Leading with Conscience: Dr. George I. Sánchez, Dean Charles R. Martinez, Jr., and the Wisdom of Praxis, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Leading with Conscience: Dr. George I. Sánchez, Dean Charles R. Martinez, Jr., and the Wisdom of Praxis

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy

The University of Texas at Austin

October 9, 2025

It is a deep honor to pay tribute to the civil-rights legacy of Dr. George I. Sánchez—an intellectual, a trailblazer, and a visionary educator whose influence continues to reverberate across generations. The building where I work at the University of Texas at Austin bears his name, as does a local elementary school with its own civil-rights history—one that now faces possible closure under the rhetoric of “consolidation” and “re-sets.” However phrased, such moves threaten the educational lifeworlds of emergent bilingual children and, in doing so, wound Dr. Sánchez’s legacy. The community, true to his spirit, is resisting.

When we invoke Dr. Sánchez’s name, we are not simply recalling a historical figure. We are evoking a living tradition—one rooted in justice, scholarship, and an unwavering faith in the transformative power of education. As Carlos Blanton (2015) reminds us in his seminal work George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration, Dr. Sánchez’s life exemplified the scholar-activist’s role in bridging research and advocacy, intellect and moral purpose. His work calls us to examine not only what we teach, but why we teach, for whom, and to what end.

For our students in the College of Education, three interwoven principles emerge from his legacy: critical consciousness, moral courage, and what Antonia Darder (2018)—drawing from Paulo Freire’s (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed—so beautifully calls the “wisdom of praxis.” This wisdom is embodied, ethical, culturally situated, and context-sensitive. It animates the work of transformative educators committed to teaching as a moral and liberatory practice.

Dr. Sánchez understood, as Freire later articulated, that education is never neutral. His research on testing and segregation in the 1930s and 1940s—especially his exposure of so-called “intelligence tests” as culturally biased—revealed how inequity hides beneath the language of meritocracy. Curriculum and assessment, he showed, mirror what society chooses to value—and whom it chooses to value.

For today’s students—future teachers, administrators, and researchers—this carries an urgent message: knowledge must not merely be absorbed; it must be interrogated. We must ask: Whose knowledge counts? Whose history is told? Whose future is imagined through our teaching? Critical consciousness, as Freire taught, is not awareness alone but the recognition that the world can be transformed—and that each of us is called to act as an agent of that transformation. Dr. Sánchez embodied this stance long before the term existed.

He also modeled moral courage. At a time when segregation was legal and challenging “English-only” schooling could cost one’s career, he stood firm. He used his scholarship to expose injustice and did so at great personal and professional cost. He was branded a radical, even a communist—but he understood that neutrality in the face of injustice is complicity.

Today, we inhabit a similar climate—one where honest conversations about race, gender, identity, and inequality are under attack; where diversity, equity, and inclusion are being dismantled; and where educators are urged to teach without touching the truth. Dr. Sánchez’s courage reminds us that education is not a technical profession but an act of moral and civic engagement. To teach authentically today requires bravery: the bravery to protect our students’ dignity, to nurture their full humanity, and to stand together in solidarity for the survival of public education as a cornerstone of democracy.

The third principle—what Darder calls the wisdom of praxis—lies at the heart of Freirean pedagogy: the unity of reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. Darder expands this idea into a moral framework for educators, describing the deep discernment that arises when love, humility, and critical inquiry guide our practice.

Dr. Sánchez lived this wisdom. He used scholarship not only to critique injustice but to build bridges—between research and advocacy, between the university and community, between intellect and lived experience. For our students, the implication is profound: education must never collapse into compliance with policy or performance metrics. It must remain a site of reflection, relationality, and transformation.

Praxis demands that we learn with and from communities rather than impose solutions upon them. It calls us to enter classrooms and neighborhoods with humility, compassion, and the conviction that education must serve the cause of justice. Were he here today, I imagine Dr. Sánchez reminding our students that being an educator is not merely about pedagogy—it is about purpose. It is about thinking critically, acting courageously, and living that delicate wisdom of praxis that unites our hearts with our work.

Here at UT Austin, we have witnessed these very qualities embodied in Dean Charles R. Martinez, Jr. Throughout his leadership, Dean Martinez has modeled critical consciousness by naming inequities others overlook and by championing an education grounded in justice, inclusion, and belonging. He has shown moral courage in navigating political headwinds with integrity and composure, steadfast in his commitment to serve all learners. And he has lived the wisdom of praxis through a leadership style that is relational, reflective, and deeply humane—bridging policy and compassion, scholarship and service.

