Ex-Richardson ISD Superintendent Jeannie Stone says anti-CRT Legislation is About Protecting Adults from Children

Great quote by former Richardson ISD superintendent Jeannie Stone: "CRT is about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a moving train." When one considers that bill sponsor Rep. Steve Toth also didn't know something he was against, it all starts to get really ludicrous. No, it's not about teaching culturally relevant curriculum. According to Stone, the fight against CRT is designed to protect weak-kneed adults from children as follows:

"The genie is out of the bottle, the cat’s out of the bag. We’re not protecting children with these bills, we’re protecting adults. We’re protecting adults from children, because adults are afraid of looking hypocritical, of being caught flat-footed when their child questions some view on race they’ve voiced at the dinner table."

Adults should improve their posture rather than compensating for weakness. Moreover, as Stone suggests, they should not at all confuse CRT with culturally relevant teaching or pedagogy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Take It From Ex-Richardson ISD Superintendent Jeannie Stone: Defining ‘CRT’ Isn’t Easy

Nobody can agree on what CRT means, or whether it's actually being taught in public schools.

State Rep. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) sponsored the so-called "Anti-CRT" legislation that later became law in Texas.

It’s only three letters, but defining CRT is about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a moving train—something former Richardson ISD superintendent Jeannie Stone explained recently in a post on her blog.

First, there is what it is on its face: Critical Race Theory, a 40-year-old academic theory that examines race as a social construct, and how it has become entrenched in how justice is meted out and how public policy is formed. 

Then there’s what many educators at first (Stone included) thought it was: Culturally Relevant Teaching, which works to build connections between student culture at home and what they experience at school. When you have districts as diverse as Richardson ISD and Dallas ISD, for instance, that opportunity to provide a mirror (students seeing themselves as appreciated in the classroom for the experiences and perspective they bring) versus a window (looking at fellow classmates, but not a part of the actual learning process) is an important one.

It’s why some of the first queries about CRT at a Richardson school board meeting threw Stone for a loop.

Stone writes:

“I honestly thought throughout the entire meeting she was referring to concepts we had been attempting to advance for years in Richardson ISD: Culturally Relevant Teaching. Because … Culturally Relevant Teaching (aka, “the other CRT”), is a thing–a really, really important thing–and something I had been heavily researching and referencing all throughout my last four years as a superintendent, albeit I regret that it wasn’t longer.”

Stone said that she actually had to look up Critical Race Theory to learn what parents were telling her they didn’t want to be taught at their schools.

District staff began digging into work by Zaretta Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain) and Dr. Sharrocky Hollie (Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning), bringing the latter in to train administrators and later teachers in some of the district’s most diverse campuses, well before the movement against the “other CRT” was even a nascent idea.

“Beyond making individual connections, there is great communal value in helping students understand the cultures of other students with whom they interact,” she writes. “Developing their understanding of other cultures lets students have more meaningful interactions with those around them.”

But then the anti-CRT movement began to take hold. Parents began demanding that districts cease teaching something they weren’t teaching. At that point, CRT took on a third meaning: everything from Black history to Black Lives Matter to virtually any effort toward diversity, equity, and inclusion was conflated with CRT.

Then, as state legislatures began to convene, actual legislation banning CRT (although in many cases lawmakers don’t actually mention CRT in the bills) began to hit statehouse floors. Then those bills were passed, and nearly all put limits on social studies curricula that addressed race or history in ways that made people uncomfortable.

It’s a phenomenon I wrote about over the summer, as I covered House Bill 3979, Texas’ “anti-CRT” bill:

“I can tell you that right now, without my help, my fourth-grader can tell you what is going on in the world because he watches the news. He has access (with supervision) to the internet. He has friends. Your child does, too. The genie is out of the bottle, the cat’s out of the bag. We’re not protecting children with these bills, we’re protecting adults. We’re protecting adults from children, because adults are afraid of looking hypocritical, of being caught flat-footed when their child questions some view on race they’ve voiced at the dinner table.”

As I wrote, my family tree is entwined with the use of enslaved Black people as free labor. It is never comfortable to think about or talk about. But even learning about that history is being cut off entirely in some cases, with just the barest of mentions about slavery in textbooks. (I know, I sat next to a fourth-grader for all of 2021.)

Stone lays out the case for why it’s important to approach the classroom in culturally relevant and informed ways—and why that is imperiled by this wave of anti-CRT rhetoric.

“It seems as though Critical Race Theory was the perfect weapon of disruption to stall forward momentum in equity work which aims to close achievement gaps,” Stone says. “Maybe it was even part of the strategy to conflate Critical Race Theory (CRT) with Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT) to focus the opposition’s attack, and also to muddy the waters of public debate even further.”

