Human Rights Education and American Education Reform

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education for Social Justice: When, With Whom, and With What Implications? A Roundtable on Dilemmas, Successes, and Remaining Challenges

Proposal

Since the enactment of the UN Decade for Human Rights Education (1994-2003), global and national educational policies and documents have increasingly referenced Human Rights Education (HRE). Not only do international bodies like UNESCO, UNICEF, and OHCHR reference HRE in their respective educational literature, but also several Ministries of Education explicitly mention employing an HRE framework when articulating national educational goals and plans. Loosely defined as a way to promote human rights and address larger and localized societal concerns and issues (Andreopoulos & Claude, 1997), HRE remains discursively prominent in these agendas, regardless of its implementation.
The United States, however, is one of the few national entities that does not refer to human rights, or human rights education, in any of its official educational policy literature, despite being a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and entangled with human rights issues domestically and abroad. While there are some grassroots organizations that refer to human rights and an HRE approach (ICOPE, 2012 and Sullivan, 2007), the discourse of human rights is absent from educational reform agendas on the local, state, and national levels. In fact, though educational policies historically are relegated to state and localized governmental bodies in the US, the recent proliferation of education mandates focus on issues of standards-based reform, accountability, choice, and innovation (Hursh, 2007; Ravitch, 2014). With this increased role of federal government in education, it seems that an opportunity to press for a HRE rather than market-based approach to reform has been missed.
I argue in this paper that HRE can and should be centered in US educational reform, particularly as current mandates have only exacerbated educational inequities for those most marginalized from schooling (McNeil et. al. 2008, Vazquez-Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008). While Bajaj (2011) and Tibbitts (2002; 2008) demonstrate how HRE increases student political engagement and fosters attitudes of tolerance, respect, and solidarity within and beyond the school community, I also purport that HRE serves as motivation for young people to achieve academically, and thus must be seen as integral to reform initiatives that claim to close gaps in achievement. When HRE is grounded in concepts of agency and transformation, I contend that it inherently creates a culture of humanity and dignity within school and draw from successful HRE-centric schools as evidence for such an approach. By theoretically linking HRE to scholarship on democratic education, critical pedagogy, and peace education, I show how HRE comprehensively transpires in a US urban context. This builds off the ways that other scholars have connected human rights with several other US educational traditions, including social justice and critical multiculturalism (Banks, 2009;
Grant & Gibson, 2013; Kumashiro, 2008).
Ultimately, I posit that HRE in schools can potentially transform schools, and consequently, the lives of those that inhabit these institutions. Since a holistic human rights approach to education engages young people as actors in their own learning, this participatory approach encourages school retention and overall academic achievement, making HRE a vitally organic component of urban school reform.

Author

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College