cyril Burt displayed a certitude that the hereditarian theory of intelligence could be demonstrated mathematically, yet this surety had its roots in his belief that the upper classes were somehow superior to the lower. Burt was unable to discern the cultural, classist bias that lay behind his faith in the empirical method.

Adams (1995) in “Education for Extinction” demonstrates the extent to which our nativist feelings of cultural superiority manifested on the “outside,” within educational institutions that tried to efface cultures thought to be inferior and replicate our own. The story of Ota Kte, the Lakota Sioux who in 1879 was shipped off to Carlisle, a white boarding school in Pennsylvania, is the story of tens of thousands. Shorn of his hair after arriving at the White school to remove this vestige of savagery, exchanging his native dress for the plain, and often ill-fitting school uniform that erased individual differences so cherished by native Americans, the boys like Ota Kte saw the design to “turn Indians into carbon copies of their white overseers.” Giving the children white names—either translations of their native names, often more ill-fitting than their oversized clothes, or new Americanized names—completed the process of attempting to blot out the native [inferior] identity. The Americanized native children had to adjust as well to “new conceptions of space and architecture,” an indoor reality of lines, corners, and squares, and to an inadequate diet which some students had to supplement by learning to steal in order to avoid starving. They were also subject to a militarized atmosphere and to harsh disciplinary practices involving whipping with a belt or board and imprisonment in the school guardhouse. The schools were often loci for the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, and trachoma. The experience of Ote Kta-turned-Plenty Kill is one among many that reveal the force of the historical discrimination rampant in learning institutions. Founded on a belief in cultural superiority and in the power of social reproduction, the boarding schools became chambers of horror for the children whose identities were wiped away and replaced.

Cultural bias that founded deculturalization and institutionalized racism is not limited to a pre-modern past or to a particular field such as IQ testing. Sarah Michaels in her research study “’Sharing time’: Children’s narrative styles and differential access to literacy” evinces an ironic degree of cultural bias—ironic, because she is attempting in the article to promote inclusiveness of a culture that has long been marginalized; yet in her “openness” to inclusion of Black idiom and discourse style, Michaels allows a bias to influence her assessment of “Mrs. Jones,” the white first-grade teacher in whose classroom the observations took place. It has been noted by Michaels, Delpit, and others that white children tend to tell “topic-centered” narratives, while black children tend to tell “topic-associating” stories—what Delpit calls “episodic narratives” that are longer and include shifts from scene to scene in a less linear manner (Delpit, p. 21). Michaels is so supportive of allowing black children to use their “home-based oral discourse competence” in their sharing time experience (Michaels, p. 423), that her assessment of the white teacher as “differential” in her treatment of white and black students seems less than supported by her observations. Michaels asserts that the white children who used topic-centered narratives

received more practice using literate discourse strategies and that the interaction of the white teacher with these students was more successful. The teacher, according to Michaels, imposed a restrictive schema of what she considered “good” sharing which amounted to a “decontextualized account centering on a single topic” (p. 427). Mrs. Jones was more successful at helping to expand a topic-centered than a topic-associating story and could help white children produce more focused and lexically explicit narratives. With black children, however, Michaels observes that Mrs. Jones asked thematically inappropriate and mistimed and interruptive questions that “seemed to throw the child off balance, interrupting his or her train of thought” (p. 434). Michaels realizes that the teacher is well-intentioned and “sincerely concerned about helping these children develop what she considered a more appropriate sharing style” (p. 434), but she accuses the teacher of bias and tries to support this through the transcripts of the student-teacher interactions. Yet it becomes clear in the transcripts that Michaels may be projecting her own bias in favor of the topic-associating discourse and assessing the teacher excessively negatively because of this bias: in essence, Michaels commits the precise cultural bias of which she accuses Mrs. Jones, but in the inverse.

In one of the two examples given, the class listens to Deena, an African-American student, tells a story of her new coat while Mrs. Jones tries to help her through the narrative. Mrs. Jones has established that the children should practice focusing on “one thing” and she experiences difficulty keeping Deena from digressing. Mrs. Jones asks Deena twice during the story, “What does that have to do with your coat?” as the girl elaborates about her crying brother and about having to stay in the house. At the end of the sharing time, Mrs. Jones asks if Deena “understood what I was trying to do…I was trying to get her to stick with one / …thing // and she

was talking about her / coat” and she brings the lesson to a close with “new coat // it sounds nice Deena.” Michaels acknowledges that Mrs. Jones began with a clear prescription of what she wants the students to do—to focus on one thing—but the researcher interprets Mrs. Jones guidance as ”pressing” Deena until the frustrated student “gives up and sits down” (p. 437). The reader is led to believe that Mrs. Jones was unjustly projecting her own cultural expectations onto unsuspecting first-graders whose home-based oral discourse competence is disregarded in favor of the hegemonically favored topic-centered narrative technique.

