Desegregation and Multicultural Education: Teachers Embracing and Manipulating Reforms

Desegregation and Multicultural Education:Teachers Embracing and Manipulating Reforms

Thandeka K. Chapman

Published online: 7 December 2007

� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine the remnants of desegregation

curricular reforms in a small urban district. This study documents the affects of

various policies that were implemented to create equity and equality in urban, multi-

racial and socio-economically diverse classrooms. These reforms were created due

to a court desegregation order that demanded the district take multiple steps to raise

the academic achievement levels of students of color in the district. Using the lens

of Critical Race Theory to examine issues of interest-convergence and the effects of

court-ordered desegregation initiatives, the researcher documents how teachers have

come to terms with two major curricular changes that work in conjunction with

other curricular reforms. Research that considers the affects of large-scale policy

initiatives on classroom practices is necessary to further current conversations on

successful reform implementation.

Multicultural education � Urban education � Critical race theory

Introduction

Researchers documenting the affects of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka,Kansas overwhelmingly have expressed their disappointment with the implemen-

tation and unexpected outcomes of policies derived from this decision (Bell 2004;

Cuban and Usdan 2003; Hess 2005; McAdams 2000; Portz et al. 1999). Due to

white flight, continued housing segregation, and low economic foundations, urban

schools remain sights of inequitable, sub-par schooling (Fossey 2003). Fossey

states, ‘‘Thus, the long years since Brown v. Board of Education are a history of

T. K. Chapman (&)

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 310 Enderis Hall,

P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53202, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Urban Rev (2008) 40:42–63

DOI 10.1007/s11256-007-0076-4

mechanical and ineffectual remedies-forced busing, magnet schools, race-based

staffing ratios, special intervention programs for ‘at-risk students,’ etc’’ (2003). In

part, researchers and educators know little about what reforms have been successful

because the politics of urban school boards and changing superintendents make it

difficult to document the outcomes of various district modifications (Cuban and

Usdan 2003; St.John and Miron 2003). What urban researchers agree upon is the

need to carve out new grassroots reform movements that share power and

accountability with the multiple communities, such as business and social services,

that are affected by student outcomes (Cuban and Usdan 2003; Hess 2005; Holland

and Mazzoli 2001; McAdams 2000). However, before moving forward, educators

should take the opportunity to reflect on those reforms, such as multicultural

education, that have managed to remain vital to educational debates that focus on

issues of equity and equality for all students in public schools. To further current

conversations on successful reform implementation, research that considers the

affects of large-scale policy initiatives on classroom practices is necessary.

Educators, policy makers, and researchers need to understand how and why

policies are embraced or rejected by teachers and students in individual schools and

classrooms.

This paper explores how a department of urban English teachers interpreted

several curriculum changes that were implemented after a court-desegregation

order. Using the methodology of portraiture and framework of critical race theory

(CRT), I articulate the various reasoning these high school teachers used to defend

their content and pedagogical choices. Before sharing the data from this close

examination of residual multicultural reforms that were orchestrated to engage and

embrace students of color, I explicate the broader social, historical, and political

contexts that impacted the narrow context of the department. I first describe the

connections between multicultural education and the Brown decision, explicate the

use of CRT, and share the contexts of the study. In the second half of the paper, I

introduce North High and the teachers of English who struggled with the various

reforms. Because of the historical contexts called for in CRT, this paper may be

seen as one district’s1 journey through 40 years of legal and political battles to

better serve their entire population of students.

Multicultural Education and Brown

In the spirit of creating more equitable educational experiences for all students,

multicultural education was birthed from Brown and has remained pertinent to

conversations about curricular and content reform, whole-school restructuring, and

district modifications (Gay 2004; Grant 1995). Gay explains the impact of Browndecision on multicultural education:

Brown sparked a number of legal and social changes that laid the foundation

for a broader civil rights consciousness movement in which other ethnic

1 The names of peoples and places have been given pseudonyms.

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minorities, women, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and gays demanded that

prohibition against discrimination and separation extend to them as well. It

also opened up floodgates of opportunities for school practitioners to pursue

educational equality on multiple fronts, and in many different ways. One of

these was multicultural education. (Gay 2004, pp. 197–198)

Multicultural education was made possible by and necessary because of the

Brown decision (Gay 2004; Grant 1995). Scholars have documented the outcomes

of Brown in public schools, particularly the devastation of urban school districts, as

state superintendents and school boards diluted and ignored policies that were made

to promote equity and equality in schools (Bell 1980; Irons 2002; Orfield and Lee

2004). Ironically, the poor implementation of initial policies to grant all children

equal access to schools resulted in the outgrowth of an enduring movement directed

towards equitable schooling practices. The move to desegregate classrooms,

primarily by busing African American students to white schools where there was

little to no African American representation at the faculty or administrative levels

greatly impacted the academic performance levels of African American students

(Bell 1980; Irons 2002; Orfield and Lee 2004). Although African American parents

gained access to better-resourced white schools for their children, they lost the

valuable cultural connections between the schools, communities, families, and

students (Edwards 1993; Walker 2000).

As people of color demanded that the promise of Brown, equal and equitable

education for all citizens, be fulfilled, the multicultural education movement gained

momentum and became intrinsically linked with the promotion of issues of access

and equity in educational reform. At times, U.S. states and individual districts have

fashioned multicultural policy statements to demonstrate the government’s

commitment to serving the needs of its diverse student population (Johnson

2003). These statements were often left to the interpretation of the administrators

and teachers in the schools who did not, or could not, support the mandated

curricular changes (Fossey 2003).

Some of the most embittered battles for equity in public schools have been fought

in urban districts around the interpretation and implementation of Brown. Children

in urban districts are often the laboratory rats for various top–down reforms that

reflect the current U.S. political climate. ‘‘Urban schools ‘try’ almost everything.