Later this week, we’ll talk about the additional unintended consequences of anti-CRT legislation. 

Bethany Erickson

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Bethany Erickson is the senior digital editor for D Magazine. She's written about real estate, education policy, the stock market, and crime throughout her career, and sometimes all at the same time. She hates lima beans and 5 a.m. and takes SAT practice tests for fun.

Perfect School Attendance Increase Absenteeism, Study Finds

This is worth reading, primarily because the findings on rewards for school attendance are counter-intuitive, accounting for their popularity. Despite this common practice, literally decades of research on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation show how rewards can work adversely to deprive children of (what should be) the joy of learning which manifests as an internal motivation to do well in school.

Do take a look at the Robinson et al. (2018) study cited herein to look at the results of their large-scale research on "prospective" and "retrospective" rewards and how both kinds turned out to be "de-motivators" for the very outcomes for which such rewards were designed.

This is why high-stakes testing, focused on sorting and ranking students, is a major hindrance, as opposed to motivator, in education. It's ludicrous that such justifications were ever used for having such top-down systems that, if anything, have lessened the quality of the educational experience that teachers and children should be experiencing in our schools.

Not that eliminating these tests or these perverse reward systems are "the solution." We must eliminate curricular tracking, too, and give every child, regardless of gender, class, or race/ethnicity, access to a high-quality education (KnowledgeWorks, 2021).

Excellent recommendations appear below, too, including one that I would place at the very top, namely, a culturally relevant curriculum. When students' cultures, languages, and community-based identities are valued, this kind of affirmation helps children make sense of who they are while nurturing in them a deep sense of belonging in school that so many students lack.

If we understand all children (and ourselves) as having multiple and shifting identities, the prescription here is never about what is disparagingly termed, "identity politics," but rather to valorize the totality of children's selves, enriching the classroom experience through the kind of trust and positive sense-making that an inclusive and respectful approach engenders.

We are always more than we are told we are or who we understand ourselves to be.

It's meaningful relationships, equally meaningful curricula, and that stirring journey to the heart that motivate and inspire. 💗

Angela Valenzuela

References

KnowledgeWorks. (2021, Nov. 2) Let’s Face It: Tracking Is Intentional Systemic Inequity [Blog] https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/tracking-is-intentional-systemic-inequity/

Robinson, Carly and Robinson, Carly and Gallus, Jana and Lee, Monica and Rogers, Todd, The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards (July 24, 2018). HKS Working Paper No. RWP18-020, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3219502 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3219502

7 new ways to stem a rash of 

new school attendance problems

Educators, however, should not push for perfect attendance, as it can actually increase absenteeism.

By: Matt Zalaznick | April 4, 2022

The new causes of chronic absenteeism that arose during the COVID pandemic require a fresh set of solutions from educators. Transportation challenges, student health, school climate, mobility and poverty—long the leading causes of chronic absenteeism—also became much more severe during the pandemic.

At the same time districts were struggling to find enough bus drivers to bring kids to school, many families also stopped using public transportation for fear of contracting COVID. Prior to the pandemic, transportation was already the largest attendance hurdle, particularly for students who had to walk through high-crime areas or faced long commutes, according to a new report from Brown University’s EdResearch for Recovery team.

A decline in student engagement was another major challenge of the pandemic as a lack of internet access cut some families off completely and teachers struggled to transfer the in-person learning experience to the virtual classroom. The new research also details a number of less well-known reasons for absenteeism not directly caused by COVID. For instance, attendance is lower in schools where asthma rates are higher and the weather is colder. And children who experience more frequent conflicts with teachers and classmates are more likely to miss school, the report says.

Beyond the academic impacts of absenteeism, students who miss school regularly show less self-efficacy, eagerness to learn and social engagement. These impacts are more pronounced among low-performing and low-income students and English learners.

To reverse these trends, many district leaders are already working to improve the school climate. For instance, in high-crime areas, administrators can encourage students to walk to school in large groups that can be supervised by educators or other adults. Districts can also develop transportation plans that incorporate ride-share services and are targeted toward students experiencing homelessness or those living in foster care.

