By Shelley J. Jones
The American educational system was designed for students from two-parent nuclear families with middle class money and values, who came to school with all the necessary materials and preparation. However, these “ideal” students are not the only ones who walk through the doors of the schoolhouse every morning. The real students of today are from various ethnicities, financial backgrounds and family structures (Kunjufu, 2002).
To add to this disparity between who the educational system was created for and who is actually being served, there is now a strict accountability system that requires all students to achieve at high levels. Otherwise, schools and districts suffer the consequences at both the state and federal levels.
The disparity between the scores of white and Asian students and their darker skinned counterparts is what is currently referred to as the achievement gap. It is also known as an opportunity gap, implying that some students are given greater opportunities than other students to learn in ways that allow them to demonstrate proficiency.
While differences in achievement results have always existed as a result of the design of the educational system, it is only recently that educators are responsible for addressing these concerns and teaching all students so that they learn all of the material.
Role of No Child Left Behind
Along with providing additional financial resources, the No Child Left Behind legislation adds important accountability provisions to Title I of ESEA and establishes an expectation for real progress in raising overall student achievement and increasing parent involvement.
The accountability provisions require states to set clear timelines for improving student achievement, with particular emphasis on closing achievement gaps between low-income and minority students and their peers. The new reporting provisions ensure that parents and the public will have a better sense of how schools are doing (The Education Trust, 2005).
While the underlying intentions of the NCLB legislation are noble, NCLB has not shown to be practical for ensuring that all students achieve the expected proficiency levels. African American, Latino and English learner students’ lack of progress in particular has led to a number of educational fads that schools and districts are implementing with the hope that they will increase achievement for all students. However, very few of the solutions explicitly address the underlying racial and cultural disconnect between students and their educators.
What is culturally responsive, standards-based instruction?
Culturally responsive, standards-based instruction (CRSBI) is a teaching style that validates and incorporates students’ cultural background, ethnic history and current societal interests into daily, standards-based instruction. It addresses socio-emotional needs and uses ethnically and culturally diverse material (Banks, 1991; Gay, 2000).
Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) states that it is a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally and politically by using cultural and historical references to convey knowledge, impart skills and change attitudes.
The Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning (2007) defines culture and its difference from race and class as “the way life is organized within an identifiable community or group. This includes the ways that communities use language, interact with one another, take turns to talk, relate to time and space and approach learning. There are group patterns that exist, which reflect the standards or norms used by community members to make sense of the world.”
There are five components to CRSBI: caring, communication, curriculum, instruction and a focus on California content standards. All five components must be in place, and no one component is of more value than any other, for they are all equally essential to the effective instruction of our current culture of students (Boykin, 1994).
1. Caring
In 1973, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said that the interactions between communities and schools — particularly students and teachers — are major determinants of the quality of education children receive.
Gay (2000) considers the kind of caring necessary for CRSBI to be “one of the major pillars of culturally responsive pedagogy for ethnically diverse students. It is manifested in the form of teacher attitudes, expectations and behaviors about students’ human value, intellectual capability and performance responsibilities.”
There is an old saying that kids don’t care what you know until they know you care. For our students who require a culturally responsive approach, this need is reflected in the many conversations that we have with students of all ages when they tell us that “the teacher doesn’t like me.”
While the uninformed response is that one should be able to learn from any knowledgeable person, for these students this is a very serious issue. This feeling of caring and acceptance allows them to feel safe and break down barriers to taking necessary risks in the learning environment.
As one eighth-grade African American student said, “Knowing that the teacher cares about me is the difference between responding when I know the answer for sure and raising my hand when I think I know the answer. But I know for sure that if I answer wrong, Ms. Smith will still like me and think I am smart.”
This caring must be genuine, for our students are very astute at being able to tell when someone is being “phony” for the purposes of forming a superficial relationship. Unfortunately, it is very hard to convince students that we care due to the mistrust that exists in our society, and once trust is gained it is very easy to lose through a careless misuse of words or actions.
2. Communication
Good communication is more than just the newsletters and phone calls home to either update on progress and current events or report unruly behavior, with the hope that families will solve student behavior problems and send to school the “good kids” that they must be keeping at home.
Communication involves how teachers relate with families as well as how instruction is communicated to the students. The communication of instruction is extremely important and widely misunderstood.
Saville-Troike said that “there is a correlation between the form and content of a language and the beliefs, values and needs present in the culture of its speakers” (1989). It is known and accepted that the way we communicate is a reflection of the culture that we come from, and therefore it impacts academic performance.
Understanding and valuing the differences in cultural communication styles is the difference between seeing a student who is engaged but speaking loudly and out of turn as unruly or defiant, and seeing that as a moment to explicitly teach the student, in a culturally respectful fashion, about the “code-switching” that is necessary for success in academic environments. This type of skill can only be acquired and used in environments where a student’s culture is understood and respected, and where trust is a foundation for a positive student/teacher relationship.
3. Curriculum
The third major element of CRSBI is the use of culturally diverse curriculum content in the classroom. It is based on the premise that effective teaching and learning for ethnically diverse students can be expedited through the use of instructional materials that are not only standards-based (which will be discussed later), but also recognize the contributions that people of these ethnic groups have made to the current bank of knowledge.
