Multicultural Education

Early Years

Multicultural education arose as the historical legacy of the movement that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka verdict. This case helped make public the inequities and inequality of the nation's school systems and society in general during the Jim Crow era. The process of integrating the nation's schools created a demand that teachers already in the field, as well as those in teacher preparation programs, think about and develop skills to address the needs of racially and ethnically different students.

Energized by President Lyndon Johnson's “war on poverty,” the Congress passed legislation for programs such as Head Start, which began to address the needs of minority and low-income children. The release of the Coleman Report in 1967 significantly helped multicultural education reformers to address greater equity and equality and led to legislation such as Public Law 94-142, which expanded these concerns to include gay and lesbian people as well as students with disabilities.

Creating an Academic Discipline

The role of James Banks in this movement has been substantial. His Teaching Ethnic Studies, now in its eighth edition, is one of the most respected books in the field. With his wife, Cherry McGee Banks, he has authored numerous other publications, but none more important than the seminal 1999 anthology, Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. The contributors to this text represent a “who's who” in the field and establish multicultural education as a significant discipline in education. The Bankses called upon scholars, including Amado Padilla, Shirley Brice Heath, and Carl Grant, to establish a research agenda. Carlos Cortes and Beverly Gordon laid the foundation for a construction of knowledge theory, while Sonia Nieto, Carol D. Lee, and Valerie Ooka Payne contributed chapters on specific ethnicities. The handbook took a stand on the achievement gap, with chapters by Linda Darling Hammond and John Ogbu, and on higher education, with work by Christine Bennett and Gloria Ladson-Billings. The handbook concluded with sections on intergroup education and with international perspectives on multicultural education, by Janet Ward Schofield, Robert Slavin, and Derald Wing Sue.

In addition to his publications, Banks helped establish the Center for Multicultural Education in the College of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. The center has been able to attract some of the top scholars in the field, including Geneva Gay and Johnnella Butler. James Banks's ascension to the presidency of the American Educational Research Association was equally significant. This distinction, [Page 915]in essence, recognized the importance of his work in multicultural education as well as the movement that he helped to establish.

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