Understanding Detracking Through a CRT (Critical Race Theory) Lens

• In Event: Celebrations and Challenges in Detracking Implementation Across the United States

Abstract

A former teacher in a detracking school, our first participant’s research centers the experiences of students from traditionally marginalized communities (e.g., Black and other Students of Color) who are impacted by educational policies and educational leadership. Using qualitative methods and a critical lens, my research has followed three distinct but intertwined threads. First, she has focused on the intersection between equity-oriented reforms and how those targeted by these reforms come to understand and enact them. Second, she has worked to understand how those with formal decision-making authority, and specifically principals, conceptualize their work and relationship to equity reform. Finally, she has participated in work to develop more clarity around qualitative research in the academy and extend it to include more and different voices. This participant will discuss her dissertation findings. Her dissertation research was a phenomenological study that used Critical Race Theory and explored how principals’ understanding of equity influences detracking efforts in their diverse high schools. She asked the following research questions: (1) How do principals in high schools that have detracked or are detracking under their tenure, conceptualize racial equity? (2) How and in what ways are principals involved in detracking implementation at their school? (3) How and in what ways do principals negotiate these concepts of equity and detracking in its ongoing implementation? The study sought to understand principals’ conceptualization of equity in relation to the detracking policy at their school to better discern how they perceive equity and how that perception is connected to the detracking reform being implemented. She found that, with some rare exceptions, their conceptualizations tended to be misaligned with their efforts. In the cases where principals’ conceptualizations were more equity oriented than their detracking efforts, such findings suggest either a lack of understanding/clarity of what such efforts should look like in practice or, less positively, a performative rather than substantive orientation towards equity. Alternatively, in the few cases when the detracking efforts were more equitable than principals’ conceptualizations, such findings bring up questions regarding potential additional factors (i.e., other than the principal’s orientation) that moved the school towards this form of detracking.

Author

• Shannon Holder, Central Connecticut State University