Quantitative Critical Race Theory: Challenging the Notion of White Racial Victimhood in Schools

• In Event: 67.042 - International Approaches to "Talking Back" to Structural Racism and Exclusion in Education

Abstract

Schools are on the front line of ideological wars characterized by racism, xenophobia, and hard-line political promises to “take back” control. The continual reiteration of the “White working class” and “Poor white” in British and American political discourse has promoted a situation where this ethnic and class fraction are treated as akin to a victimised racial group in its own right (see Gillborn, 2015; Warmington, 2009).

In the UK, the attainment of the distinctly racialized “White working class” collective is repeatedly highlighted by politicians and the media alike, to contend that the group have become victims of unfair racial competition in schools and bolstered by the power of numbers – or in the case of education, attainment statistics.

Numbers are alluring because they seem to lend a scientific, authoritative backing to a favoured political position (Gillborn et al. 2018). This presentation illustrates how carefully collated and selected numbers can give a false impression of reality, and deflect attention away from the structural racisms that continue to plague the UK school system.

Relatively few critical race scholars use quantitative data. Drawing on the concept of ‘Quantitative Critical Race Theory’ (‘QuantCrit’) (Gillborn, Warmington, & Demack 2018), this paper analyzes government published achievement statistics to expose the change in achievement (by race/gender/eligibility for free school meals) when purposely chosen labels are operationalized in dominant treatments of ‘White working class’ attainment. It draws on a range of official statistics generated by the UK government as part of its annual monitoring and reporting mechanisms: including Statistical First Releases and the National Pupil Database (produced by the UK Department for Education).

This paper demonstrates that: (i) deploying the label “White working class” for White children claiming FSMs provides a dangerous veneer of White-ethnic disadvantage that fuels a sense of siege; (ii) poorer whites (the one-in-ten White students in England state schools) quantitatively serve as a façade to White hegemony; (iii) statistics are not “value free” or politically “neutral” evidence of phenomena.

Education is consistently among the most prominent policy areas to be shaped by discourses of White racial victimhood (Gillborn, 2010). There is an urgent need to empower educators, researchers and policymakers to utilize critical quantitative approaches to challenge dominant treatments of statistics.

Author

• Claire E. Crawford, University of Birmingham