Multicultural Education, Definitions and Curriculum Standards

Standards

Today's standards movement began in the early 1980s, when governors urged states to construct disciplinary content standards. By the 1990s, most states were designing or beginning to implement testing systems based on content standards. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act mandated that states receiving federal funding implement accountability systems that use standards to assess student learning and to align curriculum accordingly. Because content standards have varied considerably across states, many states are now adopting a national common core of standards.

Setting high standards for student learning has become conflated with curriculum standardization that may conflict with multicultural education, so it is useful to define key concepts. The word standard refers to quality level according to specified criteria. People have long advanced standards as a tool to improve services or outcomes, such as standards for air quality or basic funding for public services. Performance standards specify levels of mastery (e.g., inadequate, proficient, or excellent) of a given body of knowledge or skills. Curriculum content standards specify what students should know, and can range from broad to highly detailed. Standardization is a consequence of standard-setting when attempts to improve student learning become bureaucratized and curriculum is defined in detail and mapped against test batteries students will be given.

Because schools serving students of color, English language learners, or low-income students tend to have lower achievement levels, these are the schools in which curriculum has become the most standardized. It is nevertheless possible to set performance standards without detailed curriculum standards. For example, a standard that fifth graders will be able to compare and contrast narrative structures and treatment of themes in pieces of literature of the same genre leaves considerable space for local decisions about which literature selections to use, how to work with students in the classroom, and even what language of instruction to use.

Definitions of Multicultural Education

The more prescriptive curriculum content standards are, the more difficult it can be to work with multicultural education, depending on how one defines it. Distinctions among definitions of multicultural education by James A. Banks and by Carl Grant and Christine Sleeter are useful here.

Contributions or additive multicultural education adds content to the traditional curriculum where it readily fits to reflect racial, ethnic, gender, [Page 1534]and other forms of diversity. Most current textbooks exemplify additive multicultural education, so many educators assume that contemporary curriculum standards and texts are now sufficiently multicultural and that further attempts to add or celebrate culture reduce time for academic instruction.

Multicultural education viewed as achievement through culture takes curriculum standards as given, adapting pedagogy to build on the knowledge, ways of learning, and culturally appropriate relationships of one's students. When learning is viewed as a sociocultural process, helping students relate new concepts to what they already know through culturally familiar examples, using learning styles and networks of relationships that are familiar and supportive will facilitate achievement.

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