Yet even the researcher admits that the connection between the new coat and Deena’s digressions are unclear; and she spends over two pages speculating about possible ways to explain the connection. While admitting that Deena’s reasoning in associating sub-topics to her main topic “is not at all apparent on the surface” (p. 438), Michaels accuses Mrs. Jones of “interrupting” Deena from the time she first mentioned her cousin, the subject of the digression, until the first-grader sat down. However, earlier in the class when the white student Mindy was sharing, Michaels describes the teacher’s “interruptions” by saying that “Mrs. Jones comes in at this point” (p. 432) that she “reiterates her interest” (p. 432), that she “rephrases her instruction” (p. 432), and that she “asks a further question” (p. 433)—all of which are equally as “interruptive” as her interactions with Deena, depending on one’s interpretation. In essence, when Mrs. Jones works with white students and interjects, the researcher finds euphemistic ways to describe the interaction, painting a picture for the reader of a harmonious blending of teacher and student dialogue. But when Mrs. Jones works with a black student, the picture becomes one of an almost coercive attempt to “interrupt” and force one counter-cultural method of discourse onto a frustrated first-grader. In the end, Michaels admits that Mrs. Jones is an excellent teacher

and that the perceived difficulty in communicating sprang from a mismatch in discourse styles, rather than from prejudice or incompetence. The reader of the study is justified, however, in questioning whether the actual “difficulty” lay in the teacher-student interaction, or in the interpretation of the researcher as she looks for a preconceived communicative gap that may not have actually existed. It may be that Sarah Michaels has allowed her own cultural biases to influence what she observed in Mrs. Jones’ classroom interactions during sharing time.

It seems clear that cultural bias seeps into scientific research and that the scientific researcher has no more claim to objectivity than researchers in other fields who acknowledge that objective knowledge, though a worthy pursuit, cannot be arrived at in a vacuum. While Sarah Michaels seems unaware that the objectivity of her conclusions may be compromised by her subjective cultural bias, Gould acknowledges the degree to which sciences and the social sciences are founded on subjectivity. In refuting biological determinism in The Mismeasure of Man, Gould builds a case for the invalidity of scientific positivism; in exposing and criticizing “the myth that science itself is an objective enterprise” (p. 53), Gould warns researchers of the need to remain aware of the degree to which scientific “truths” are influenced by bias.

Smitherman (1998) and Delpit (1998) focus on the issue of linguistic capital and show not only the power of language as a conduit of cultural values, but also the enormous pressure to de-culturalize through language that can come from both within and without. Smitherman (1998) echoes Paulo Freire (1985) in his assertion that “language variations [like Ebonics]…are intimately interconnected with, coincide with, and express identity” of both the individual and of a culture. Dialects are, then, part of the linguistic capital of which Bourdieu wrote that is transmitted intergenerationally. In explaining the phonetic and semantic qualities of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) which she refers to as USEB (or, Ebonics, spoken in the U.S.), Smitherman demonstrates the validity of its use as a “native” language. Saussure has established the arbitrary nature of language, implying that the primary reason Ebonics is not, in fact, a standard dialect is simply because the dominant society does not agree to it; of itself, Ebonics is a valid a linguistic system as Standard American English, itself simply a dialect of British English. But Smitherman specifically points out the similarities between AAVE and West African languages—it shares phonetic and semantic features that are close enough to substantiate a linguistic argument that Ebonics is, in fact, more a West African language with English words than a mere dialect of English. Franz Fanon, as Smitherman notes, taught that “every dialect, every language, is a way of thinking. To speak means to assume a culture” (1967). And she wants to clarify the extent to which fluency in Ebonics is a vital part of being a descendant of slaves in the United States; it reflects the valid heritage of a people who suffered and have striven to overcome, and seeking its eradication as broken English or “sloppy” speech is tantamount to seeking the eradication of a history and culture. Ebonics, Smitherman asserts, is about transformation and liberation, and those who continue to speak it engage, consciously or unconsciously, in the transforming power of the culture that has sustained them in its many transformations since the first slave ship landed in Jamestown in 1619. Lisa Delpit (1998) supports the claim of those who recognize the validity of AAVE, the language in which many Black children first “encountered love, nurturance, and joy”; yet she also recognizes the claim of teacher who hold that Black students not completely fluent in the correct use of Standard English are at a disadvantage in the work world that comes after graduation. She advocates a middle-road between respect and validation of the native language that forms a basis of the speaker’s identity and providing access to the standard language of the dominant culture. While knowing Standard English will not make the speaker/writer any more intelligent, it will open doors of opportunity. Delpit is careful to acknowledge, however, that to promote the standard language only by disparaging and extirpating the native Ebonics would be to shut the doors of the past and cut Black youth off from the culture that has nurtured them and those who have gone before them.

Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco and Todovora (2008) echo the findings of Moje and Martinez (2007) that the contrast between the immigrant’s home/family experience and the “new land” of contact zones in which they are educated outside the home offers tremendous complexity. They also affirm the conclusions of Smitherman (1998) and Delpit (1998) that language plays a pivotal role in learning. Of all the variables that Suarez-Orozco, et al. studied in relation to academic achievement, such as parental education and employment, they found that learning the new language was the key factor related to higher test scores and GPA. This finding relates interestingly to deculturalization; since great pressure is placed on newer arriving immigrant children to learn the second language, implicit pressure is placed on them as well to acculturate. Already separated from parts of their family who stayed in their homeland and having to integrate into a new culture and to achieve in the new language and among new traditions, deculturalization can occur by a kind of attrition.

American society has historically placed great pressure on immigrants to assimilate. They have bolstered this pressure with theories of racial, cultural and ethnic superiority, through establishing institutions that strip away foreign cultures and systematically re-create individuals to mold them into Americans, and through the notion that we are simply an English-only nation, but a Standard-English-only culture. The forces of historical discrimination, institutionalized racism, and deculturalization have certainly contributed to the achievement gap between the dominant White American culture and minority groups. Even as we have become on the surface more accepting of diversity, our more pluralistic society still has a long road ahead in eliminating vestiges of these forces and closing this gap.