Dean Martinez’s work reminds us that Freire’s insistence on education as the practice of freedom is not an abstraction. It lives in the choices of leaders who refuse cynicism and act from hope. In many ways, he stands in the living lineage of Dr. Sánchez—a leader whose every decision reaffirms that education at its best is an act of love and conscience. His example challenges all of us—faculty, students, and community partners—to carry forward that same spirit of reflection, courage, and transformative action.

This brings us to the question: What does it mean to be a critical scholar today?

Dr. Sánchez was a public intellectual in the fullest sense—an educator whose expertise extended from classroom to courtroom, from the academy to the public square. His research and testimony informed landmark desegregation cases; his policy advocacy exposed inequalities others preferred to ignore. Yet he never divorced scholarship from ethics. For him, knowledge was not an end in itself—it was a means of liberation.

In our own time, to be a critical scholar is to connect knowledge to justice. We live amid profound contradiction: unprecedented access to information coexists with the weaponization of misinformation, the erosion of truth, and the narrowing of academic freedom. In this climate, we cannot retreat into abstraction or silence. As Freire might say, our vocation is not simply to interpret the world but to transform it—through teaching, research, and public engagement.

Dr. Sánchez refused the false divide between “academic” and “activist.” He understood, as Freire did, that the scholar’s moral task is to link reflection with action. Today, that work means producing public scholarship, mentoring students who feel isolated or fearful, testifying before legislatures, and defending the spaces where critical inquiry still breathes. It also means expanding our sense of who counts as an intellectual: community elders, parents, artists, organizers, and students all produce vital knowledge. Our role is not to dominate those conversations but to connect and amplify them.

The intellectual of today—like Dr. Sánchez and Dean Martinez—must be multilingual in the broadest sense: fluent in the languages of justice, solidarity, and hope. And we must model integrity in our work, understanding that the goal is not accolades but the cultivation of the public good. If our scholarship does not help people think more critically, act more humanely, or live more freely, we have lost sight of the moral purpose that animated Dr. Sánchez’s life.

Were Dr. Sánchez here among us, I imagine he would look upon the College of Education—this vibrant community of future teachers and scholars—and say, The work is not finished. He would remind us that democracy must be renewed with every generation, through the daily acts of teaching, mentoring, and standing up for what is right. And yes, I think he would encourage our faculty to join Texas AAUP-AFT, now 300 members strong at UT!

He would urge us to keep education tethered to humanity, compassion, and the belief that safeguarding every child’s potential is sacred work. He would ask each of us to reflect: Are we using our knowledge to open doors or to close them? Are we preparing students to comply with authority or to question it thoughtfully? Are we aligning with comfort or with conscience?

Here again, we find inspiration close to home.  Dean Charles R. Martinez, Jr. has modeled these very principles in his steady, visionary leadership. It is deeply disappointing that the university has chosen not to renew his contract (see Valenzuela, 2025). Yet in the spirit of Dr. Sánchez, Dean Martinez has shown us what it means to lead with critical consciousness, with moral courage, and with the wisdom of praxis—weaving reflection, research, and ethical action into a seamless practice of compassionate leadership.

His example reminds us that the legacy of Dr. Sánchez is not a monument to the past but a mandate for the present: to teach truthfully, to research courageously, and to live out what Darder (2018) and Freire (2000) together describe as the wisdom of praxis. It is a call to embody what Dr. Sánchez showed us so powerfully—that knowledge without justice is hollow, and that the most enduring scholarship—and the most meaningful leadership—are those that serve the dignity of all people.

References

Blanton, C. K. (2015). George I. Sánchez: The long fight for Mexican American integration. Yale University Press.

Darder, A. (2018). The student guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniv. ed.). Continuum. [pdf]

Tevis, M. (1976). George I. Sánchez: Pioneer in education and advocacy for Mexican Americans. Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/sanchez-george-isidore

Valenzuela, A. (2025, September 16). Dean Charles Martinez and a legacy of equity, belonging, and impact. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/09/dean-charles-martinez-and-legacy-of.html

Beyond the Myth: Rethinking Meritocracy in Education and Society, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Beyond the Myth: Rethinking Meritocracy in Education and Society

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 2, 2025

For generations, we’ve been told that education in the United States is a meritocracy—that if you work hard, study diligently, and play by the rules, you can rise as far as your talent will take you. It’s the story of the “American Dream” translated into classrooms and campuses. But for anyone paying close attention, this story is less truth than myth. Meritocracy suggests that educational outcomes are solely about individual effort. Yet persistent disparities by race, class, gender, and language tell a different story. 

