(2024). Inside the Black Box: Detecting and Mitigating Algorithmic Bias across Racialized Groups in College Student-Success Prediction. Grantee Submission, AERA Open v10 n1. Colleges and universities are increasingly turning to algorithms that predict college-student success to inform various decisions, including those related to admissions, budgeting, and student-success interventions. Because predictive algorithms rely on historical data, they capture societal injustices, including racism. In this study, we examine how the accuracy of college student success predictions differs between racialized groups, signaling algorithmic bias. We also evaluate the utility of leading bias-mitigating techniques in addressing this bias. Using nationally representative data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 and various machine learning modeling approaches, we demonstrate how models incorporating commonly used features to predict college-student success are less accurate when predicting success for racially minoritized students. Common approaches to mitigating algorithmic bias are generally ineffective at eliminating disparities in prediction outcomes and… [Direct] [Direct]
(2023). White Imagination, Black Reality: Recentering Critical Race Theory in Critical Whiteness Studies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), v36 n8 p1450-1458. This essay uses the concept of the white imaginary to reflect on Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) in education. It examines the field's value but also its limitations, specifically its preoccupation with converting white people as the solution to systemic racism. The conversion approach ignores the fuller structural nature of whiteness and often privileges the needs and wants of white people over people of color. The essay argues that to better serve Black students and educators, CWS must stay connected to the central tenets of Critical Race Theory and aligned with approaches rooted in the racial knowledge of people of color, such as work on Black genius…. [Direct]
(2022). On (Not) Being the Master's Tools: Five Years of 'Changing University Cultures'. Gender and Education, v34 n5 p512-528. This paper reflects on the first five years of the Changing University Cultures (CHUCL) collective, which conducted equality and diversity projects in four English universities between 2015 and 2020. We explore how CHUCL has been used in the service of institutional polishing (Ahmed, S. 2012. "On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life." Duke University Press, 143) and airbrushing (Phipps, A. 2020b. "Reckoning Up: Sexual Harassment and Violence in the Neoliberal University." "Gender & Education" 32 (2), 230-233), how our reports have become non-performatives (Ahmed, S. 2012. "On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life." Duke University Press, 90), and how our findings have been weaponised in the service of institutional interests. We are two of three white middle-class women who constitute the CHUCL collective; we situate this retrospective within critical reflections on our positionality and an… [Direct]
(2021). The Economic Burden of Racism from the U.S. Education System. National Education Policy Center Even as the U.S. education system becomes more ethnically and racially diverse, many racial disparities persist with regard to school segregation, educational resources, and ultimately educational outcomes. These disparities harm students individually and have significant societal impacts as well, including economic consequences. Educational resources are misallocated in ways that may reflect racial discrimination. Black and Hispanic students often leave school with substantially lower levels of human capital and, as a result, have lower lifetime earnings on average. Together, these misallocations and losses in human capital are what this brief calls the "economic burden of racism." In estimating the main economic burdens of racial disparities, this brief attempts to include all the resources that are affected by racism, measured in dollars. The brief's conservative estimates point to the need for more complete and precise data; thus, the brief concludes with… [PDF]
(2024). An Integrative Review of College Readiness Programs for Black High School Students; Opportunities for School Nurse Involvement. Journal of School Nursing, v40 n1 p26-42. Education is associated with improved health outcomes. However, fewer non-Hispanic Black Americans earn high school diplomas, baccalaureate, or advanced degrees than White Americans, placing them at higher risk for poor health outcomes. Racial disparities in education have been linked to social injustice and structural racism. Through the Framework for the 21st Century School Nursing Practice[TM], school nurses can impact academic success and college readiness for Black youth. An integrative review of the literature was conducted to describe programs to promote college readiness for Black high school students and evaluate school nurse involvement. Findings of the eighteen unique studies included in this review were: programs included mostly female participants, and most yielded improvements in students' non-cognitive skills (i.e. sense of belonging/confidence) and college knowledge. None of the programs included school nurse involvement. School nurses can advocate for anti-racist… [Direct]
