Читать книгу The Data Coach's Guide to Improving Learning for All Students - Katherine E. Stiles - Страница 21

The historic legacy of education in America is rooted in acts of separation and inequality, and these attributes currently operate in the lexicon of the education profession.

—CampbellJones and CampbellJones, 2002, p. 135

In this book we avoid the terms “minority,” “economically disadvantaged,” and “culturally disadvantaged” because they reflect and reinforce stereotypes of those who are not White and middle class as “different” or “less than” (CampbellJones & CampbellJones, 2002; Lindsey, Nuri Robins, & Terrell, 2003). Even a seemingly benign term like “subgroup” connotes “less than” or “under.” The term “achievement gap” communicates that African American, Latino/a, or Native American students do not achieve as well as White or Asian students, but ignores the legacy of racist practices that underlie this outcome. The achievement gap might better be called a “testing gap” or a “racial teaching gap.” The very fact that we struggled as authors to find language that is both respectful and acknowledges the reality of race testifies to the grip that the language of oppression has on our vocabulary.

In this book, we use “groups” or “student populations” instead of “subgroups” to refer to the disaggregation of the total student population into groups based on race/ethnicity, language, economic status, gender, mobility (students moving from school to school), and educational status (students with exceptional needs and the general education population). We use the terms African American, Native American, Latino/a or Hispanic, and Asian, which, though imprecise, are used commonly in the equity literature and are generally, although not universally, preferred by members of those groups (Lindsey, Nuri Robins, & Terrell, 2003). (For more on identifying student groups, see Chapter 3, Task 2.) Although we are ambivalent about the term achievement gap for the reasons stated earlier, we use it to name the current reality with the caveat that it is important to examine what is in the gap—a long history of institutional racism in society as a whole, low expectations, overt and covert discrimination, and biased testing, to name just a few causes of the gap.