While projects are not systematically offered or evaluated, they abound. Inevitably

this plethora of projects (‘‘projectitis’’) has unforeseen consequences and unforeseen

impact’’ (Haberman and Post 1998, p. 100). Given their diverse student populations,

urban districts have attempted to implement multicultural reforms by: (1) Changing

texts to include the works and experiences of people of color, women, and

homosexuals, (2) Supporting new pedagogical approaches, (3) Funding in-service

seminars to acknowledge learning style differences and multiple intelligences.

These attempts will be explored later in the paper through the data from the study.

Although contemporary multicultural education reaches far beyond issues of

curriculum and instruction and into the contexts of all schools as a vehicle for social

justice (Gay 2004; Ladson-Billings 2004; Sleeter and Bernal 2004), the limited

reforms embraced by urban districts primarily have moved educators to fuse

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non-traditional curricula with traditional curricula. Because multicultural education

remains one of the most controversial topics in public education, with a wide

spectrum of definitions, it poses an interesting challenge for educators to implement

and document more progressive multicultural reforms that will result in transfor-

mative education (Banks 2004) or education for social reconstruction (Grant and

Sleeter 1997) at an institutional level. Therefore, the literature on multicultural

education largely remains on the level of theory and practical classroom

applications (Grant et al. 2004; Wills et al. 2004). Perhaps what is missing in an

institutional memory of how policy changes trickled down into classrooms through

teachers who either embraced or deflected attempts to make all children successful.

In order to present a realistic portrait of reform, I attempt to bridge the divide

between policy implementation and the practice of teachers by highlighting how

these teachers made pedagogical decisions based on their professional experiences,

personal backgrounds, and individual philosophies concerning the roles of teachers

and students.

Theoretical Framework

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is used to interpret the teachers’ perceptions and

actions, the actions of the courts and the district, and the choices for the newly

revised curricula. As a theoretical lens, it provides a legal, historicized filter for

explicating and analyzing the events and the participants that comprise the

documented actions. Scholars (Ladson-Billings 1998; Ladson-Billings and Tate

1995; Lynn 2004; Solorzano and Yosso 2001) have applied CRT to the field of

education research with the express goal to examine issues of race, class, and gender

in educational settings. These applications of CRT address issues in teacher

education, educational research paradigms, and the historical and present effects of

court-ordered desegregation.

Understanding that curriculum includes both formal and informal methods of

presenting knowledge means that we also understand decisions are made about

what knowledge is presented and who will have access to that knowledge.

Thus it is important to broaden understandings of curriculum beyond the

visible materials teachers present in their classrooms to include less visible

curricular structures, processes, and discourses. (Yosso 2002, p. 93)

Critical critiques of the curriculum, such as the one Yosso calls for in this quote,

hail from an extensive body of research and critical theory on institutions, teachers,

students, and the curriculum (Fine 1987; Foley 1990; Gutierrez et al. 2002;

McLaren 1994; Valenzuela 1999; Willis 1977). Critical Race Theory is particularly

important in the context of this study because it connects the districts’ history of

racial oppression to the ongoing unequal system propagated by current curricular

reforms and the teachers’ pedagogical choices and content selections (Gillborn

2005; Montoya 2000). Moreover, ‘‘Critical race theory has the benefit of hindsight

in drawing on previous critiques of educational inequality to expose and challenge

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macro and micro forms of racism disguised as traditional school curriculum’’

(Yosso 2002, p. 94).

The following events tell a story about the beginning and ending of several

multicultural initiatives that will enrich the readers’ conceptualizations of curricular

reform practices in urban schools. This story enhances the empirical research on

urban education reform that focuses on the process of change rather than

decontextualized student outcomes.

Specifically, Bell’s ‘‘interest-convergence’’ principle details the means in which

Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka Kansas decision helped the United States

show good faith to European countries by appearing to grant African Americans

their full and legal constitutional rights to access public schools (1995). Bell argues

that African Americans only progress in their battles with civil liberties when whites

are allowed to benefit as well. Interest-convergence is an important concept to

explain how and why urban districts made certain decisions around the implemen-

tation of Brown. These interpretations or avoidances of Brown benefited whites by

creating alternate hierarchies of schooling to maintain racially stratified education

opportunities.

To explore how teachers interpreted the district’s initiatives, I first present an

overview of the larger institutional reforms and a few of the multicultural

curriculum reforms that impacted the entire district and its five public high

schools. Later I represent the teachers’ reflections on the multicultural curriculum

changes that stemmed from the desegregation initiatives imposed upon the district.

The particular restructuring that is the primary focus of this paper was completed

at the high school level in the English department. In an attempt to increase the

academic engagement and achievement of students of color, the content of the

curriculum was changed to incorporate the works of people of color and their

experiences, and teachers were exposed to various methods to diversify their

pedagogical practices.

Method

The data were collected from a more extensive qualitative study that focused on one

white teacher in a racially diverse ninth grade English classroom at North High.

Informal data collection took place over a year with more formal classroom

observations, individual and group interviews, and focus group interviews taking

place in the second semester. The archival documents from the district courts, the

school district, the local newspaper, and the school frame the events and participants

in the study. These data were collected in the first semester of the yearlong study.

Excerpts from the court rulings, the Comprehensive Remedial Order (CRO) that

was created by the school district and the court appointed Master, and the revised

English curriculum show the progression of the top-down reforms as they gradually

trickled into the classroom. These excerpts are the more general contexts, or

carefully drawn backdrop, of the study.

The story is created using the weekly individual interviews with the primary

teacher participant, group interviews with the English faculty, and field notes from

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classroom observations that illustrate how teachers then interpreted and adopted

pieces of the curricular reforms. I use the words of the North High English teachers

to highlight the complexities of curriculum reform implementation. The interview

data focused on the teachers’ reflections on the changes in content and pedagogy,

their pedagogical choices, and their perceptions of the students’ interests and

academic levels as they pertain to the curriculum changes.

