Abstract
This paper sets two metaphors for change within educational research against each other. The first, colorblindness, is related to racial equity, specifically the policies and pedagogies that claim to foster equitable outcomes for racialized students. Scholars, especially those with commitments to critical race theory, have used this metaphor to define a conceptual spectrum bounded by race-neutral and race-conscious education policies. By plotting specific policies along this spectrum, scholars have historicized claims to colorblindness in an effort to better understand racial (in-)equity at and through school. This paper extends that metaphor to introduce the notion of tone-deafness. Similar to colorblindness, tone-deafness foregrounds the question as to whether a given education policy is language-neutral or language-conscious. This paper explores tone-deafness in two ways. First, and similar to colorblindness, the metaphor helps to historicize the development of language education policy, and to understand the sharp contradictions of contemporary education policies that are formally language-neutral and yet negatively affect speakers of minoritized languages. Second, the paper uses the notion of tone-deafness to analyze contemporary educational research on English language education.
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Notes
- 1.
This term often invokes images of Klansmen or neo-Nazis in the United States . However, I follow Fields and Fields (2014) in seeing no meaningful distinction between white supremacists who wear hoods and those who wear judges’ robes or academics’ spectacles.
- 2.
One effort, namely angry white mobs harassing and threatening Black youth as they tried to enter formally desegregated schools, produced some of the key images associated with the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. Other efforts, such as shutting down entire public school systems to evade desegregation orders, are less widely known.
- 3.
Charter school laws vary from state to state, so defining them can be difficult. In almost every case, however, charter schools receive public funding but are exempt from public oversight. Instead, charters are privately managed, whether by a for-profit corporation or a board of directors separate from the public system. Moreover, charters are typically exempt from catchment policies, meaning that children living in the neighbourhood around a given charter school do not have the right to attend it as they do with a public school. The largest charter school operators in the United States are managed by for-profit corporations such as Leona Group and Mosaica. In almost every case, charter schools are non-union workplaces.
- 4.
In fact, it was this single provision that helped generate so much support for NCLB among mainstream Civil Rights organizations when it was first proposed. The logic was that by ‘shining a light’ on test scores according to students’ race and/or ethnicity, it would become clear how poorly schools were serving students of colour. Disaggregated test scores would thus pressure schools to do better or face the consequences. Note that, almost 15 years later, many of the same Civil Rights organizations have recently called on the Obama administration to end the very testing practices they lent their support to in 2000 and 2001 (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/28/eleven-civil-rights-groups-urge-obama-to-drop-test-based-k-12-accountability-system/). One noticeable absence from the list of organizations reported in the news article linked here is the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a leading Latino civil rights organization. NCLR, in fact, is a sponsoring partner of the Understanding Language project described later in the paper that is working to make the new Common Core State Standards effective for English learners.
- 5.
There is a parallel set of standards for science education, called the Next Generation Science Standards, which I do not address in this chapter.
- 6.
Some conservative political resistance to CCSS has persuaded several states, as of this writing, to rethink or entirely abandon the CCSS project. In other words, the adoption process is still fluid and contested.
- 7.
My assumption is that this exclamation is a play on a now infamous factoid from the 1992 presidential race, in which a Clinton advisor refocused the campaign on one sole topic to garner votes: “it’s the economy, stupid!”.
- 8.
Indeed, Hakuta (2011a) is the print version of a lecture he gave as part of the Brown series held at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association.
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Bale, J. (2016). “It’s the language, stupid!” Colorblind and Tone-Deaf as Discourses of Change in Educational Research. In: Smeyers, P., Depaepe, M. (eds) Educational Research: Discourses of Change and Changes of Discourse. Educational Research, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30456-4_13
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