On-Track Data, Enacted Curricula, and Racism

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Teacher Education and Implications for K–12 Education (Table 19)

Abstract

This paper investigates how the “on-track” data metric found its way into an enacted antiracist curriculum as both necessary for that curriculum’s creation and as limit to that curriculum’s resistance. The career fair was put on in a k-8 public school in Chicago and depended on grant funding which required the inclusion of on-track data (which uses attendance, discipline, and academic data to determine which student are likely to complete eighth grade “on time”). This paper details both the career fair and how the educators involved were able to subvert the violent effects of the data through it. It concludes that curriculum theorists must be adaptable to data which is actively disrupting their antiracist work.

Author

• Alexander B. Pratt, University of Memphis