The Researcher

Critical race theory values the experiences of the researcher as a person of color and

as an analytic tool of the research. Before entering the site as a researcher, I was an

English teacher in the school for 3 years. Many of the teachers were my colleagues

and others were also called friends. The students in my last class were seniors at the

time of data collection. In keeping with critical methodologies of empowerment, I

returned to this school to conduct research that would help these teachers teach and

the students that I highly valued (Foley and Valenzuela 2005). I do not see myself as

an unbiased researcher who is removed from her participants. Rather, this work is an

extension of my commitment to this community, the parents, and the students.

Data Analysis

To ensure rigor, a thorough analysis of the data was ongoing throughout the study.

Data from the interviews were coded using LeCompte’s (2000) five stages of

analyzing qualitative data. First, the data was kept in an organized fashion through a

computer filing system. Second, I identified items by frequency and omission.

Third, I began to make sets of items based on how frequently issues were mentioned

in multiple ways, in different circumstances. These issues were identified through

the multiple interviews with teachers and students. I assembled initial taxonomies

based on these sets of data. Fourth, I identified patterns that were supported by the

taxonomies. These patterns originated from the various sets of interviews as well as

the classroom observations. And lastly, using these identified patterns, I built an

overall description and framework for the data analysis. To reinforce credibility and

belief, the field observations, focus group interviews and teacher interviews were

triangulated and supported by archive data such as written curricular directives from

the district and students’ in-class work and homework assignments.

The District Contexts

The District is one example of an urban district that implemented reforms based on

repercussions from the Brown decision. These changes were eventually eroded by

institutional practices that function as a design of U.S. schools. In 1993, the U.S.

Federal District Court found the District guilty of 11 counts of intentional

discrimination against African American and Hispanic students. The judge found

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the district guilty on 11 counts of willful discrimination including: (a) students

tracking and ability grouping, (b) within school segregation, (c) student assignment,

(d) faculty and equipment disparity, (e) employment disparities, (f) staff assignment,

(g) transportation, (h) extracurricular activities, (i) bilingual education, (j) special

education, and (k) composition of the Board of Education. Over a period of

10 years, the District spent over 238 million dollars towards their efforts to

desegregate the schools and increase equity of opportunity for students of color.

These reforms were in place from 1993 until 2003 when the District finally

succeeded in having the desegregation order dissolved. It is important to note that

throughout the 10-year term the district and several white parent organizations

contested the verdict and the terms of the agreement (Chapman 2005).

To cauterize the wounds of institutional racism, specifically the imbalance of

students’ access to better teachers and school facilities, the judge ordered controlled

choice. This mandate was adopted by the school board in 1995 and implemented in

1996. Controlled choice affected those students who were entering the kindergarten,

seventh, and ninth grades. Parents with elementary age students could choose schools

in certain locations according to the school zone in which they resided. Secondary

students had unrestricted choice, provided there was space within the school and the

students’ presence maintained the student balance according to Racial Fairness

Guidelines. Administrators at the district level monitored the racial demographics of

each school to make sure schools ‘‘would not deviate by more than 15% from the

majority composition of the school district’’ (http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/op3.fwx).

The guidelines were to insure that certain schools were not unequally racially bal-

anced. The district provided transportation, city or yellow bus, for all students outside

a 1.5-mile radius of their assigned school. The 15% variation quoted by the judge was

also the designated percentage for racially balancing school in earlier desegregation

legislation such as Detroit Public Schools (Bell 1995).

The heightened attention to exposed racial issues in the district created an intense

racialized state in schools and classrooms that made students, teachers, and

administrators feel and act uncomfortable and guarded. Controlled choice also was

set into place inside the school in an attempt to micro-manage each classroom

according to the Racial Composition Guidelines. To correct issues of intra-school

segregation and segregated student assignment—two counts on which the district

was found guilty by the federal court—all classes were ‘‘leveled.’’ Leveling is when

students are assigned and re-assigned classes according to their racial background

and the number of students of color already in the class so that each class’s racial

composition matched the school’s overall racial composition. All students were

affected by these measures and could be removed from or denied a class because of

leveling. However, honors classes were mainly targeted for leveling to augment the

lack of students of color in these classes. This remedy lasted only a year. The

schools’ administration found it too difficult to balance every classroom without

disrupting students’ assignments after instruction had begun. Teachers were

frustrated with the movement of students and constant shifting community

dynamics in their classrooms. The initial policy was adapted so that counselors

continued to level classes when mapping the overall building schedule and placing a

significant number of students of color in honors level classes.

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Maintaining honor levels classes was one compromise made to keep middle-class

white students in the schools. Derrick Bell (1995) states that in order for

desegregation to ‘‘work,’’ so that the whites do not flee that system, there are

compromises made on both sides of the issue. Thus, the district was able to say that

it abolished forms of tracking, while keeping the curriculum split into two distinct

levels. The difference in these levels was that parents could sign their children into

honors English without teacher recommendations. In theory, the classes were open

admissions to all students, regardless of color or previous academic background, but

students of color were heavily targeted for these coveted positions. In practice, when

students were promoted from regular English to honors English, due to a parents’

insistence or a teacher’s recommendation, the student almost always returned to the

regular track before the 12th grade.

Here again, interest-convergence occurs because parents were now empowered to

have their children placed in the honors classes. But, like a snake that visibly alters

when swallowing its prey whole and later returns to its shape after digestion, the

system maintains itself. The children who were newly introduced to ‘‘honors’’ work

at the high school level caused a discreet bulge in the ninth and tenth grade honors

classes; however, because they were under-prepared for the amount of academic

rigor and suffered from isolation from their past friends and new peers, they

eventually left the upper-level track to those students that had been in it since early

elementary classes. To excuse the continued dearth of students of color in honors

and maintain the program, the unsuccessful attempt to diversify honors was blamed

on the victims, those students who were set up to fail by being exposed to a new

standard of academic work at such a late point in their academic careers.

