Racism, Public Schooling, and the Entrenchment of White Supremacy
A Critical Race Ethnography
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Demonstrates how ingrained ideas of race created and sustain the achievement gap in U. S. schools.
Description
The racial achievement gap in U. S. education is a pervasive and consistent problem, an unavoidable fact of public schooling in this country. Because This Is Not for Us is a multi-site critical race ethnography of policy and institutional relationships in an large urban West Coast school district, focused on the practices that created and sustain the achievement gap in that district's schools. In this daring and provocative work, author Sabina Elena Vaught examines how this gap, and the policies and practices that sustain it, is produced and reproduced by structures of racism and race attitudes operative in education. She interweaves numerous interviews with and observations of teachers, principals, students, school board members, community leaders, and others to describe the complex arrangement of racial power in schooling, and concludes that the institutional relationships that create and support policy practices ensure the continued undereducation of Black and Brown youth.
Sabina E. Vaught is Assistant Professor of Urban Education at Tufts University.
Reviews
"Beautifully written and sophisticatedly argued, this book is a must read for anyone interested in race, policy, and schooling. The text is well informed, rigorously researched, complicated in its analysis, and rhetorically deep. Vaught's careful analysis of schooling and its large policy-related issues is masterful; the story she tells is simultaneously heartbreaking and all too familiar. " — Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Arizona State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks
"Sabina Vaught has captured, with poignancy and precision, the complexity of racialized educational inequity. Vaught skillfully draws on CRT to ground her analysis and demonstrates the ways in which racism persists to disenfranchise 'the least of these'—our nation's children. " — Adrienne D. Dixson, coeditor of Critical Race Theory in Education: All God's Children Got a Song
"Vaught addresses the interrelationship of a number of important issues with insight, clarity, personal experience, and a call to (re)commit ourselves to the pursuit of equality and justice for all students. " — Alice McIntyre, author of Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers