Update, 4/29. I made a five-minute video as a companion piece to the essay described to below. In it I describe what critical theory is, how it can be useful, but why it has to be rejected as the single lens through which we address issues of racial achievement gaps:
In my latest essay for The Chalkboard Review, I argue that racial bias may be a real phenomena among educators, and it may partially explain the persistence of achievement gaps based on race. But indoctrinating teachers in critical race theory or imposing CRT in the curriculum isn’t the answer. In fact, CRT actually prevents a meaningful exploration of how implicit bias shows up in schools and how we might do better by students.
Research from education advocacy group TNTP, billed as “The Opportunity Myth,” shows that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds regularly receive classroom assignments that are below grade-level expectations. In fact, the Opportunity Myth study found that in 4 out of 10 classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment).
Does racism play a role in this abysmal display of low expectations? Perhaps. The biased belief that students of color are incapable of completing rigorous assignments almost certainly does. But a fair number of minority teachers and administrators would also have to be guilty of this assumption.
Is white privilege at work in this pattern? Perhaps – to the extent that teachers assume white students are capable of high achievement and therefore challenge them with rigorous work. So racial prejudice may indeed make a difference in student outcomes. But what do we do about that? And does that explain everything about these differences?
CRT advocates would say we have to expose these implicit biases in educators—presumably the minority teachers with low expectations for students of color also hold those views because of some mysterious pattern of white supremacy—and insist that students receive more “culturally responsive” instruction like the CRT-approved but historically inaccurate pablum of the 1619 project or ethno-mathematics where concepts like finding the right answer in a math class is an alleged reflection of “whiteness.”
Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they recognize the pattern and tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments, and they immediately want to help their schools do better.