In addition, these honors level courses no longer gave students weighted grades

to compensate for the higher level of material and increased workload. Weighted

grades were seen as privileging those students in upper tracked courses, regardless

of the curriculum differences. When the school board restructured the academic

tracks, all classes were equalized. This presented a problem for honors students

because their extra work no longer carried the same reward. It was more difficult for

those students in honors to have high grade point averages and compete for the top

25 class rankings. Both these areas of student achievement are extremely important

for these college-bound students. Many students of all racial backgrounds chose the

easier tracked courses so that they remained competitive for college admission.

Moreover, the lack of weighted grades and the removal of high-level electives

angered many white middle-class families. Those who had the financial means left

the district and placed their children in private urban schools or moved to suburban

areas surrounding Boulder City.

To curb white flight, other policy changes were directed towards wooing middle-

class and upper-middle class white families: the creation of an academic magnet

school in the west side high school, an emphasis placed on the increased test scores

of all students, and a college preparation curriculum for all students. Through these

and other changes, the school board tried to show that the higher taxes and federal

monies for the desegregation remediation were serving all students by improving

the quality of education.

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Reflections on the Reforms

Almost 10 years after the reforms were put into the curriculum, I asked the 12

teachers in the English department to reflect on their feelings about the

desegregation reform policies. Through a series of group interviews, the teachers

talked about what they felt were good and bad curriculum shifts. The teachers talked

about how and why they modified the curriculum over the course of the ten years to

meet the perceived needs of the students in their classrooms.

The English Curriculum

The substantial changes to the curricular content were an attempt to challenge the

Eurocentric perspective of the curriculum. Critical Race Theory calls into question

the ownership of the public school curriculum and poses curriculum content as the

perceived property of a particular set of beliefs concerning what it means to be an

educated citizen in the United States (Ladson-Billings 1998; Yosso 2002). In this

instance, the all-white teaching faculty felt significant ownership and accountability

for maintaining a Eurocentric perspective of curriculum that reflected western

canonical literature. Two significant policy changes: (a) a district-wide curriculum

with mandatory content and curricular goals at each grade level, (b) the use of books

by various ethnic authors as supplementary texts for each unit, forced teachers to

relinquish their individual classroom domains and create space for new authors with

new stories. Before the court-ordered curricular changes the teachers functioned

autonomously with a few benchmark assignments. Billie, a high school English

teacher at North High, said, ‘‘Well before now [the curriculum change] you were

just given your books for the year and told to go to it’’ (3/20/00). After the changes,

the teachers had mandatory textbooks, novels, and independent reading assignments

for each semester, which were unfamiliar to them and not their previous

preferences. In addition to the ample new content, certain academic benchmarks,

such as the junior and senior research papers remained in the curriculum. For all

grade levels, the most significant change involved the infusion of new literature for

each grade level. Novels such as So Far From Bamboo Grove and Things Fall Apartwere new introductions to the curriculum.

The tension between the core works and the traditional textbook is an example of

the battles for ownership of the curriculum. Class time was supposed to be divided

between teaching the core work and short stories and poems from the primary

textbook. Lessons stemming from the textbook were grammar, writing, reading

comprehension, literature analysis, and thematic interpretation. To diversify the

curriculum, one out of the four core works (novel, expositions, or play) for each

grade level was changed to a text by an author of color. These core readings guided

the theme for that quarter while the other readings from the textbook and

supplemental books were supposed to reinforce various elements of the thematic

unit. Because the themes in the core works did not coincide with the thematic units

in the textbook, many of the textbook readings were rearranged and read in non-

sequential order. During the group interview, Billie pointed out her frustration with

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trying to match the district’s themes to the core book readings and the other primary

reading choices.

Billie: I like our gray books [primary textbook]. I think they are well designed

with good selections. I like the way the book has been organized by thematic

units and it is multicultural within every unit and subunit. I have no idea why we

had to rearrange the sequence of the selections to fit some other themes that we

had to create. I will never be able to understand why that was supposed to be

better than the thematic units that were already in the book. It made it verydifficult on the teacher to try and devise tests for a unit because you couldn’t use

anything from the teacher-created materials.

Researcher: Because the new themes were collections from various parts of the

book?

Billie: There’s a test for unit one. I couldn’t use the test for unit one, not that I

always like the tests that are provided by those sources. But it [jumping around in

the book] was very difficult and the kids found it confusing that one-day we’re on

page 83 and the next we’re on 468 and the next we’re back to 314 and constantly

bouncing around the textbook. They [students] didn’t understand why we were

doing it. I thought it was very easy to lose focus of the theme that I was supposed

to be teaching for the quarter, frankly. (5/14/01)

Redesigning the curriculum to include outside resources worked at odds with the

primary textbook structure and resources. Billie was unable to use the unit test

because she would only cover part of the information during the unit. Most of the

teachers would cut and paste questions and assignments from the textbook to

include with other questions they designed. The non-sequential use of the textbook

not only confused students and teachers, but it caused them to negatively view the

readings outside the traditional textbook as problematic. The core readings were

altered to add breadth to the curriculum and to enact one tenet of multicultural

education, which is to change the content to reflect the experiences and backgrounds

of the student body. However, the thematic mismatch between the two primary texts

made the curriculum disjointed.

Group Novels

The second major policy shift in the curriculum, the installation of the group novels,

was more difficult for the teachers to utilize. During the summer of 1993, the

English teachers were told that new anthologies and novels were to be used in their

classrooms. The teachers were told how the new curriculum was designed and given

a list of novel choices in late July/early August of the school year that the

curriculum was activated. Teachers designed assignments and activities around the

novels to guide the students’ reading outside of class. With a few exceptions white

women and authors of color wrote the novels. Some of the authors dealt with issues

of race, class, and gender in explicit ways, while others told stories of adolescents

and families with characters of color. Because of the time constraints for

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implementation the teachers felt forced to use the recommendations of the

consultants without an in-depth look at their book selections.

Soon after the English teachers began using the chosen novels, they discovered

that their hasty selections were not sound curricular choices. Some texts were too

difficult for their assigned grade levels, others dealt with death and violence in

inappropriate ways, and many lacked interest and were poorly written. Teachers

attempted to address these curricular issues in subsequent summer professional

development sessions after the implementation of the new curriculum. However,

each later session focused on the implementation of a new facet of the curriculum,

leaving no time for the teachers to reflect on the previous year’s curricular

challenges.

