Verificación inicial

Legal scholars historically have been at the forefront of challenging racial issues in American jurisprudence. So, the transition of critical race theory from legal studies into education was a matter of time. Tate (1997) proposes the existence of a correlation between the use of CRT in both law and education that is based on emphasizing race in order to create a new theory against racial inferiority. Indeed, Bell (2008), in his landmark legal textbook, Race, Racism, and American Law, dedicates a chapter entitled “The Quest for Effective Schools,”

specifically on educational issues. Bell discusses several major school litigations—for example, the Roberts v. City of Boston (1850), the Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1897), the Brown (1954), and the Milliken v. Bradley (1974)—that he believed had a lingering influence on students of color. Consequently, Bell (2008) summarizes his sentiments about racism and education with this statement:

Achievement lags of black students have caused many to realize that simply integrating the schools will not be enough to eliminate the vestiges of a discriminatory system. Having denied black children access to effective schools for centuries, we cannot expect that these children can now be thrown into the schools to compete with white students on an equal basis. (p. 188)

Here, Bell offers the idea that the contest for academic achievement being racially equal today ignores the historical—and one can argue present—racist practices that disadvantage students of color confront. In fact, it can be recognized that Bell’s argument continues to ring true today— which further extends the demand for equitable school leadership.

The emergence of CRT in education began during the mid 1990s (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006), with the publication of Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate’s 1995 article, “Toward a Critical Race Theory in Education.” In this piece, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) argue that the possession of property represents both an explicit and implicit role in education. Speaking about this, critical educational researchers, DeCuir and Dixson (2004) argue,

through the myriad policies and practices that restrict the access of students of color to high-quality curricula, and to safe and well-equipped schools, school districts have served to reify this notion of Whiteness as property whereby the rights to possession, use and enjoyment, and disposition, have been enjoyed almost exclusively by Whites. (p. 28)

In this comment, DeCuir and Dixson (2004) argue that the significance of property to education is underscored with the correlation that property ownership encompasses the educational

learning opportunities for students of color and students of low-socioeconomic status (SES). Furthermore, CRT’s framework in education is informed by race and ethnic studies, women’s studies, sociology, history, humanities and Freirean pedagogy (Solórzano, 2013; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Thus, the foundation of CRT in education and progress towards more equitable practices began with the critique on school funding.

In response to the tenth anniversary of Ladson-Billings and Tate’s 1995 article on CRT in education, Dixson and Rousseau (2006) found that during the decade following the introduction of CRT into education, it remained closely aligned with the four legal tenets of CRT. Dixson and Rousseau make the following assertion on the stated alignment:

The body of literature that has developed in education over the past ten years has drawn upon a variety of constructs from legal studies, including the property value of whiteness, voice, restrictive vs. expansive visions of antidiscrimination law, and the problem with colour-blindness. (p. 22)

In the above statement, Dixson and Rousseau support the idea that CRT’s transition into education has been consistently connected to legal CRT. CRT in education, similarly to legal studies, positions race as the central focus towards critiquing—both overtly and covertly—race within social structures, school practices and policies (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Yosso, 2005). At a certain point, some educational researchers began to adapt and align CRT tenets toward educational structures and dilemmas.

Some critical educational researchers began to transform tenets from legal CRT to those more closely situated to education. For example, Solórzano (1997, 1998) created five themes of critical race theory in relation to education that inform perspectives, research methods, and pedagogy: (1) The centrality and intersectionality of race and racism, (2) The challenge to the dominant ideology, (3) The commitment to Social Justice, (4) The centrality of experiential

knowledge, and (5) The interdisciplinary perspective (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2005). The above five tenets in CRT in education will be used to in my data analysis because it can help identify, analyze, and transform structural and cultural ideology that disadvantages students of color in classrooms (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), as well as assess issues of re-segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, and special education policies (Lynn & Dixson, 2013). According to Leonardo (2013), to examine education through a CRT lens infers that in education “race and racism permeate the entire educational enterprise, from aspirations, to spatial configurations, to teacher education itself” (p. 26-27). Furthermore, Ladson-Billings (1998) proposes that the use of CRT in education can be used as a tool to deconstruct oppressive structures and discourses, reconstruct human agency, and construct equitable and socially just relations of power.

A favored method of highlighting issues of race by CRT scholars is through storytelling and/or counterstories, narratives, autobiographies, allegory and parables (Bell, 2009; Taylor, 2009, Yosso, 2005). Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) argue for the use of CRT because, “The ‘voice’ component of critical race theory provides a way to communicate the experience and realities of the oppressed, a first step on the road to justice” (p. 58). For example, one goal of voices through narratives and storytelling is to provide insight to racial discrimination (Parker & Lynn, 2002). Since the inequitable issues that occur inside this country’s public educational spaces are a reflection of the inequalities found in the greater society, we can assume that dialogues on race and racism are continually muted and marginalized (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) across this country’s K-12 and higher education institutions (Solórzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001; Leonardo, 2013). Thus, storytelling is a powerful tool in CRT because it relates to actual perspectives and stories lived by those individuals who experience inequitable schools.

CRT in education is committed to transforming the prevailing negative racial dialogue either consciously or unconsciously (Taylor, 2009), written about people of color (Leonardo, 2013; Parker & Lynn, 2002), situated in challenging white supremacy (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006) and the belief of culture and poverty as reasons for educational disparities (Lynn & Dixson, 2013) by the predominately white teaching staff. Furthermore, the usefulness of CRT in education is the ability to identify the instructional practices that presume black students as deficient (Ladson-Billings, 1998) and critiquing the influence of power that educators situate on students (Leonardo, 2013) that leads to deficit thinking theory (Smith-Maddox & Solórzano, 2002; Yosso, 2005). In fact, Chapman (2013) makes the assertion that CRT is intertwined with social justice:

CRT in education, redress abounds in calls to help teachers teach students of color through professional development, to reform teacher education programs and PK-16 curricula, and to reform policies and practices at all levels of education-school, district, state, and federal. Redress as a criterion of social justice is indivisible from CRT. (p. 104)

In this comment, Chapman suggests the application of CRT in education can be used as a tool for equity and social justice (Stovall, 2006). In short, the use of a CRT lens by school leaders can support the purposeful goal of equity and social justice.

Altogether, then, critical race theory can be a useful alternative lens to a more equitable direction. The benefits of using CRT in education is twofold: one CRT in education allows us to highlight dilemmas in school litigation, school funding, and harmful teacher practice; and secondly, CRT challenges us to search for the voices and counterstories of those shut out from society. As the proliferation of CRT into education has taken place, research using the CRT perspective has provided a greater awareness to educational issues that can cultivate transformational change for students of color and low-SES.