p1407 -
Culture and Class: Fighting Inequality through Education
In 2011 Christine Sleeter, then President of the NAME, stated her opinion that k-12 multicultural education was still needed to name and examine ways in which racism works, and to close the achievement gap by promoting “quality teaching of students who are culturally and linguistically diverse” (Sleeter, 2011).
The need to fight racism is even more evident today. The question remains, however, whether multicultural education can be relied on to increase equality since the legislative successes of the Civil Rights movement that gave birth to it in the 1960s made race-based discrimination illegal in such areas as housing, voting, education, and employment. Perhaps social justice educators should move beyond civil and political rights and build a new movement that provides the economicrights necessary to end the poverty that research has long identified as a major cause of the large number of children who fail to thrive educationally (Rothstein, 2004).
This paper identifies three groups of multicultural education critics: conservative, center/left, and radical/left, and contends that even those most left of center have not produced an educational program that can meet the radical-left’s critical standard demanded by Freire’s pedagogy or Brameld’s social reconstructionism. Continued emphasis on identifying racial and cultural differences reduces attention to the government policies that maintain the inequitable economic structure. Those who prepare future teachers must understand and address demands for policy reforms that can benefit working-class families in order to reduce the academic achievement gap (Anyon, 2005).