Savior Visions and Diluted Solutions: A Settler-Racial Capitalist Analysis of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Coleman Report

• In Event: 42.027 - Neoliberal Racism as Educational Policy

Abstract

With a nationwide emphasis on ending poverty, between the years of 1965 and 1980 dominant discourses on racial justice in education shifted its attention towards not only addressing issues of desegregation/integration but also directly tackling matters of educational equity. The 1965 passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which specifically tackled the issue of equal educational access by, for the first time, allocating federal funds to primary and secondary schools with large concentrations of children from low-income families, initiated an epoch that witnessed the prevalence of discussions on educational reparations for improving academic achievement gaps, and as such moving towards racial economic justice. This paper pursues the task of understanding how the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity publication—also known as the Coleman report—framed, and sought to measure, the relationship between educational achievement, equity, and economic progress.

For this particular paper, I will be drawing from both theories on racial capitalism and settler colonialism to formulate a framework through which the U.S. schooling system can be situated and reread as a terrain that politically, economically, ontologically, and epistemically advances white settler colonialism—a task that several scholars have already initiated within the field of educational research (Calderon, 2014; Patel, 2014; Tuck & Yang; 2012). A racial capitalist and settler colonial understanding of corresponding processes is useful to the extent in which it demands that both the U.S. public school system and political economy be understood together and located within a historical tapestry of ongoing colonial state violence. Consequently, it insists that educational reforms—like those initiated, supported, and normalized by the ESEA and the Coleman report—be approached as settler state mechanisms.

The central data I analyze in this essay is the original 1965 ESEA policy, the Equality of Educational Opportunity report, and corresponding presidential speeches. From an analysis of this data, this paper argues that both conservative and liberal discourses surrounding the ESEA and Coleman report operated as disciplinary mechanisms for condensing notions of racial justice and self-determination to issues of ‘access and equity’. That is, whereas desegregation patterns previously served as the reference point for measuring racial justice, “academic achievement” gradually became the new locus for assessing ‘racial progress’.

Ultimately, this paper attempts to unsettle educational debates that normalize the U.S. public school system as a rescuable structure, and as such asks that we reevaluate the degree to which it can—if at all—serve as a sustainable site for liberation and anti/decolonial struggles. My intent is to draw attention to whether or not public education in the U.S. can be “reformed” to accomplish the demands set forth by anti-white supremacist and anticapitalist struggles or whether a complete rejection of settler-state educational politics is worth considering. I conclude that we must collectively shift towards dismantling the normalcy of confining the ‘crisis of education’ to a struggle against neoliberal privatization and instead expose the complex historical dynamics between schooling, settler colonialism, and racial political domination.

Author

• Anita Juarez, University of Utah