Early Childhood Intervention: The Social Science Base of Institutional Racism

Abstract

Joan and Stephen Baratz examine the underlying assumptions of intervention programs that tacitly label Negro behavior as pathological. They suggest that the failure to recognize and utilize existing cultural forms of the lower-class Negro community to teach new skills not only dooms intervention programs such as Head Start to failure, but also constitutes a form of institutional racism. An illustration of a pathological versus cultural interpretation of Negro behavior is presented when the Baratzes contrast the interventionists' statements that describe Negro children as verbally destitute and linguistically underdeveloped with current sociolinguistic data that indicate that Negro children speak a highly developed but different variety of English from that of the mainstream standard. The cultural difference model is presented as a viable alternative to the existing genetic inferiority and social pathology models, both of which share the view of the Negro as a "sick white man."

Print Environments and Experiences Offered to First‐Grade Students in Very Low‐ and Very High‐SES School Districts

“…Following in the tradition of work by scholars such as Baratz and Baratz (1970), Rist (1973), Bowles and Gintis (1976), and more recently Anyon (1981), I considered whether low-SES children's lower levels of literacy achievement may derive, at least in part, from the schools they attend. I asked the question, are there differences in the print environments and THE INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION'S OUTSTANDING DIS-SERTATION AWARD, which has been given yearly since 1964, recognizes exceptional contributions made by doctoral students in reading or related fields.…”

Kurt Lewin and the Origins of Action Research

“…In education these interventions were termed 'compensatory' or 'enrichment'. Although they were prone to justified criticisms then and subsequently (for instance, Baratz & Baratz, 1970;Bernstein, 1970), at least those initiatives went beyond the previously dominant determinist notions that the poor could do little for themselves or were to be blamed for their faults and even made to feel guilty for what was ascribed as their Inadequacies.…”

Social Policies Toward Children of Diverse Ethnic, Racial, and Language Groups in the United States

“…Such critics have considered much of the research on and program design for ethnic-and racial-minority and low-income populations to have a European-derived middle-class bias that prejudices our understanding of those groups. Because those who employ a premise of cultural deficit or pathology, or any other aggressively ethnocentric framework, are predisposed to identify order with conformity to the norms of their own group, they will be unable to find another kind of social organization or cultural pattern in their observations of other ethnic and racial groups (Baratz & Baratz, 1970;Hill, 1972;Laosa, 1981;Nobles, 1978).…”