Some students start the race miles behind, while others inherit head starts in the form of privilege, networks, and resources. To cling to meritocracy is to ignore history, power, and systemic inequality. If we are serious about democracy, we must stop pretending that meritocracy delivers justice and instead imagine what a truly liberatory education could be.

Rather than treating education as a contest where a few winners emerge, we reimagine success as the ability of all children to thrive. Education must be about collective flourishing, not exclusion. True equity requires more than the promise of opportunity; it demands addressing deeply unequal starting points and ensuring that outcomes are not predetermined by race, class, or zip code. Equity-driven pedagogies already point the way. 

Culturally sustaining pedagogy argues that schools should nurture rather than erase students’ home languages and cultures (Paris & Alim, 2017). Yosso’s (2005) framework of community cultural wealth highlights the rich forms of capital—aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, navigational, and resistant—that marginalized students carry into classrooms. And Freire’s (1970/1998) critical pedagogy insists that education should prepare students not simply to adapt to unjust structures but to question and transform them.

Source: Schools Matter

Meritocracy is upheld not just through ideas but through the machinery of schooling. Practices like tracking and high-stakes testing place students on narrow paths early, often based on biased measures. 

Standardized tests and admissions practices reward wealth and cultural privilege more than effort, while school funding tied to property taxes guarantees uneven opportunity from the start. To move beyond meritocracy, these structures must be dismantled, and resources redistributed so that a child’s future is not dictated by neighborhood, language background, or family income.

Perhaps nowhere is the myth of meritocracy more visible than in our obsession with testing. These exams, presented as “objective,” disproportionately punish students of color, bilingual learners, and those from low-income families (Au, 2009; Valenzuela, 2005). Because scores track most closely with family income, they measure privilege more than potential. Worse, they narrow the curriculum, pushing out art, history, and critical thinking in favor of endless drills (Au, 2009). 

Students are reduced to data points and teachers to test-prep technicians. Low scores are framed as individual failures rather than reflections of systemic inequality, perpetuating deficit narratives that work to reinscribe Eurocentric cultural dominance. Far from advancing equity, high-stakes testing suppresses the very cultural wealth and talents that students bring to school.

Moving beyond this obsession requires recovering cultural frameworks that define education differently. In Latina/o culture, being bien educado/a—well-educated—refers not to grades, degrees, or credentials but to respect, reciprocity, and responsibility to community. This ethic challenges the individualism of meritocracy and reframes education as a public good essential to democracy. It calls on schools to replace competition with cooperation, to cultivate belonging, and to ground learning in dignity and care.

Policy, too, must confront legacies of exclusion head-on. Affirmative action and targeted supports remain necessary correctives to centuries of systemic inequality. Community-university-school partnerships can bring resources into underserved neighborhoods while honoring families as co-educators and decision-makers. Democratic accountability must mean more than bureaucratic checkboxes; parents, students, and communities deserve a real voice in shaping curriculum, discipline, and funding priorities.

Perhaps the boldest step is to abandon meritocracy as the ultimate measure altogether. Drawing inspiration from Sen’s (1999) Development as Freedom and Nussbaum’s (2011) Creating Capabilities, the capabilities approach shifts the focus from test scores and credentials to what people are actually able to do and be.

While neither Sen nor Nussbaum cite Paulo Freire directly, their visions align with his insistence that education must be a practice of freedom. Freire (1970/1998) argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that true learning cultivates critical consciousness—the ability to question, imagine, and act upon the world in transformative ways. 

In Pedagogy of Freedom (1996/1998), he further emphasized that teaching should nurture autonomy, responsibility, and ethical engagement. Similarly, Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2011) contend that development and education should be measured not by narrow economic or meritocratic outcomes—like GDP or test scores—but by the expansion of people’s real freedoms and capabilities. 

Read together, Freire’s pedagogy of liberation and the capabilities approach point toward a shared horizon: an education that resists domination, affirms human dignity, and equips learners to participate fully in democracy and in shaping more just futures. Education, then, is not a scarce privilege but a human right, to be measured by how well it reduces inequality and advances collective well-being.

Critiquing meritocracy is not about dismissing effort or perseverance. It is about dismantling the lie that effort alone determines who succeeds and who struggles. It is about exposing how privilege tilts the field for some and not others.

The challenge before us is to imagine—and fight for—an education system that lifts everyone, not just a select few. One that affirms students as cultural beings, equips them as agents of justice, and measures its worth not by how many are excluded but by the communities it strengthens. Education must be redefined as a shared project of democracy, care, and liberation. Only then will we move beyond the myth of meritocracy and realize what education has always promised at its best: not a sorting mechanism for the few, but a foundation for freedom.

