Troubling Dominant Approaches to Educational Inquiry: Expanding and Enhancing Contextual Illumination of Systemic Inequities

• In Event: Resurgence of Backlash to Redressing Pernicious and Persistent Inequities: Navigating Race, Class, and Systemic Equity-Driven Improvement

Abstract

The director of the Great Lakes Equity Center’s largest project, a US Department of Education regional Equity Assistance Center (i.e., Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center), will present how education data have been used over time to inform and constrain equity movements, and how to (re)claim the data narrative and construct data collection, analysis, and reporting to compel communities to join and rejoin educational equity efforts.

“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘‘the practice of freedom,’’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Freire, 2000, p. 34).

Freire’s comments illuminate why, sixty years after public schools were ordered to desegregate after Brown verses Board of Education, and fifty years after the inception of the EAC program, segregated and inequitable education access, participation, and outcomes persist. In its provision of technical assistance to public education agencies throughout the US Midwest and Plains region the EAC emphasizes that histories and current manifestations of racism, ableism, and other oppressions in the form of policy, practice, and belief systems about who is competent, normal, and who belongs, underpin educational inequities. Relatedly, Skelton details how, in order to illuminate and address educational inequities, partners must consider the need to and then engage in the collection and analysis of student outcome data along with students’ everyday educational experiences and historical and current systems data. Even when outcome data is disaggregated to identify disparities between groups’ performance, without examining the processes and beliefs that contribute to these data, technical solutions that seek to address individual or group disparities may leave racist beliefs, policies, and practices intact.

Rather, Skelton asserts that educational data must account for individual and systemic practices that benefit some and oppress other students, along with consideration of individual belief systems and institutional values that contribute to patterns of benefit and marginalization as related to student (and other stakeholder) race, sex, national origin, disability, and other identity intersections. She will provide examples of available data synthesized from the Office for Civil Rights and The Education Trust, paired with data collected and analyzed with EAC partners that demonstrate, for example, African-American students with high math performance in fifth grade are unlikely to be placed in algebra in eighth grade; that students of color are more likely than white students to attend a school where more than half the teachers are absent over 10 days per school year, and with a security officer but not a school counselor; and that students with disabilities do not experience positive identity development related to disability in school. Skelton will close with implications for reframing and expanding what counts as data and who counts as researchers capable of contributing to collection, analysis, and reporting toward systemic change.

Author

• Seena M. Skelton, Indiana University - Indianapolis