Fighting Mediocrity: Unraveling Crisis Narratives of Black Education

• In Event: 53.064 - New Research on Challenging White Supremacist Educational Structures to Achieve the Promised Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This paper examines why Ladson-Billings’s (2006) pronouncement of the nation’s “education debt” as opposed to “achievement gap” has not gained traction in the national discourse around educational disparity. The author contends that the “education debt” is a more nuanced, historically-based, and generative framing of racialized educational disparity, which has been marginalized by the narratives of crisis in education, specifically for black youth, that necessitate an urgency allowing for ahistorical, quick-fix interventions to complex problems. By tracing four major epochs in African American education, including the anti-literacy law era, Reconstruction, the Brown v Board era, and today’s “crisis”, the paper explores how African American education has always been precarious amidst structural white supremacy, and thus, able to be labeled a crisis. The author explicates how crisis narratives provide fodder for profiteers to exploit the desires of black parents and families for access to quality education, while maintaining the very structures that have historically produced disparity. Using a combination of synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (longitudinal) analyses, the paper demonstrates how achievement gap logic does not allow us to address historical constructions of contemporary disparity. It concludes by suggesting that African American self-determination and not the reification of the nation-state should be the driving force behind educational decisions that impact black youth, and proposes a reparations model of education policy that addresses the accumulation of education debt.
The author focuses on the education of black youth in particular, because although the education debt crosses racial, socioeconomic, ethnic, gendered, and linguistic lines, African American scholars have been at the forefront of illuminating how these historical accumulations of educational debt, specifically impacting communities of African descent, continue to constitute today’s outcomes.
Taking a historical approach, this paper does the following:
1) explores how the discourse of crisis in the education of black youth obfuscates deeper questions about the root causes of racialized education disparity;
2) buttresses the “education debt” argument by tracing the accumulation of inequity across four major epochs of black education, and;
3) draws from African American educational historians and scholars to rearticulate a vision for educational self-determination for people of African descent in the U.S. education system.
The paper identifies the following themes that have existed in perpetuity in conjunction with black education: (1) the economic necessity of black mis-education, (2) the lack of control of black education by black people, (3) the denial of critical models of education that critique white-supremacist power structures, and (4) the degradation and omission of the African experience from curriculum.
The intent of the paper is to challenge progressive educators and those who have deep commitments to racial and educational justice to re-evaluate the ahistorical discourse of crisis in black education, which, in turn, perpetuates the surface level discourse of the achievement gap as the “end-all-be-all” of racialized educational disparity.

Author

• Brian Lozenski, Macalester College