Bill Howe on Multicultural Education

Becoming Culturally Responsive Educators: Rethinking Teacher Education Pedagogy

Dr. Cathy Kea, North Carolina A&T State University

Dr. Gloria D. Campbell-Whatley, University of

North Carolina-Charlotte

Dr. Heraldo V. Richards, Austin Peay State University

Dr. Cathy Kea, North Carolina A&T State University

Dr. Gloria D. Campbell-Whatley, University of

North Carolina-Charlotte

Dr. Heraldo V. Richards, Austin Peay State University

Dr. Cathy Kea, North Carolina A&T State University
Dr. Gloria D. Campbell-Whatley, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Dr. Heraldo V. Richards, Austin Peay State University

Teaching Strategies in Multicultural Education

Dena Wagner
June 1, 2002 

Classrooms today are becoming increasingly diverse. Teachers must consider not only race and ethnicity, but also issues such as gender, substance abuse, homophobia, teen pregnancy, and homelessness. These issues all have implications within a multicultural classroom. Sadker and Sadker (2002) illustrate the diversity of children in today’s society with the following example of merging these very issues into a classroom of thirty students:

	19 would be white
	17 will be living with their two biological or adoptive parents
	15 will live in a single-parent family at some point in childhood
	12 will never complete a single year of college
	10 were born to unmarried parents
	10 will be poor at some point in childhood
	10 are a year or more behind in school
	8 live with only one parent
	6 were born poor
	6 were born to a mother who did not finish high school
	6 would be Hispanic
	6 live in a family receiving food stamps
	6 have a foreign-born mother
	5 are poor today
	5 would be African American
	4 have no health insurance
	4 live with a working relative but are poor nonetheless
	4 were born to a teenage mother
	4 speak a language at home other than English
	4 will never graduate from high school
	3 might be questioning their heterosexuality, or believing that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered
	3 have a disability
	2 live at less than half the poverty level
	2 have difficulty speaking English
	1 would be Asian American
	1 might be Native American
	1 lives with neither parent
	Several might be bi-racial or bi-cultural

Multicultural Education: An Overview

Reprinted from Highlights Parent Involvement Program - Teacher Resource Book.

This overview of Multicultural Education is provided by Pam Hart, an elementary educator and doctoral student in the multicultural education program at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, where she studies with Professors James A. Banks and Geneva Gay, recognized leaders in this field. Pam has given many presentations and workshops on aspects of multicultural education, including “Multicultural Learning Through the Arts.”

>From The Sunday NY Times
December 9, 2007 

* - Age-related macular degeneration (blindness) - 20% less than average - Asthma - 31% less than average - Breast cancer - 1.45 times greater than average - Coeliac disease - 66% less than average - Colon (bowel) cancer - 16% greater than average - Glaucoma - 1.42 rimes greater than average - Inflammatory bowel disease - 31% less than average - Multiple sclerosis - 29% greater than average - Heart attack - 33% less than average - Obesity - 5% greater than average - Prostate cancer - 1.02 times greater than average - Psoriasis - 31% less than average - Restless leg - 29% less than average - Rheumatoid arthritis - 20% greater than average - Type 1 diabetes - 65% less than average - Type 2 diabetes - 33% greater than average Results are calculated by comparing one person’s genetic sequence to thesequences of other participants in studies published in world literatureon genetic risk for disease

All Brains Are the Same Color
By RICHARD E. NISBETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/opinion/09nisbett.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=opinion
Ann Arbor, Mich.

JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was
“inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens
because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their
intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that
blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted
in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But
was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites
that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?

The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a
1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a
psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen
maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites
was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could
never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the
evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example,
and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate —
have made the same mistake.

In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in
I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.

The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent
of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates
of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of
middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial
proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range
of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric
Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor,
improvements in environment have great potential to bring about
increases in I.Q.

In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us
nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait
is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability
can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).

Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q.
differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain
size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller
brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women
is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men
and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group
of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces
extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their
intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.

Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more
direct evidence about the basis for the I.Q. gap? About 25 percent of
the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that
the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly
European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who
have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than
those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and
“negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black
person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even
though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the
social advantages of such features).

During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered
children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent
European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in
later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to
have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an
average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the
smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a
group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in
the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents
and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of
European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree
to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays
show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q.
Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high
intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin
than other blood groups.

The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a
study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by
white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted
by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had
many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a
substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at
adoption is associated with lower I.Q.

A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians —
was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie
Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by
middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in
I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr.
Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13
points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The
environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as
favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.

Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what
factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western
Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College
tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to
learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially
more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants
were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary
definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just
as well as the whites.

Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to
recognize similarities and better facility with analogies — when
solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely
to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning
were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and
whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge
predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior
knowledge only that differed.

What do we know about the effects of environment?

That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the
so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher
in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole,
I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone,
it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over
such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the
result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce
changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce
big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white
12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30
years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than
the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of
Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math
improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.

Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to
college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement,
sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This
mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has
environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a
society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop
their minds.

Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of
Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and
Westerners Think Differently and Why.”

Closing the Racial Achievement Gap:
The Best Strategies of the Schools We Send Them To

by Pedro Noguera
New York, New York
America expects a lot from its frequently maligned public schools but we do relatively little to make it possible for schools to meet our expectations. Our schools are expected to educate the neediest children and are blamed when students whose most basic needs for housing, nutrition and healthcare are not met, do not do as well academically as more privileged children. Our politicians want schools that will enable the United States to maintain its economic and technological dominance in the world, even though we continue to pay teachers salaries that make it unlikely that our top college students will enter the profession. We expect schools to provide students with the knowledge, understanding and frame of mind to participate intelligently in civic life, but increasingly the curriculum is so focused on preparing students for state mandated exams that there is little time for critical thinking on topics like war and civil liberty, that are essential to our democratic order. We call upon our schools to play a role in solving a wide variety of problems that confront our nation, from global warming and substance abuse, to sexually transmitted disease and race relations, yet we rarely provide the resources schools need to even come close to meeting these challenges. Given our unrealistic and unfair expectations, it is hardly surprising that schools typically disappoint and fall short of the unrealistic goals that have been set.