The mandated structure of teaching the group novels also created several

challenges for the teachers. Teachers had difficulty monitoring the progress of

student reading groups and providing instruction for the larger work. The use of

group novels complicated the teaching of themes such as, ‘‘family’’ in freshman

English or ‘‘heroes and villains/virtues and vices’’ in senior English, because some

group novels were more aligned with the literary themes for each semester than

others. The structure of the curriculum and the wide breadth of student learning

abilities also forced teachers to prepare multiple sets of vocabulary and discussion

questions for the different novels. The teachers were not given specific assignments

or activities for the novels. During the summer professional development sessions

before the curriculum changes, the reform facilitators modeled strategies for

teaching the group books. However, the construction of vocabulary lists, the

creation of actual assignments, and the development of assessments were left to the

individual teacher without support from those who designed the curriculum

changes.

The Appearance of Race in the Curriculum

The teachers who were interviewed about the changes to the core curriculum had

mixed feelings. The teachers felt that the inclusion of new voices and new literature

was a bonus for the students and for themselves. Although they lamented the

removal of some primary texts, they felt that the changes were beneficial for several

reasons. The teachers liked having a diversity of authors in the curriculum because

the students seemed to like the changes. Teachers remarked that their students really

liked such core texts as So Far From Bamboo Grove and Black Boy, both of which

were inserted as major works after the curricular changes.

The teachers believed that the diversity of texts was necessary because of the

broad range of reading levels in the regular classes. Since the CRO abolished the

four-track system, the two tracks had a greater representation of student abilities.

Cathy: We [faculty] just talked about that [student ability] at the faculty meeting

a couple days ago. We’ve lost our middle. We still have 13.0 [first year college

reading levels] and then we drop to 7th, 8th grade.

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Researcher: This is seniors?

Silvia: This is seniors.

Cathy: Yeah it’s rather discouraging.

Silvia: For 9th grade one kid was reading at grade level, the others were around 3

and 4th grade level.

Researcher: I’ve heard 4 grade reading levels mentioned a couple times by the

teachers.

Silvia: That’s one of the difficulties is this gap. If we had basic classes we could

use all the same materials. But it’s difficult when we have ranges from 13th to 4th

[grade levels]. (2/12/01)

The wide-breadth of reading levels due to the abolishment of tracking meant

that the teachers were more concerned with students having primary and

secondary texts that lower level students could read and discuss while remaining

interesting and challenging for upper level students. Within the highly structured

new curriculum the teachers attempted to choose readings that accommodated the

skill levels represented in their classes, matched the core texts, and represented

different racial groups and women. Teachers also used older textbooks and outside

resources to supplement the curriculum. They annotated difficult readings

materials and played audiotapes and videotapes of plays and speeches during

classes.

Whereas the core works had to be read by all students, the English teachers used

the independent reading books, or group books, to scaffold reading materials for the

range of readers and as an opportunity for students to read fiction based on the

realities of people from other countries and communities. When asked about the

group books two teachers had this to say:

Cathy: I do, I love them. I really do. And I’ve heard comments from both [white

students and students of color]. At first it seemed that my minority students

always chose books with minority protagonists. Now the last couple of years, I’ve

seen a difference. The white kids go to the minority centered books, and what’s

even more interesting a lot of the minority kids are going ‘‘enhh enough of that.’’

I don’t know. Maybe by senior year because they’ve read a lot, they want to

choose something different. The Black kids are choosing books with a Hispanic

or Caucasian protagonist.

Researcher: That’s really interesting.

Cathy: It’s great. It took awhile.

Silvia: Well, that’s what we want to happen.

Cathy: Exactly

Silvia: Yeah I have a couple; mostly white kids, who are choosing to read TheColor Purple.

Researcher: So that was one of the positive changes?

Silvia: Absolutely, absolutely (2/21/01)

When these teachers talk about changes over time, they were just seeing students

who were the true products of the reform. These juniors and seniors have been

exposed to multicultural content for the bulk of their education in the district. This

Urban Rev (2008) 40:42–63 53

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exposure served as a double-edged sword. These reforms have successfully

broadened the students’ exposure to literature and allowed them to connect with

experiences beyond their own racialized and classed experiences. However, because

their teachers were unable or unwilling to guide them towards greater social

critique, the students were not taught academic ways to question the origins of

structured inequity or why these structures remain in place. Using U.S. History as an

example, Yosso explains,

Teachers may not be able of willing to incorporate a challenge to the

traditional, Eurocentric versions of history conveyed by textbooks into their

lectures or discussions. Barring textbooks or teachers who bring a multifaceted

version of U.S. history into the curriculum, students have little access to

academic discourses that decenter white upper middle class experiences as the

norm (Yosso 2002, p. 94).

The students had the opportunity to cultivate sympathy for and awareness of

people from other races and cultures, but given the lack of professional development

and poor content choices, the students’ experiences probably did not lead them to a

critical understanding of social transformation or reconstruction that is hoped for

with multicultural education (Banks 2004; Grant and Sleeter 1997).

Additionally, these students were saturated with texts from young adult fiction

and American literature that deal with complex social issues and often do not yield

positive resolutions. Many of the works were reality-based fiction that reflected the

lives of students of color living in urban areas. Although diverse in their approaches

and stories, few novels depicted families and communities as sources of strength

and not oppositional barriers. Two teachers discuss the challenges of teaching the

chosen texts.

Billie: Yea, I find that more frequently they complain that everything we do or

most of the things we do are minority works or depressing.

Bill: Yea.

Billie: It’s not that they are about minorities, but that most of these books are

depressing. And that kind of surprised me because they would really like to read

something that’s more uplifting.

