Subtractive Education

Subtractive education refers to curriculum policies, processes, or practices that remove students' culture or language from classroom contexts as a resource for learning or as a source of personal affirmation. Subtractive education assumes that students' academic successes depend on the degree to which they give up their own cultures or linguistic practices or traditions to assimilate into mainstream culture, a process often referred to as “Americanization” in the United States.

In her landmark book, Subtractive Schooling, Angela Valenzuela demonstrated that academic achievement is a social process that emerges through the lived experiences of students as they negotiate the numerous social, cultural, historical, and linguistic relationships that define their lives both in and out of school. Increasingly, public school curricula are organized in ways that systematically remove, or subtract, from the classroom context cultural resources for historically marginalized youth. The phenomenon of subtractive education leaves these students progressively vulnerable to academic failure because it denies them important social and cultural capital that [Page 826]might otherwise assist them in establishing connections between themselves, curriculum content, and academic achievement. Thus, “the problem” of academic achievement among historically marginalized students can be found not with students, but with curriculum policies and practices that by design are intended to erase students' culture.

One curriculum policy that has been widely associated with subtractive education practices includes external, high-stakes, standardized testing programs. Educational researchers who have focused their investigations on the effects of external testing systems on historically marginalized racial, cultural, or linguistic student groups have documented clearly the ways that such testing programs stand in stark contrast with cultural practices and even ways of understanding or gaining knowledge. Although judgments about historically marginalized students' academic abilities or potential are made based on low test scores, many curriculum scholars have concluded that these scores merely reveal the degree to which these students have given up their own cultures and transitioned into mainstream, English-speaking, White culture. Other subtractive curriculum policies include English immersion, or English-only policies, as curriculum moves away from multicultural education toward canonical-focused curricula.

In contrast to culturally subtractive curriculum policies, culturally additive curriculum policies equalize educational opportunities by helping historically culturally or linguistically marginalized students to assimilate into the larger society through bi- or multicultural cultural processes. Through additive schooling policies, students do not have to choose between being, for example, Mexican or American; instead, they can be both. Whereas in a subtractive school setting, a student's home culture and home language are viewed as deficits, or impediments to academic success, in additive educational settings, home culture and language are assets.