Abstract: Building on the careful racial analyses of Charles W. Mills, this article uses the example case of Black ethnics to illustrate the general plausibility of ethnic identity as a useful political analytic category, suggesting that the absence of ethnic identity in racial analyses mutes important aspects of the lived experiences of racialized persons as individuals and in aggregation. The article establishes the possibility of ethnicity as an identity modifier, providing additional specificity to racial identity narratives. Building on these positions, the article turns to educational contexts to explore the ways in which ethnicity (as introduced in the preceding sections) stands to offer additional specificity to justice-oriented analyses of educational policy and practice.
Abstract: Rule violations are expected in schools, and assessments of the severity of those violations and the appropriate disciplinary responses are a significant aspect of educators’ responsibilities. While most educators and policy makers reject rule violation as a permissible behavior in schools, is such a categorical rejection always a suitable response, and are there circumstances that might merit an alternative response? In this article, A. C. Nikolaidis and Winston C. Thompson argue that under unjust circumstances, noncompliance with school rules may be permissible and even desirable. Building on a contractual framework placing systemic injustice at the center of inquiry, they show that under unjust conditions schools forfeit their ability to hold students accountable for role-dependent violations.
Abstract: In the present unjust context of US schools, many educators face uncertainty about the legitimacy of their issuing punishments, especially when their identity meaningfully differs from that of their students. In this article, we address these doubts by acknowledging distinctive elements of schools to provide helpful distinctions and analyses of the legitimacy of punishments within them. Specifically, we interrogate the role that identity categories such as race and gender play in establishing legitimate punishment within schools, with a particular focus on the case of Black girls attending US schools. We offer a taxonomy of legitimate responses to undesired student behavior, arguing that a particular person in their role within a school might lack legitimacy to punish based upon their identity even while other, related yet more nuanced, behavioral responses remain. In this work, we aim to equip educators with tools to better navigate the options available to them and better understand the significance of their actions in response to student behavior.
Abstract: In this article, we explore the interrelated phenomena of teachers’ paternalistic aims and their misattributions of the agency of their students within particular schooling contexts of systemic racial injustice in the United States. We argue that, because teachers in these contexts assess agency in patterned, predictable ways that stem from – and reify – preexisting unjust patterns of oppression, teachers are unreliable evaluators of the conditions necessary for just punishment. To build this argument, we explore a complex case in which authorities regularly fail to meet these conditions: the punishment of Black girls in low-income, urban, predominantly non-White primary and secondary schools in the United States. Through our analysis, we offer a new concept, excess agency misattribution, which raises serious questions about subjective justifications for punishment in contexts of entrenched injustice. By delineating how the perceptions of teachers influence both the putative justifying aims and targeted recipients of punishment, we demonstrate how the existing terrain of school punishment practices ought to affect our normative reasoning about the fairness of punishment in these contexts.
Abstract: In this paper, Thompson engages the fact that educators perceive themselves to be faced with an apparent dilemma regarding racial identity education. On one hand, their political obligations may incline them to teach racial identity so as to avoid reifying the reality of a racialized system of power. On the other hand, honoring their epistemic obligations to accurately represent the realities of the world may incline them to teach racial identity in a less consequentialist manner, prioritising the goal that students do not suffer hermeneutical injustices as they grapple with racial identities/consequences. Thompson argues that these seemingly opposed obligations can be united, by attending to their underlying claims. In closing, Thompson provides an example of an educational event that coheres with these conclusions.
Abstract: In an attempt to understand widespread school failure among children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, dominant discourse points to pervasive deficit ideologies that blame a student’s family structure, cultural and linguistic background, and community (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Valencia, 2010; Weiner, 2006). By accepting such a simplistic explanation of blaming the child for a lack of successi without examining systemic inequities, deficit thinkers ignore real and complex issues of structural inequity. We agree with Pearl (1997) who argues that deficit thinking ignores “external forces— [i.e.], the complex makeup of macro- and micro-level mechanisms that help structure schools as inequitable and exclusionary institutions” (p. 151). Systemic inequities in the U.S. have manifested themselves in a variety of ways— for example, in matters of racial profiling and restrictive housing contracts for people of color. In schools, practices such as academic tracking, disproportionate funding, and the overrepresentation of Black and Latino children in punitive school disciplinary procedures contribute to the maintenance of structural racial inequality and social reproduction (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Kozol, 2005; Oakes, 2005). In reference to these and similar trends, researchers argue that children of color are not dropping out of school; rather, they are being pushed out through the presence of a school-to-prison pipeline that criminalizes Black males in particular—and prepares them for incarceration (Ferguson 2000; Wald & Losen, 2006). Viewing students as summarily deficient has long been deeply embedded in the culture of urban and low-income schools.
Abstract: In this essay, Winston C. Thompson questions the rigidity of the boundary between ideal and nonideal theory, suggesting a porosity that allows elements of both to be brought to bear upon educational issues in singularly incisive ways. In the service of this goal, Thompson challenges and extends John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, bringing it to bear upon education in our imperfect world. By showing that this representative work of ideal theory can be meaningfully supplemented and applied to the nonideal fact of race, this essay suggests that recognition of nonideal circumstances and theorizing need not void ideal theory's value to philosophy of education. Instead, the field can engage both ideal and nonideal theory on previously unavailable questions and dimensions of educational justice toward productive ends.
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