Racial Equity as Antithetical to Fairness: Teachers Penalizing Black Students for Receiving Academic Support

• In Event: 79.022 - Injury, Loss, and the (Im)Possibility of Justice in Racially Punitive and (Neo)Colonial Schooling

Abstract

This ethnographic case study examines how a racial equity-focused effort was contested and undermined by analyzing classroom observations and interviews with three teachers who worked in a credit-recovery program. Drawing on Critical Race Theory’s restrictive equality analytical lens, this article illustrates that although the credit-recovery program was created to offer struggling Black students support and to address racialized academic disparities, it actually exacerbated racial inequity. Findings demonstrate that teachers who did not teach in the credit-recovery program used formal equality ideals of fairness and equality to penalize Black students for receiving help from the credit recovery program. This article shines light on ways equity efforts are refashioned to support racial inequalities in a post-truth era.

Author

• Shameka Nija Powell, Tufts University