Bill: I had an African American student a couple of weeks ago and we were

reading a poem about things that Black women have done to overcome their

conditions. And she raised her hand—and this is a good student—and she said,

‘‘We get it.’’ This is the student who knows how many poems we have read about

African American women overcoming trials and tribulations. She asked, ‘‘How

many of these do we have to read?’’ And I said, ‘‘This is about your specific

heritage.’’ And she said, ‘‘I know. One or two is fine. I get it. And I respect what

they did, but I don’t need five or six of them.’’ (5/14/01)

While Bill and Billie’s responses reflect the need for more diversity in the

content, they more importantly reflect their lack of strategies for selecting and

teaching these texts in ways that define each piece and show its unique qualities.

When choosing the books, poems, and short stories for the new curriculum, the

curriculum reform team focused mainly on books written by and about people of

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color, without regard for intra-group diversity. Marianne, another English teacher

remarked, ‘‘The students are dying to read works they are really interested in. The

group books do not keep their attention. They are diverse in ethnicity, but not in

variety’’ (2/20/01). Therefore, because of the novels’ realism and the teachers’

inability to differentiate the books, the students began to couple depressing themes

with authors of color. The English teachers acknowledged their own lack of

expertise concerning how to teach these supplemental texts and were willing to

marginalize the books in the curriculum in order to teach canonical texts that were

just as serious, but held high value in to the teachers.

Sylvia: One thing I’ll say about the supplemental books, and a lot of what we

read, we heard from kids and from parents are that they are so depressing and I

think that’s a valid argument that they are. There aren’t too many that are

uplifting.

Cathy: Well The Power of One, and The Color Purple

Sylvia: So many of them are such depressing books.

Cathy: And because they are older we think that they can handle it, but... [shrugs

her shoulders]

Sylvia: Sometimes

Cathy: Yeah a lot of the literature senior year is depressing but it’s valid and it’s

necessary. And I think getting back those classics into the curriculum was a major

hurdle that I’m certainly glad we accomplished. I hope to heaven now with these

new people at the helm that we don’t dispense with them. Our kids need to be

knowledgeable in works that are alluded to so often in culture like Brave NewWorld, Lord of the Flies, even if it is a little difficult for some of them. (2/21/01)

The teachers reflected on how many of the ‘‘great works’’ ended with tragedy and

strife, regardless of the author’s race or gender. The teachers felt that the depressing

nature of good literature could not be avoided at the higher levels of English and

lamented the fact that this was a challenge when trying to cultivate reader

engagement or students’ appreciation for literature. To balance the realism in the

canonical readings, they wanted the group novels to be light-hearted and simple,

less difficult and less volatile to teach. Thus the white teaching staff blamed the new

texts for the dour reading content, rather than critique the Eurocentric canonical

readings that remained in the curriculum. These English teachers protected the

Eurocentric curriculum in an effort to ‘‘re-center discussions of race back to the

‘‘standard’ white middle class’’ and continue to be perceived as a rigorous program

that caters to white middle class students, at the expense of students of color (Yosso

2002). The lack of critique by the teachers maintained the privileged place of

canonical European works by forcing the group books to serve as supplemental

literature of unequal and lesser merit.

Adaptations

Readings, such as The Color Purple, remained in the curriculum because the

students appeared engaged with the text and the teachers liked the more uplifting

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ending. The teachers’ acknowledgement of positive changes from top down reforms

that they opposed and struggled to accept is a small victory in the battle for policy

implementation. As a means to maintain the status quo, even when one reform

succeeds, another of equal merit fails, thus minimizing the overall impact of the

reform package. Lipman states, ‘‘Policy texts are ‘read’ by teachers, principals, and

administrators in multiple ways. As people negotiate official policy in these

contexts, they ‘re-write’ it through their own actions’’ (Lipman 2004). In the

District, the teachers were willing to try some of the modifications, but did not fully

embrace the restructuring necessary to run the reforms. After years of trying to

make certain pieces of the curriculum work, the teachers again functioned as highly

autonomous workers with very traditional classrooms. Often policy changes made at

federal and district levels have minimal success in changing the daily working

practices of classroom teachers (Lipman 2004). The curricular reforms from the

CRO became another illustration of how the snake-like system, because it cannot be

completely transformed, returns to its previous shape to reify the dominant ideology

of the curriculum. For example, instead of offering the group books four times a

year with four choices, many of the teachers scaled down the group books to one or

two offerings each year.

Silvia: But there are too many. Do you still do them every quarter?

Cathy: No. Well it depends. It depends.

Silvia: ... we have so much in our curriculum. I found to do the supplemental

novel every quarter was just too much.

Cathy: The term paper quarter no way.

Researcher: So that’s one adjustment you made, you just cut them out for those

quarters?

Cathy: Yes, I had to [adjust the schedule].

Researcher: And you do one book a semester?

Cathy: I do two [books] a semester except when there is a term paper involved.

Researcher: Okay.

Cathy: So three [group books] a year, but not every single one [choice]. (2/21/01)

Another English teacher, Billie, stated:

I use the books, but we basically don’t do them as groups. I have the kids read

them and they get to choose something. I think it’s nice that they have a choice

about the books. The biggest thing that I got out of the training that we had for

group novels was how to get the kids interacting with books. And that’s what I

like about it. That if they read the book, they interact [with literature] through

lots of little individual activities. And I use those techniques all the time in the

classroom. (5/14/01)

These teachers each had a different version of text usage that was based on

similar reasoning. The teachers changed the curriculum for several reasons. First,

after years of sorting through the texts, the English teachers only used a select

number of texts that had proven successful with their students.

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Billie: I’ll tell you what I’ve done though. When we first started doing this it was

definitely you have to do this, you have to do that. You have 30 kids in your

classroom; you had to have 5 or 6 kids reading each title and no more than that.

What I’ve done is, I tell them [students] which books I think are the best. I tell

them which books kids have enjoyed in the past. And anybody who wants to read

that book gets to read it. I don’t care if half the class is reading that same book. (5/

14/01)

This is an alteration of the original curriculum design in which teachers were to

offer four to seven choices and have no more than six or seven students in a group.