References

Au, W. (2009). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. New York: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970/1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1996/1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world.New York: Teachers College Press.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Valenzuela, A. (2005). Accountability and the privatization agenda. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 13(41), 1–24.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

 Friends:

Published in 2010, I offer blog reader's Dr. Henry Giroux’s reflection on Paulo Freire that makes clear why the Brazilian educator remains one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed offered not just a literacy method, but a vision of education as a deeply political, moral, and liberatory practice. Especially in fields like education, sociology, and the humanities, I don't think one should graduate without having read this text.

Unlike today’s market-driven models of schooling that reduce learning to test scores, job preparation, and corporate accountability metrics, Freire viewed pedagogy as a project of freedom—an invitation for students to reflect critically, imagine otherwise, and act to transform their world. Giroux laments how contemporary education has largely abandoned this vision, reducing teachers to technicians and classrooms to “dead zones” where critical thought is stifled in favor of test prep and control.

At the heart of Freire’s philosophy is the conviction that education is never neutral. It either domesticates students into existing systems of power or equips them to challenge injustice and reclaim their agency. For Freire, literacy was not merely functional but existential: it was about “reading the world” as much as reading the word, developing self-knowledge, and creating conditions for democratic life. Such an approach is threatening to elites precisely because it cultivates critical citizens rather than compliant workers. Giroux stresses that this remains as urgent today as in Freire’s lifetime, as neoliberal policies and corporate culture continue to erode education’s democratic purpose.

Beyond theory, Giroux also recalls Freire as a person—humble, generous, and full of hope. His politics were inseparable from his humanity: he modeled compassion, joy, and a refusal to surrender to cynicism. For Freire, hope was not naïve optimism but a disciplined practice rooted in history and collective struggle. His legacy challenges educators and citizens alike to see education as a site of possibility, to insist on its role in sustaining democracy, and to nurture the unfinished project of freedom. In Giroux’s words, Freire’s work remains not only relevant but indispensable in the fight against conformity, authoritarianism, and the foreclosure of human potential.

Giroux's article in Truthout originates from Policy Futures in Education, a scholarly journal, where it was published in 2010, as well. I should add that Henry Giroux is also one of the most influential educators in the last and current century, as well. I once heard Giroux lecture while at Stanford and found him every bit as passionate and dynamic in person as he is in his writing.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy futures in education, 8(6), 715-721. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715

Giroux, H. A. (2010, January 1). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy, Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/rethinking-education-as-the-practice-of-freedom-paulo-freire-and-the-promise-of-critical-pedagogy/

Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century.[1] Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice - that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of "taming" students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a "dead zone," where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards.[2] Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

"Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed 'citizen' capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values."[3]

Blogging: how to make it work: My Take on This

Blogging: how to make it work

Here is a good, short piece on why it's worthwhile to blog and how to make it work.  It also provides links to other helpful pieces.

Why people blog is a very good question.  Prior to this blog, I ran an educational listserv for approximately 7 years, then a colleague, Dr. Susan Empson, who subscribed to my listserv suggested that what I needed was a blog.  So I looked into it and got immediately hooked. 

I could do a deep introspective analysis of this, but I'd rather point to the power of the First Amendment (free speech) and its importance to democracy, on the one hand, and the power of blogging for extending voice, presence, and power, on the other.  For researchers and academics, our value-added, I would think, is that bring the best of what we know to bear on important issues of the day.  As academics, if I may generalize, we're a different kind of political actor when we blog.  We're always trying to educate our audiences through a weighing of evidence that within our areas of expertise, in particular, seems to be the least that we can do for a public that is continually bombarded with so many messages, interests, and ideologies that lurk beneath.  So blogging presents itself as an ethical counter-weight to the commercialization of so much information today that masquerades as "knowledge."  This is so important to free, open, and democratic societies.

I'm actually somewhat mystified by many academics' fear or resistance to social media when our practice, in my mind, should always be one of raising silent voices and broadening and deepening perspectives in a democracy.  Borrowing from the late Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, while our students should ideally learn and command the skills and tools of democratic citizenship, I fear that too often their instruction is more for their domestication, than their liberation.  

That said, I totally empathize with the difficulties of "finding one's voice" in the blogosphere.  It's not easy for anyone, but it is a practice that for everyone evolves and unfolds, sometimes painfully, myself included.  There are risks involved, but the benefits of developing and ultimately "having a voice" in the public sphere overwhelm any negatives.  

Personally, I'm grateful for this opportunity to blog and additionally see it as my digital footprint, my legacy.  What digital footprint will you leave behind?  Now that's something to consider.

Angela Valenzuela