“Love Is Not Enough”: Race and Academic Expectations in Innovative Urban High Schools

• In Event: The Role of Cultural Capital and Race in Urbana Schools' Post-Pandemic Outbreak

Abstract

Research on teacher expectations has studied “race matching,” showing that White teachers’ often-reduced expectations for Black students negatively impacts student learning. Yet this literature has largely focused on teachers and students as individuals, overlooking social context and collective meanings and experiences, and failing to account for differences across schools with respect to how race is understood and performed. This ethnographic study of school culture at two “innovative” urban high schools (a dataset including 700 hours of observation and 75 interviews) identified narratives circulating in each school that linked educators’ racial identity with specific stances around academic rigor. Yet these narratives differed sharply across schools, suggesting that expectations can be complex and racialized in ways not always predicted by extant literature.

Authors

• Maia B. Cucchiara, Temple University

• Sherelle Ferguson, University of California - Irvine

• Sidra Sheikh, The Center for Program Design and Evaluation