Several teachers remarked that they limited the choices and allowed as many

students as possible to read the same book.

Second, most of the students did not finish the books in the given time

frame. Often there were multiple assignments connected to the books because

of the significant amount of time allotted to the novels. When the student did

not complete the required reading necessary to accomplish the list of

assignments attached to it, his/her grade was negatively affected and

significantly impaired. When I asked Bill, a new English teacher, how he

used the group books he said, ‘‘I do it once a year. Because it’s almost like

giving an assignment that 10 out of 100 kids will do. It almost seems silly to

burden those 10 over-achievers with more work’’ (5/14/01). Teachers felt that

they were setting up students to fail by asking them to complete a series of

assignments that yielded so much resistance.

Third, the original independent nature of the assignment made the group books

seem peripheral to the rest of the curriculum. Many of the teachers folded the group

books into the regular curriculum so that they could more closely monitor students’

progress. The teachers set aside silent reading and small group discussion during the

class as a means to assign value to the books.

Researcher: Do you think the students really like the group books and individual

reading, or do you think they see them as a burden and its too much for them to

read on their own?

Cathy: I’ve had kids say, I’ve never read a whole book until you made me and

now I like this. I think you have to realize that they are not reading at home. They

have jobs, some of them from the time they leave here until they go to bed, or

they’re involved with extra curriculars. And we can see the difference in the non-

reading that is going on. So I figure being an English teacher it is my job to get

them reading and to hopefully get them to like to read. So I set aside reading time

in class.

Silvia: I do too.

Cathy: And I think it’s necessary.

Silvia: I agree. And reading at home then seems supplemental that never works.

They’re no longer group novels for me. They’re individual. And I have projects

with them and some creative things. And they seem to enjoy that because it’s a

break from some other things. (2/21/01)

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The teachers selected those texts that they felt the students enjoyed and would

complete the readings. Rather than mandate outside reading that often was not

completed, they used class time to make the students read.

Fourth, some teachers simply did not value the group books and decided not to

use them in their classes. Teachers cited student opposition to homework, lack of

interesting books, and limited time for the curriculum as reasons that they no longer

assigned the books. The choices that the teachers made were based on their

perceptions of what the students could and could not do, would and would not do,

did and did not like to do, as well as their own feelings about the texts. The ways in

which the teachers made their choices is both an area of strength and a source of

concern. The concept of teacher as knower in the classroom is powerful when

asking teachers to make decisions about the curriculum they will teach. For

example, Cathy was very thoughtful about how she restructured the group books to

suit her students.

Cathy: That’s why I decided after the first year not to do them by theme. I do

them by size [interruption]. I didn’t think it was right. Some kids were reading

15 pages a day if the largest book had to be broken up into 20–25 pages a night

and it would take 11 reading days, and other kids had chosen a real skinny

book then they only had to read 10–15 pages a night and they were howling

about it and not choosing the longer ones and I just thought, well this

[differencing in page readings] was goofy. So I just did it [changed the

schedule]. The seniors have the skinniest books 4th quarter when they have

‘‘senioritis.’’ They have the biggest books like Malcolm X and Power of Onefirst quarter. It has worked much better that way, just doing it by size.... Well I

found that for 2nd semester the 3rd quarter novels I got rid of the individual

short answer questions and I just made it the same. What were the mistakes the

protagonist made, and what would you have done differently? Because all of

them had made some serious life choices that truly wrecked their lives or that

should have been dealt with differently. And again it’s just finding the patterns.

And making the essay proportional and a little more creative other than did you

read this essay or not? (2/21/01)

Teachers, like Cathy, are most intimate with the ability and affect levels of the

students in their classrooms. However, even in her thoughtfulness, she streamlined

her teaching of the novels to address the more benign questions about the characters

that asked students to construct moral judgments of the protagonists’ actions.

Teachers should be the ones to make these curricular compromises and tailor the

curriculum to the needs of their students. But they should not do it in isolation.

When teachers alter their practice without the benefit of critical friends or mentors

who can push their thinking about issues of race, class, and gender, their

‘‘revisions,’’ like the newly aligned group books for Cathy, are usually superficial

and possibly more stereotypical and disempowering for students of color (Sleeter

and DelgadoBernal 2004).

In the imperfect world of public schools, where teachers’ perceptions of their

students and the content are filtered through the lenses of race, class, and gender,

teachers functioning as isolated decision-makers without opportunities to share with

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and challenge each other about their pedagogical practices hinders their ability to

make good choices that reflect the needs of diverse student populations. Research

shows that teachers who teach the lower tracks of students often hold lower

expectations for these students and give them less rigorous assignments (Oakes

1986; Solorzano and Ornelas 2004). Teachers often removed curriculum content

that the teachers themselves felt was too difficult for the students to master or that

dealt with difficult subjects that the teachers did not think they could appropriately

address, while other teachers boasted great success with the same materials and

student population. Retaining traditional curriculum marginalizes students of color

by preserving Eurocentric stories, cultural norms, and behaviors as the center of the

curriculum and the knowledge that is valued in society (Yosso 2002). Therefore,

teachers’ inability to embrace new content and pedagogy leads to further

disengagement, distrust, and hostility from the students towards the school and

the teachers.

Talking Across the Curriculum

Ten years after the initial implementation of the reforms, the teachers themselves

were amazed at the lack of pedagogical cohesion in the department. Instead of

students being given equal opportunities for enrichment and exposure to the

curriculum throughout their matriculation at North High, students were likely to

move from grade to grade with very different literary experiences and levels of

academic exposure because the teachers were autonomous actors once again. The

ability to discuss their individual practices led teachers to challenge one another

about their choices. For example, during my interview with Billie and Bill, Billie

was able to challenge Bill’s assumptions about the curriculum.

Bill: There are some poems that we read that are just dreadful.

Researcher: Are they in the gray book?

