While organizing efforts by movements such as Black Lives Matter and responses to the hate-filled policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump are heightening public discourse of racism, much less attention is paid to mechanisms of racial oppression in the field of education. Instead, conceptualizations that allude to racial difference but are disconnected from structural analyses continue to prevail in K–12 education research. In this chapter, our goal is to challenge racism-neutral and racism-evasive approaches to studying racial disparities by centering current research that makes visible the normalized facets of racism in K–12 schools. After narrowing over 4,000 articles that study racial inequity in education research, we reviewed a total of 186 U.S.-focused research studies in a K–12 school context that examine racism. As we categorized the literature, we built on a theory of the “new racism”—a more covert and hidden racism than that of the past—and grouped the articles into two main sections: (1) research that brings to light racism’s permanence and significance in the lives of students of Color through manifestations of what we conceptualize as (a) evaded racism, (b) “antiracist” racism, and (c) everyday racism and (2) research focused on confronting racism through racial literacy and the resistance of communities of Color. In our conclusion, we articulate suggestions for future directions in education research that include a more direct acknowledgement of racism as we attend to the experiences and needs of K–12 students of Color.
For decades, research has shown the pervasive racism of teacher education and its harmful impact on teacher candidates of Color. In this conceptual article, we argue that teacher education programs must interrogate how racism is embedded structurally through policies and practices that guide the various facets of the institution. We build from higher education scholarship on racial climate and “health” and teacher education research on race and racism to explore how multiple dimensions of a teacher education program (historical, organizational, compositional, behavioral, and psychological) accumulate and shape the experiences and well-being of teacher candidates of Color. We offer a model to assist teacher education scholars, administrators, and practitioners to reflect upon their current structures as they strive for a healthy racial climate responsive to the experiences and needs of a diverse teaching force.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.