With the adoption of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, we have given yet another responsibility to our public schools: the requirement that they produce evidence that all children are learning. As simple and reasonable as this goal might seem, it actually represents a radical departure from generations of past practice. American schools have never been expected to educate all children, and even more importantly, they have never been expected to eliminate racial disparities in achievement. For the first time in American history, closing the racial achievement gap has been embraced as a national priority. The profound significance of such a crusade can only be appreciated if one considers that for most of America’s history racial differences in achievement were presumed to be natural (i.e. rooted in innate ability), unalterable and even acceptable.

I spend a great deal of time working with school districts throughout the country on efforts to close the achievement gap. While I rarely question the sincerity of those who lead these efforts I have come to understand that the reason why some schools succeed in closing or at least reducing the racial disparities in achievement while the overwhelming majority fail, has less to do with skill than with will. Schools like Edison Elementary in Port Chester, NY, Henshaw Middle School in Modesto, CA, or Fenway High School in Boston provide the proof that it is indeed possible to educate poor Black and Brown children. Their striking deviation from norms of failure and mediocrity, cannot be explained by their possession of a secret curriculum or extra resources, rather what sets them apart and makes them unique is the dedication, commitment of the educators who work there and deliberateness of the approach they take in meeting the needs of the students they serve.

Of course, there is more to it than that. In the best schools where all children are achieving regardless of race or class, there are typically several strategies in place, including: 1) a commitment to engage parents as partners in education with explicit roles and responsibilities for parents and educators laid out; 2) strong instructional leadership focused on a coherent program for curriculum and instruction that teachers support and follow; 3) a willingness to evaluate interventions and reforms to insure quality control; 4) a recognition that discipline practices must be linked to educational goals and must always aim at re-connecting troubled students to learning; 5) a commitment to finding ways to meet the non-academic needs of poor students.

Of course there is more that could be mentioned but these are the main strategies identified in the research literature. When this combination of ingredients can be brought together on a sustained basis, it is amazing what poor and disadvantaged children can accomplish.

Ironically, very few of the schools where I find the greatest progress in closing the racial achievement gap are in affluent suburbs where resources are abundant and poor and minority children are few in number. In such places it is more common to find highly predictable racial patterns of achievement — White and occasionally Asian students at the top of the achievement hierarchy, Black and Brown students at the bottom. Even more disturbing is the air of complacency surrounding perceptions of this phenomenon that characterizes so many of these schools. There usually are many individuals who publicly lament the fact that racial patterns in achievement are so consistent but there are even more who have come to believe that is just the way it is.

This is why it is ultimately the beliefs of the educators that determines whether or not gaps in achievement close and all children learn. Whenever the educators refuse to blame others for low achievement or to make excuses for student failure but instead accept responsibility for their role, children benefit. Children know when they are taught by adults who care about them and who believe in them. They typically respond by displaying the qualities that are so essential to school success — self motivation, self discipline and resilience. The fact that schools like Edison, Henshaw and Fenway produce such students regularly is further proof that the problem is not the kids or their parents, but the schools we send them to.

Published in In Motion Magazine July 29, 2007.
 

Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction. ERIC Digest 98.

What we now call multicultural education originated in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights movement as a corrective to the long-standing de facto policy of assimilating minority groups into the “melting pot” of dominant American culture (Sobol, 1990). Multicultural education has captured almost daily headlines in recent years, as it has become an ever more contentious and politicized battleground. To cite just two instances, attempts to establish multicultural curricula in New York City and California were the subject of considerable public attention. In the debate over New York’s Children of the Rainbow curriculum, opponents such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1991) argued that multicultural education threatened to divide students along racial and cultural lines, rather than unite them as Americans. California’s curriculum was met with strong attacks from both opponents and proponents of multicultural education; depending upon one’s perspective, the curriculum either carried diversity too far, or merely bolstered the traditional curriculum’s Eurocentric biases (Kirp, 1991; King, 1992).

School Diversity
We are committed to generating and synthesizing research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that have been neglected or overlooked.Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality
Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. January 13, 2005 One of the common misconceptions over the issue of resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy. Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society. Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply important cause of educational inequality.

100 Questions and Answers about Arab Americans: A Journalist’s Guide

Like all people, Arab Americans are too often described in simplistic terms. Although the Arab culture is one of the oldest on Earth, it is, in many parts of the United States, misunderstood. There are no easy, one-size-fits-all answers. Culture, language and religion are distinct qualities that act in different ways to connect Arabs, and to distinguish them from one another.

The differences that seem to separate Arab Americans from non-Arabs can be much smaller than the variations that at times differentiate them from one another. It takes time to learn the issues and to understand them, but it is essential and rewarding for us to do that. Misunderstanding ultimately hurts each one of us.

At the Detroit Free Press, published in the city with the United States’ most concentrated Arab-American population, we try to better understand and explain these issues daily. After consulting with others, we offer this guide as a step toward more accurate journalistic portrayals of Arab Americans.

The 100 questions and answers contained herein only touch on the issues. We urge you to give these issues the attention they deserve by continuing to read, to interview sources on all sides and to make a long-term commitment to increasing your understanding. For it is only with understanding that we can practice fair and accurate journalism.

The mission of the National Center for Cultural Competence (NCCC) is to increase the capacity of health and mental health programs to design, implement, and evaluate culturally and linguistically competent service delivery systems.