By Dr. Stephanie Boyce
Now, more than ever, public school educators across the country are going to find it necessary to become trained and prepared to create classrooms and learning experiences that center their student demographics and create safe spaces that honor who they are. This is especially true for those serving in predominately Black communities. While the research and work in the field of culturally relevant education (CRE) has been around for decades, it is oftentimes on the heels of an American white lash like the presidential election of 2024, that Black folks become more acutely aware of the duty we have to safeguard and nurture our kids, as they are entrusted to educational institutions that were not engineered with their unique challenges in mind.
While the growing interest in private schools and homeschools may prove to be a viable option for Black parents looking to step up and provide their children with the protections and tailor-made educational opportunities they desire, the reality for the majority, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, is that public schools serve 84% of Black students, as most of them do not have the privilege of selecting such options.
This is evident in the numbers, as 8% of Black students attend private schools and 16% are homeschooled. Even with the growing conversations about school choice and voucher options that could redirect public school funds to private schools and other options, two truths still remain: 1. If you gave every Black student in America a school voucher tomorrow, the private schools available to them do not have the capacity to hold the 7.4 million students attending public schools. 2. Vouchers are not full-ride scholarships. What remains is the need for families to come up with the money to pay the difference between tuition costs and voucher allocations. While school vouchers may be music to the ears of the middle class and upper class families who can afford to pay the difference that would be required for private entry, for resource-limited families these schools continue to not be an option. Simultaneously, their local schools lose funding and the social capital they may have been afforded by way of the middle and upper class families attending the community schools alongside them. We could go on here about other reasons why private and homeschools are not a large-scale fix for Black students and communities in our present reality, but the purpose of this piece is to explore one possible solution for our students.
Culturally Relevant Education
There are many theories and terms that may be utilized to describe educators’ ability to effectively teach and center historically marginalized students in their classrooms. For the sake of this article we use the term Culturally Relevant Education (CRE), as defined by Aronson & Laughter, 2016.
CRE is a combination of culturally responsive teaching, made popular by Geneva Gay, and culturally relevant pedagogy made popular by Gloria Ladson-Billings. Four teacher behaviors that characterize CRE classrooms are as follows:
- Using culture as a bridge to connect to academic skills and concepts,
- Facilitating students’critical reflection of their lives and society,
- Building students’cultural competence to take pride in their culture,
- Critiquing discourses of power to challenge the status quo.
Source: Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies
In response to the historically-daunting disparities that exist in schools between students of color and their white counterparts, CRE provides educators direction towards facilitating more equitable classrooms and communities at large. While many justice-minded teachers may be readily leveraging any combination, or all of these approaches regularly, it’s time historically-marginalized communities start to demand a new standard whereby their local schools make such teacher practice non-negotiable.
70 years post Brown vs. Board of Education our public schools remain highly segregated. Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, explains “Segregation appears to shape educational outcomes because it concentrates Black and Hispanic students in higher-poverty schools, which results in unequal learning opportunities.”
In the face of increasingly segregated schools, a factor outside of the control of most educators, a unique opportunity to center students’ cultural and communal values becomes even more apparent, when building bridges to better teaching and learning. In many areas that serve large demographics of Black and Brown students, for instance, we are starting to see campus and district administrators embracing historically marginalized aspects of the community (i.e. policies that safeguard natural hairstyles, embracing popular music and culture into the school community, cultural celebrations and connections, etc.) that their students come from, thereby allowing schools and classrooms to welcome their authenticity and curate learning environments that are welcoming and affirming. It is in such warm and culturally inclusive environments that Black and Brown students have the best chance at learning and achieving better outcomes.
When it comes to teacher prep programs and school district professional development opportunities, it’s time for prioritizing learning opportunities that ensure teachers are prepared in the art and science of CRE.
When they are trained, and these practices become regular behaviors, research suggests that students have increased attendance, less behavioral referrals, and improved academic outcomes. And while these measures are very important, perhaps the most important is how students report feeling valued and seen by their teachers and administrators when culturally relevant approaches are employed and embedded in practice. Although policy makers who do not appreciate best practices in education may continue to push for their own best interests, local school boards and community members must be resolute in their fight towards implementing what decades worth of research has taught us, and what many of us knew all along: Centering our students, communities, and history is essential to ensuring Black and Brown students receive equity in schools. They are still worth the fight.
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