(2022). Perceptions of Race in Career and Technical Education: Moving toward Critical Consciousness. Career and Technical Education Research, v47 n1 p3-22 May. Career and technical education (CTE) gives students access to skill development and greater economic opportunity, but challenges in the CTE system are pervasive for students of color, specifically Black and Latinx students. This study examines Black and Latinx high school student and teacher experiences with race in a profession-based learning program that awards CTE credits. This basic qualitative study is built around a conceptual framework that examines what racism is in CTE, how it creates barriers for people of color and how activating sociopolitical consciousness of students and teachers may enhance student agency. Findings reveal student and teacher perspectives defining race as skin color, strong beliefs in meritocracy, and individualized approaches that lead to a lack of awareness of systemic racism. Teachers play a critical role in supporting students through challenges, but they stop short of using their positions to elevate those challenges toward more meaningful systemic… [Direct]
(2024). Organizing Possible Futures: A Systematic Review on Dis/Ability Justice Frameworks to Design Equity-Oriented Inclusive Teacher Education Programs. Review of Educational Research, v94 n6 p883-926. In the U.S. school system, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students often experience multiple forms of marginalization at the intersection of racism, ableism, and other forms of subjugation. To reform dysfunctional school systems, teacher education programs must create transformative spaces to nurture future educators committed to equity. These educators then will be equipped to dismantle the (in)visible racist and ableist structures within education systems and envision new alternative futures. Drawing on critical learning sciences and dis/ability justice-oriented theoretical approaches, we conducted a systematic literature review of 11 empirical studies to examine how teacher preparation programs are informed by dis/ability justice theoretical lenses. We synthesized how dis/ability justice-oriented teacher preparation programs organized transformative learning environments aimed at disrupting color-evasive and pathologizing discourses. We discussed the findings on… [Direct]
(2024). Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Perspectives across the Explicit Curriculum: Insights and Efforts from a School of Social Work. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, v44 n4 p423-440. Principles of diversity and difference are and have historically been, essential to social work education. However, preparing students with the knowledge, awareness, and skills of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices has been less central in social work education until recently. In June 2022, the Council on Social Work Education issued new Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) guidelines. Most notable was the addition of EPAS 2.0, requiring social work programs to integrate anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) approaches throughout social work programs' context and learning environment. Responding to EPAS 2022 and our program's commitment to social and racial justice, this article presents our school's process for critically assessing and revising how our explicit curriculum integrates critical ADEI perspectives. We highlight the findings from a rapid scoping review of ADEI content in the social work literature. Additionally, we discuss the… [Direct]
(2024). Decentering Whiteness in Teacher Education: The Role of Emotion. Educational Foundations, v37 p21-42. Teacher candidates and teacher educators of color often carry a heavy emotional burden as a consequence of the epistemic violence they experience in many TEPs (Teacher of Color Collective & Sauto-Manning, 2022). To interrupt this pattern, we must critically engage with emotion by examining what emotions "do," how emotions function and in whose interest. This type of critical emotional literacy is especially important for White teacher candidates and White teacher educators, as the emotionalities of Whiteness are closely intertwined with practices and structures of racism. Drawing attention to the emotionality of Whiteness is not without risks. It is possible that focusing on how emotion operates to maintain (and potentially dismantle) White supremacy may further reinscribe Whiteness as the normative center of teacher education "and" perpetuate the marginalization and pain teacher candidates and teacher educators of color. However, without engaging in this work… [Direct]
(2024). An Anti-Racist English Education. English in Education, v58 n3 p240-257. In this conceptual article we offer a vision and a manifesto for an anti-racist English education, focusing particularly on language. Locating our work with anti-racist efforts in the UK, we conduct a brief historical reflection of these efforts, before turning our attention to the current politico-economic context and making a case for the urgent need for English teachers and teacher educators to commit to anti-racism within their work. We then outline what contemporary anti-racist efforts in English education might look, sound, and feel like. We argue for a greater attention to intersectional positionalities and activism in English education. We argue for anti-racist language policies which work in dialogue with other broader anti-racist efforts. We argue for the need to pay attention to specific contexts and racialised dynamics of institutions and local communities. We argue for anti-racist pedagogical stances which seek to sustain the language practices of marginalised children…. [Direct]
