Toward a Political Theory of Race in Education

• In Event: Critical Policy Research Meets the Politics of Education

Abstract

America’s education discourse remains steeped in liberalism’s “ideal theory” (Rawls, 1971) – a political philosophy and ideology grounded in notions of equality, freedom, and justice that conveniently ignores the reality of racial caste in America’s schools (Author, 2017; Kiel, 2015). Whether the characterization of education as “The Great Equalizer” (Mann, 1849) or the Brown decision as a symbol of the nation’s commitment to educational equality, such idealized assumptions weaken the field’s ability to advance research that contributes to meaningful racial reform and social change (Anyon, 2005; Authors, 2014). The purpose of this paper to advance a political theory of race in education grounded in a realist approach to studying race as a political construction and its implications for research, policy, and advocacy. Informed largely by Guinier and Torres’s (2002) concept of political race as “an effort to change the framework for the conversation about race by naming relationships to power within the context of our racial and political history” (p. 15), I use political race theory to analyze school desegregation and charter school policies in Las Vegas, Nevada, and their implications for students, families, and communities of color. In terms of contribution, this project seeks to disrupt the proliferation of predictable research findings (e.g., “race matters”) that lead to more rhetoric than action and misguided policy prescriptions that often result in more harm than good. It concludes with a discussion of how political race theory can deepen and extend the field’s capacity to address more explicitly the implications of the politics of race in American education and resist its “reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization of the actual” (Mills, 2017, p. 75).

Author

• Sonya Douglass Horsford, Teachers College, Columbia University