REACH Center

History and Purpose

The REACH Center began in 1978 as an outgrowth of both the civil rights movement and the emerging field of multicultural education. In a rural and predominantly White school district in Washington state, a small team of middle school teachers, with the leadership of Gary Howard, sought to answer a set of challenging questions: How can the vision and lessons of the civil rights movement be applied in a White rural setting? How can students who in many cases are growing up with racism as a family value, come to understand and value racial and ethnic diversity? How can a curriculum steeped in White and Western perspectives be transformed to reflect the broad range of human and historical realities?

The REACH Center was created in the confluence of federal education policy, multicultural theory, and personal history. After his student years in New Haven, Connecticut, where Howard had been active in civil rights organizing and work with Black and Latino urban youth, he joined the federal Teacher Corps program in his home state of Washington. Teacher Corps was a strategic effort to change public education from the inside by recruiting cadres of social justice advocates, empowering them with teaching credentials and transformative skills, and placing them in high poverty or racially diverse school systems. A central component of the Teacher Corps teacher training process was an intensive immersion in the theory and practice of multicultural education, inspired by the work of Carl Grant, James A. Banks, and other founders of the multicultural movement. Through his Teacher Corps involvement, Howard discovered that the emerging field of multicultural education provided the practical link between his student engagement in the civil [Page 1769]rights movement and his career goal to teach for racial justice and social change.

The funding base for the early development and eventual dissemination of REACH programs came from three federal sources: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title IV-C grants supporting the creation of innovative ideas in public education, the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program funding work in the arena of cultural diversity, and the National Diffusion Network providing resources and a process for sharing proven educational practices with schools throughout the United States. With the support of these federal initiatives, along with more than a million dollars of private donations, the REACH Center was able, during its first three decades of work, to produce and share multicultural curriculum programs and professional development practices with school districts, universities, and community organizations throughout the United States and internationally. During that time, the work of REACH expanded beyond its rural White roots in Arlington, Washington, and gained footing in suburban and urban settings with much greater diversity of racial, ethnic, and cultural populations.

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