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More from DA: Why two educators say elevating student voice is key to building back better

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Here are several more attendance strategies detailed by EdResearch for Recovery:

1. Home visits. These give teachers, nurses and other educators insight into why children are absent and can also improve relationships with families.
2. Communicating with parents. Pairing detailed and timely information about a child’s absences with positive messages about their schools has been shown to improve attendance. Text messaging is a particularly effective way to connect with parents who are unaware of the extent of their children’s absences.
3. Breaking down ‘morning barriers.’ Schools can help families navigate the logistics of getting children to school by providing laundry services and coordinating ride-shares. Another step in this process is to have teachers or educators greet students when they arrive at school.
4. Access to health care. Schools see better attendance when they can provide dental care, vaccinations and other medical care to students. Improved ventilation will also help prevent medical conditions that cause absences.
5. Culturally relevant classrooms. Students are more engaged, and more likely to show up, when their schoolwork connects to their identities and life experiences. When it comes to special education, students are more likely to miss school when they are segregated into special needs classrooms.
6. Mentors make a difference. Students are more likely to come to school when they can look forward to working with a mentor or role model. Schools can develop mentorship programs in-house or work with community organizations.
7. Creat [sic] absence intervention teams. Districts can form teams that comprise educators, social workers and other community organizations to diagnose and respond holistically to the many causes of chronic absenteeism. The teams should use data to pinpoint a student’s academic and behavioral issues.

Educators, however, should not push for perfect attendance. In fact, research shows that rewarding perfect attendance in one month can lead to lower attendance the next.

Reality Pedagogy and Navigating the Anti-CRT Waters in the Classroom: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege

I have posted on Christopher Emdin previously.  I'm coming back this week to his excellent presentation delivered at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.

In the current anti-CRT moment where some teachers may feel inhibited in their classrooms to teach the truth and to teach truthfully, Christopher Emdin's "reality pedagogy" offers a way out of this policy-contrived conundrum. Note that he not only does not say Critical Race Theory, but that he also launches a critique of the the facile, if frequently disingenuous or gratuitous, usage of such terms as "culturally relevant pedagogy," "transformative pedagogy," "social justice," and the like.

Teachers are called to respect and honor children's experiences, and in so doing, raise their voices and thusly, their possibilities. This kind of pedagogy is social justice-oriented, situated in children's lives, cultures, and experiences without necessarily ever having to say that it is—that is, CRT without being explicitly "CRT." Plus, as we all know, it's not. It's just great student-centered pedagogy.

So powerful. This is precisely what we seek in the Ethnic Studies classroom. The beauty of his framework is that it can be applied to any educational context.

Though perhaps elusive for some—as many of life's simplist truths often are—Emdin's framework, is not only bold, but achievable. Listen for yourselves.

-Angela Valenzuela

History, The Dimensions of Multicultural Education, Evidence of the Effectiveness of Multicultural Education by J. Banks & J. Ambrosio

Banks and Ambrosio concisely describe the history of multicultural education that became particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, multicultural education in K-12 education is termed, "Ethnic Studies."

I love pieces like this that provide a quick refresher.

-Angela Valenzuela 

Citation: 

Banks, J., & Ambrosio, J. (2010). Multicultural education-History, the dimensions of multicultural education, evidence of the effectiveness of multicultural education. Retrieved: 2021.

History, The Dimensions of Multicultural Education, Evidence of the Effectiveness of Multicultural Education

by

JAMES A. BANKS & JOHN AMBROSIO 

Multicultural Education

Multicultural education is an idea, an approach to school reform, and a movement for equity, social justice, and democracy. Specialists within multicultural education emphasize different components and cultural groups. However, a significant degree of consensus exists within the field regarding its major principles, concepts, and goals. A major goal of multicultural education is to restructure schools so that all students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function in an ethnically and racially diverse nation and world. Multicultural education seeks to ensure educational equity for members of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups, and to facilitate their participation as critical and reflective citizens in an inclusive national civic culture.

Multicultural education tries to provide students with educational experiences that enable them to maintain commitments to their community cultures as well as acquire the knowledge, skills, and cultural capital needed to function in the national civic culture and community. Multicultural theorists view academic knowledge and skills as necessary but not sufficient for functioning in a diverse nation and world. They regard skills in democratic living and the ability to function effectively within and across diverse groups as essential goals of schooling.

Multicultural education is highly consistent with the ideals embodied in the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. It seeks to extend the rights and privileges granted to the nation's founding elites–the ideals of freedom, equality, justice, and democracy–to all social, cultural and language groups. Multicultural education addresses deep and persistent social divisions across various groups, and seeks to create an inclusive and transformed mainstream society. Multicultural educators view cultural difference as a national strength and resource rather than as a problem to be overcome through assimilation.

History

Students can benefit from 'ethnic matching,' says dean of UNR's College of Education

This research by Dr. Easton-Brooks is consistent with a growing body of research which shows strong, positive, and consistent correlations to achievement when teachers share the same race/ethnicity as their students.  Research by Dr. Kenneth Meier further shows that Anglo students benefit as much from diverse environments, as well.

Dr. Easton-Brooks' recently-published book is titled, Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color.  I look forward to reading it.