(2023). 'Demonstrable Experience of Being a "Mammy" or "Crazy Black Bitch"' (Essential). A Critical Race Feminist Approach to Understanding Black Women Headteachers' Experiences in English Schools. Race, Ethnicity and Education, v26 n3 p318-334. This paper builds on the emerging, but significant scholarship of Critical Race Feminism (CRF) in education. It adds to the literature in this area by applying the theoretical and methodological underpinnings to the British education context where such applications are vanishingly small in favour of broader critical race applications. Supported by racialised and gendered images of professional Black women in leadership roles as the analytical standpoint for understanding a Black woman Headteacher's experiences in an English school, this paper argues that Black women's tenure and trajectories are underpinned by the white racial colonial logics of the "Mammy, Crazy Black Bitch, Superwoman" and/or "Feisty Sapphire." In so doing, institutional racism continues to underpin "and undermine" Black women Headteachers' leadership potential, experiences and outcomes…. [Direct]
(2022). Whose Future? Whose Facts?: A Critical Case Study of News Literacy Education in the United States. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oregon. In the wake of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing public attention has been paid to the ability of citizens to use and understand news media, information, and digital technology. Conversations about media literacy–the ability to critically engage with media–are ongoing in the press, schools, and state and federal governments. Most media literacy scholars agree that media literacy is an integral part of an informed and healthy democracy. Yet not all media literacy approaches are the same, and some scholars suggest that mainstream approaches may re-create antidemocratic systems and ideologies. What does it mean when the tools intended to support a healthy democracy reinforce systems of oppression? A case study of the News Literacy Project (NLP), a nonpartisan, nonprofit education organization, was used to explore this question by examining how ideologies of racism and neoliberal capitalism are perpetuated or challenged in the resources… [Direct]
(2022). Funding the Future We Want: Leveraging University Funding to Support Black and Indigenous Communities. Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, v5 n1 p101-106. For more than a decade, critical service-learning and community-engagement authors and scholar-activists have been pushing for a more race aware, critically informed view of the work of community-based learning. These calls encourage, support and validate the hard work of individuals across campuses who teach and practice in ways that support students of color and critically challenge systems of oppression. But since racism is structural, it is also important to pay attention to the ways institutions of higher education incorporate the values of anti-racist teaching and learning into everyday practices and policies. The authors' goal in this paper is to provide a timely discussion about the role of university-based funding to address or ignore issues of equality. The authors provide insight into the questions: how are communities of color affected by funding without a focus on anti-racism? And how can we change our grant making processes to make them more equitable? This focus on… [PDF]
(2023). Gatekeeping through Assessment: Understanding a Systemic Problem in the STEM Degree Pipeline. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Iowa State University. This exploratory study aims to contribute to the limited literature regarding the characteristics of STEM gatekeeper courses (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997; Suresh, 2006; Weston et al., 2019; Vyas & Reid, 2023) and their role in student retention and attrition by centering issues of ableism and racism (Annamma et al., 2013). I argue that gatekeeper courses, through their use of high-stakes assessment, reinforce experiences of ableism and racism that depress students' aspirations toward STEM baccalaureate degree attainment (Riegle-Crumb, King, & Irizarry, 2019; Pfeifer et al., 2021; Vyas & Reid, 2023).To better understand how these courses exacerbate systemic ableism and racism, we need to identify the STEM gatekeeper courses, determine commonalities in the courses' student assessment practices, and analyze course outcomes for students with intersectional dis/ability and minoritized racial identities. To do this, I posed the following research questions, given the setting is… [Direct]
(2022). Elementary Pre-Service Teachers' Practice of Racial Literacy: Analysis of Small Stories in Online Critical Inquiry Communities. Teaching Education, v33 n1 p81-101. Despite pedagogical efforts to promote preservice teachers' racial literacy, preservice teachers may resist critical racial pedagogies. Such resistance has serious, detrimental consequences in classrooms populated with students of Color. To study how interracial groups of preservice teachers (PSTs) engage with issues of race outside of their coursework and fieldwork, I investigated preservice teachers' engagement with race in discussing Claudia Rankine's "Citizen" in an informal online space. The preservice teachers were embedded in an urban emergent elementary school in a predominantly African-American community in the Southeastern U.S. I asked: (1) how do PSTs use their racial literacy in an online critical inquiry community? (2) how might we understand the possibilities and constraints of PSTs' practice of racial literacy? I found that some students continued to see issues of race and racism as an intellectual rather than a lived problem. Other students wrestled with… [Direct]