Bill: Some are in the gray book, some are in the old orange book, but they are still

on the curriculum list and we’re supposed to teach them. You try to find some

redeeming educational value and you try to give it to the students.

Billie: But that’s all a matter of choice right?

Researcher: Some of them are listed.

Billie: They’re listed, but they are optional. You don’t need to teach those poems.

It’s the menu from which we choose.

Bill: No. I cold skip them. [shrug]

Billie: So you can’t find any poems that you enjoy teaching? That the kids like?

[looks pointedly at Bill]

Bill: Oh there are a lot of them, but there are some that are on the list as options

that are just deadly.

Billie: Right. [gestures with open palms]

Researcher: So maybe the list needs to be revised? [looking back and forth

between the two teacher]

Billie: Right. [nods and looks away] (5/14/01)

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Although Billie pushes the conversation with Bill to better understand Bill’s

point of view and curricular choices, these moments rarely occurred and remained

on a superficial level. Teachers were unwilling to openly challenge their

colleagues’ classrooms. Yosso suggests that conversations such as this are

‘‘spoken and unspoken narratives which serve to maintain racial, gender, and class

inequality’’ (2002, p. 94). Similarly, even though Cathy challenged Sylvia on her

decision not to use certain texts, such as Master Harold and the Boys and HuckFinn that Sylvia felt were offensive in language or action, Cathy did not suggest

that the direct references to race and oppression were perhaps what disturbed

Sylvia.

Conversations in which teachers shared resources and discussed their students

were also rare. During all of the interviews, the teachers were surprised by each

other’s responses to the questions and choices from the content lists. These were

conversations that the teachers had not cultivated since the curriculum was new.

After the first few years of the reform, professional development sessions around the

curriculum were discontinued and it was assumed that the new curriculum had been

implemented or ignored by the teachers.

Through these conversations, teachers also realized how their own approaches to

the curriculum and the students were either affected by the policy changes or

remained immobile. When asked about the changes they have made to their

practices Cathy and Silvia remarked that they have had to use ‘‘tough’’ motivational

strategies and new approaches to curriculum to move students through their

semesters.

Cathy: I’m getting more grumbling because the students who have lower reading

levels are struggling to get through the readings. I tell them too bad. You’re gonna

tell me that you are not as bright as my other classes than my other years of

classes that you can’t get this?

Silvia: I do that with my honors classes.

Cathy: That’s right. So long as it’s not personal, you gotta shame’m sometimes.

Silvia: When I look back at what I use to do with the honors, it’s not the same as

now.

Cathy: no, no

Silvia: What I required and what I had them read years ago is quite different. Are

we watering down? Yes. Are there good things coming out of it? Yes. (2/12/01)

What Silvia considers ‘‘watering down’’ is adapting and changing the curriculum

to meet the needs of students who have lower reading levels. Her reflections are

from of previous classes that were highly tracked and predominately white middle-

class, where students were deeply indoctrinated into honors level work through the

systematic tracking of the entire system. These narratives comparing the new cohort

of racially and socio-economically diverse students from varying socioeconomic

backgrounds to the past homogenous white middle-class students reinstantiates

notions of white privilege and class that are indelibility embedded in the public

school curriculum (Gillborn 2005; Montoya 2000).

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Conclusion

In this paper, I have explicated how teachers have interpreted various reforms

targeted at the erasure of injustice. Critical race theory challenges scholars to

examine the past as part of the present contexts. It is disappointing to reveal that

after 50 years of urban reform, researchers know little about what actually works

(Cuban and Usdan 2003). Examinations such as this, where contexts, perceptions,

and processes are analyzed shift the focus from poor student outcomes and

continued social marginalization to understanding why urban schools continue to

fail the students. Yosso explains:

It is important to address the inequality embedded in school curriculum before

addressing unequal educational outcomes. Indeed, one of the first mistakes

most often made by many educators and policymakers is to look at the

inequalities for student outcomes and blame students without looking at the

conditions, such as curricular structures, processes, and discourses that create

unequal outcomes. (Yosso 2002, p. 94)

Although the spirit of the reforms held great potential for changing the content

and pedagogical practices in schools, other forces that are constantly in motion

acted upon the district and modified these attempts.

These political and personal, individual and collective contexts shape how

teachers will handle curricula and how students will perceive it. As teachers

continued to make alterations to the curriculum, based on their perceptions of the

students and individual tastes, the reform was eventually washed away and the

system returned to its former structure. Bell (2004) and others (Lipman 2004;

McAdams 2000; St.John and Miron 2003) state that urban reforms aimed at

increasing educational opportunities for all children are most often re-appropriated

by the system to further marginalize students of color and maintain the status quo.

Contextual forces such as teacher identity, the inclusion of resources and support,

thoughtful processing of curricular choices, other reform mandates, and the push for

short-term results all contribute to the minimal progress of urban school reform.

As educators reflect on the various tools to reform urban schools, they must also

examine how and why teachers alter these reforms in their autonomous classroom

spaces. Research has indicated that teachers will adapt and manipulate reforms as

they see fit and for what seems to be very valid reasons (Apple 1987; Giroux 1985;

Lipman 1997; McLaren 1998). And I do not advocate for a teacher-proof

curriculum. However, as educators continue to work with schools and departments

to implement reforms, I suggest that teachers should be a part of on-going work

groups and action research in their classrooms to better assess their decisions

concerning content and pedagogical choices and curriculum cohesion. Moreover,

scholars suggest that teachers need ongoing support to fulfill the promise of reforms,

such as multicultural education, which require teachers to incorporate new skills and

change their professional dispositions (Sleeter 2000; St.John and Miron 2003).

Other cities are taking new approaches to urban reforms (Cuban and Usdan 2003;

Holland and Mazzoli 2001; McAdams 2000) that build coalitions among seemingly

disparate groups. While it is too early to judge how many reforms will take hold, it

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is important to document the process as well as the outcomes. Only then, will

educators be able to replicate, extend, and revise teachers’ pedagogical practices

and curricular content to meet the needs of all students in urban settings.

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