-Angela Valenzuela


Students can benefit from 'ethnic matching,'says dean of UNR's College of Education

Donald Easton-BrooksPublished 12:07 p.m. PT May 21, 2019 | Updated 12:11 p.m. PT May 21, 2019| Reno Gazzette Journal

Donald Easton-Brooks (Photo: Provided by Donald Easton-Brooks)

I am excited to be the incoming dean of the College of Education at the University of Nevada-Reno and to work with the schools and their ever-changing demographics. I also feel that my new book, "Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color," can provide districts like Washoe and others insightful ways to provide equitable education for all students.

When talking about ethnic matching, what I often hear is, “What is ethnic matching?” Ethnic matching is when you pair a student of color with a teacher of the same race/ethnicity. The research in my book shows that students of color tend to perform better academically when they encounter at least one teacher of color. Similar research found this to be true in human resources, counseling, management/supervision and higher education. 

So is it safe to say we feel more comfortable with people of our own race than we do with people of other races? If so, why not just hire the same race of people who match the demographics of the people we serve, or simply bring back segregation? I would argue that ethnic matching is not that simplistic, and if we were to only hire those who fit our demographics or move back to segregation practices, we would be breaking a number of civil rights and labor laws.

Additionally, ethnic matching is not to imply that we segregate ourselves from one another or create a homogeneous work environment. Yet the findings around this work can be complex. For instance, why do students do better when interacting with teachers of their same race/ethnicity? One argument can be that when engaging in a stressful, possibly unfamiliar situation — like learning new information, stressing over test, or feeling out of place — it can be subconsciously comforting to be around others who share some semblance of normality. One other argument is that there can be social cues, words, phrases or expressions that are culturally significant that set us at a level of comfort.

I understand this because, being in a field that is 2 percent Black, there are interactions and social comforts that I can find and share with other Black colleagues in higher education in the same way I witnessed two White males in the airport, from two different parts of the country, talk about deer hunting. The same as East Oregonians talk about “jockey-boxes,” or Rhode Islanders talk about “cabinets or frappes,” or Southerners talk about “grits with or without sugar.”

These comforts or interactions do not suggest that one likes people from other races/ethnicities less or that they cannot have a best friend or favorite teacher whose race is different from their own. On a subconscious or conscious level, there can be similarities that make a situation more comfortable, less stressing, or more relaxing. Since we are in the U.S. and race is very talked about in our country, it is understandable how ethnic matching carries such significant weight.

However, what I would argue and do in my book is that ethnic matching produces significant findings that are worth exploring. We must ask ourselves, what is the research really telling us?

1.  We do not pay attention to one another as much as we think we do, meaning we are not intentional in our actions to understand one another
2.  We pay more attention to those things that we are most familiar with than with those with which we are not
3.  Diversifying the education workforce is critical.

Related to the latter, in many large cities, the White population makes up about 25 percent or less of the student population in public schools. In the top20 largest suburban schools, nearly half of the students are students of color, and rural schools are now 25 percent students of color. Yet teachers of color make up only 16 percent of the public-school teacher workforce.

The example here is based on the three points above. Research in my book found that even though 98 percent of teachers of color and 96 percent of White teachers took a course in multicultural education or culturally responsive practice, 88 to 94 percent teachers of color used culturally responsive practices in their classroom. In comparison, 76 percent of White teachers used this practice in their classroom. Teachers acknowledge that they did not use culturally responsive practice in their class because there was no support by their district or school leaders, they were not trained, they were not sure what to do, and a small percentage stated that they were not sure it mattered. 

Further, I found that professionals of color who attended public schools had a different interaction with White teachers depending on the number of teachers of color they encountered when attending public school growing up. I found that 88 percent of professionals of color had positive interactions with White teachers if they had at least four teachers of color. In comparison, only 56 percent of these professionals of color had a positive interaction with White teachers if they had one or fewer teachers of color. Another relevant finding in the book is that when White teachers worked with at least 30 percent of the workforce being teachers of color, White teachers were more willing and better able to effectively use culturally responsive practice with their students, regardless of the level of professional development.

Therefore, we know that segregation is not the answer; rather, we must diversify the teacher workforce to provide all students with representation in  schools and to enhance educators’ ability and motivation to implement culturally responsive practices. As I articulate in the book "Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color," ethnic matching can provide an insight into understanding students  of diverse backgrounds, enhance the ability of educators to communicate within a diverse work environment, and create a more diverse learning environment in which teachers, students, families and communities benefit.

Donald Easton-Brooks, Ph.D., is the incoming dean of the College of Education at UNR. He is the author of "Ethnic Matching: Academic Success of Students of Color."