Leading Through Critical Race Theory (CRT): How Administrators Use CRT to Reframe Deficit Perspectives of Children of Color

• In Event: 34.079 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 34.079-2 - Critical Race Classroom Ecology: Using Critical Race Theory to Inform Praxis in the Pre-K–20 Classroom

Abstract

Purpose: This study uses CRT as it applies to how school leaders in one middle school in the inter-mountain west region of the U.S. attempted to change color-blind and racial student deficit perspectives (Capper, 2015).

Theoretical Framework: A CRT analysis in educational leadership is important because few studies have looked specifically at how school leaders use CRT to engage in policy mechanisms such as equity audits disaggregation of racial data with action plans and measureable race goals that also challenge a form of “deep whiteness” among teachers who unconsciously adhere to an ideology of whiteness as property regarding their teaching and curriculum that has a deleterious impact on students of color (Bonilla Silva, 2015; Gooden, 2102). This study will use a CRT framework to provide a foundation for an analysis for the viewed differences between school communities with regard to the majoritarian “achievement gap” story versus the counterstory of students and parents of color who argue that they indeed care about education and schooling from a critical race achievement perspective (Carter, 2009).

Methods & Data Sources: This study was conducted in a middle school, the majority of whom are Latinx and African American/African immigrant students. The teaching staff is majority white. This school was considered by the urban school district board of education to be an “at-risk/challenge school” with below average test scores. The leadership team engaged in a series of equity audits to open majoritarian stories and counter-stories regarding why there was a perception gap between what the teachers believed about school success and what the parents and students believed. The ongoing study will use data from equity audits, individual interviews, and focus groups with the teachers, parents, and students. Our study combines the descriptive data of the achievement test scores, with counter story-telling vs. majoritarian “achievement-gap” storytelling; CRT methodology will address the inferiority mythology of the school that persists with the intent to better understand the role of racism and race in everyday life (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Result/Conclusions/Significance: Our analysis will deconstruct the prevailing mythology associated with this particular turn-around school based on the majoritarian story, and will conclude with counter stories to provide a better understanding of the school and the school community. CRT interpretation of the data indicates that school leadership that undertakes the use of data as a means to see racial disparities, can also use this as an interest convergence opportunity to interrogate the pervasiveness of racism in school practices and teacher beliefs, the role that whiteness as property holds in teaching and assessment, and how leaders have to continuously monitor where CRT goes when the change is implemented and initial gains are made and there is movement toward deeper racial challenges and how this can be sustained if possible.

The scholarly contribution of our study is that it seeks to actively apply CRT to educational leadership and our analysis will provide solutions to deconstructing the prevailing racialized myth of this particular school and in moving it away from the “achievement gap”.

Author

• Laurence Parker, University of Utah