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Multicultural Education
Multicultural education is defined by James A. Banks as an idea or concept, a process, and an educational reform movement that assumes that all students—regardless of their gender, social class, and their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds—should have an equal opportunity to learn in school. U.S. schools are increasingly more diverse than they were before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954. African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American, and Native American students make up 42% of the national public school population. African American students constitute a majority of the school population in several of the 20 largest urban school districts in the country.
Yet school children from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds continue to experience unequal educational opportunities. The racial achievement gap between White students and African American students has remained stagnant. The average 12th-grade, low-income student from an underrepresented group reads at the same level as the average eighth-grade, middle-class White student. African American scholars, educators, and parents have called for educational opportunities that are multicultural and equitable and incorporate culturally responsive curriculum and instructional methods, equitable assessment practices, and organizational structures that promote interaction across racial and ethnic lines and facilitate academic achievement for all students. This entry looks at how that idea evolved, how multicultural education works, what its critics have to say, and how it may develop in coming years.
Historical Development
When several urban school districts enacted policies to promote racial and ethnic diversity in the years before, during, and immediately after World War II, their efforts were known as “intercultural education.” Intercultural advocates in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit produced curriculum materials on African American history and race relations and designed professional development programs and college courses to promote cultural pluralism and improve human relations.
In some city neighborhoods, such as Harlem, New York, and the Hill District in Pittsburgh, intercultural education was also linked with activism by African American parents and community organizations to hire more African American teachers, promote African American history and culture, and improve race relations through radio programs, films, art exhibits, and children's literature. Characterized as “educating for democracy” during the war years, intercultural efforts contrasted the stated democratic ideals in the U.S. Of freedom and equality of opportunity with the historical reality of ongoing discrimination for marginalized groups. These curriculum and staff development efforts were largely halted during the Cold War era, when intercultural courses were criticized as “subversive and un-American,” and several teacher union leaders who promoted intercultural education were subject to “Red-baiting.”
By the late 1960s, African American Studies programs sprang up in colleges and universities, and African American literature and African American history courses were instituted in selected high schools across the country. Community and parent activists from Los Angeles to Brooklyn demanded more control over the content of the curriculum, more African American and Latino teachers and administrators, and more decision-making powers on local school boards.
Models and Approaches to Multicultural Education
By the 1970s, African American scholars such as James A. Banks, Carl Grant, and Geneva Gay began to develop sophisticated models to explain how multicultural education might transform K–12 school systems. Banks's conceptual model of multicultural education includes five interrelated
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