When students see visions of people who look and live like those of their culture (both currently and historically), it not only breeds interest but also provides motivation for students to believe they can achieve, and that their achievement is not only expected but valued.
The delivery of the curriculum, which also falls under the category of communication, is paramount to the success of our students. It must also be responsive to the way that our students learn and use information.
4. Instruction
That being said, the fourth component of CRSBI values the research showing that “deliberately incorporating specific aspects of the cultural systems of different ethnic groups into instructional processes has positive impacts on student achievement” (Gay, 2000).
The fact that the teacher is the central element of student achievement has been stated, researched and proven; therefore, the focus now is on what it is that the teacher does that can most impact achievement (Marzano, 2001).
Research also shows that “school achievement improves when protocols and procedures of teaching are synchronized with the mental schemata, participation styles, work habits, thinking styles and experiential frames of reference of diverse ethnic groups” (Gay, 2000).
In a CRSBI structure it is non-negotiable that instructional practices must be at the forefront of collaborative efforts, driven by both quantitative and narrative data provided by our students. We must have a thorough understanding of how our students perform based on the styles of instruction provided.
If a certain style or pedagogy is not effective, we as educators must be fluid enough to work collaboratively and strategically to adjust our instructional processes so that they fit the needs of our students, even if that means trying methods that are new and uncomfortable.
When instructional practices are culturally responsive, we as educators become the students, and our students show us with formative assessment data what works and what doesn’t work. No one is an expert in this area, and we all must humble ourselves to respond to the needs of our students, whatever they may be. While there are numerous practices that have been proven effective, it is the task of the skilled and diligent educator to listen to those messages from our students and respond accordingly.
5. Standards-based instruction
The final component of CRSBI, which in many ways takes it a step further, is ensuring that all instruction done every minute of every day is directly based on the California standards. Focusing on culture alone will not improve student achievement or help students become productive citizens. Infusing the culturally relevant aspects of learning into strong, standards-based instruction, with continuous assessments producing data that is used to improve that instruction, is the element of CRSBI that will drastically increase student achievement.
What does this mean for school leaders?
There are many implications for our educational leaders when it comes to addressing the needs of our underserved populations. In order to succeed we must first get comfortable being uncomfortable with the current achievement of our students, and get the inner strength to lead our teams in the courageous conversations necessary to face the issues at hand (Singleton, 2005).
The goals of NCLB have been questioned and statements made about how impossible it is to expect all of our students of color to perform at the appropriate proficiency rates in every grade level and in every subject. The real question is: Which student in any of our schools is not worth us, as educators, doing everything humanly possible to ensure his or her success?
As educational leaders, our first courageous conversations are the ones we have with ourselves where we honestly assess whether or not we truly believe that all students will achieve. In conjunction with that, we must identify the skills that we as educators do and do not have in order to lead this endeavor.
Once we are clear on what we know how to do well and what we don’t know how to do well, we can ask for help from those who have experience getting results with the subgroups we are struggling to serve. Collaborating with other administrators and finding out what their areas of strength are will greatly assist in districtwide and statewide efforts to address culturally responsive student needs.
With a research-based, data-driven plan in place, we must have the courage and skill to have honest conversations about the belief systems that have kept our expectations for students low and have prevented us from serving their needs. This means directly addressing the data, not allowing excuses for it, and working through an expectation that we will have all of our students achieve at high levels through systems and processes that are culturally responsive, standards-based and indisputably data-driven.
Being data-driven means that if the data says to us that something is not working, we stop doing it or analyze it and do it differently after looking at the relevant research and proven practices.
A third implication for school leaders had to do with hiring practices and professional development. If our instruction is to be culturally responsive, standards-based and data-driven, then our hiring practices and professional development should be the same.
It should be standard practice to hire individuals for all levels who have experience increasing the achievement of our struggling student populations. Furthermore, professional development around CRSBI will need to be continuous and differentiated for the various levels of implementation that exist among our staff.
Ron Edmonds made a statement in 1967 that still rings true today: “We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose education is of interest to us. We already know more than we need in order to do this. Whether we do this or not must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we have not done it so far.”
References
Banks, James A. (1991). “A curriculum for empowerment, action, and change.” In Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Boykin, A.W. (1994). “Afrocultural expression and its implications for school.” In Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
California Department of Education Educational Demographics Unit, 2006-2007. Retrieved 8/19/07: http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/EnrollEthState.asp?Level=State&TheYear=2006-07&cChoice=EnrollEth1&p=2.
Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, retrieved August 20, 2007. www.cultureandlanguage.org/ccrtl.html.
Gay, Geneva. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kunjufu, Jawanza. (2002). Black Students Middle Class Teachers. Chicago: African American Images.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Marzano, Robert J. (2001). Designing a New Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, ed. Thomas R. Guskey and Robert J. Marzano. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Saville-Troike, Muriel. (1989). The ethnography of communication: An introduction (2nd Edition). New York: Blackwell.
Singleton, Glenn E. (2005). Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Shelley J. Jones is co-founder of Skema Consultants, LLC and is studying for her educational doctorate at the University of Southern California.