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In an effort to enhance and expand the effectiveness of the Center's 13-year-old tolerance education program, the Center recently partnered with Harvard University's Civil Rights Project in a new research venture.
In late April, the two issued a call for papers to elicit a series of new studies from scholars and educators across the country addressing how to create positive outcomes in interracial classrooms.
The research will focus on identifying and understanding the factors necessary to create multiracial schools that meet the needs of children today and in the future.
Racial diversity increasing
The new study comes at a critical time. Public school enrollment at the beginning of the 21st century is more racially diverse than ever before. Current research shows that white students comprise only 60 percent of that enrollment, compared with 80 percent during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s.
In only a few decades, fewer than half the students in our nation's public schools will be white, a trend that is occurring especially rapidly in the West and the South.
But teachers are often unequipped to be effective in their changing classrooms. According to a National Center for Education Statistics survey of teachers in 2000, only 32 percent of those sampled indicated they were very well prepared to teach in diverse setting.
Research shows that teachers who view cultural differences as problems to be remedied will generally not make accurate assessments of children's strengths and limitations. An attitude that presumes children of color suffer automatic deficits invariably leads teachers to emphasize what students cannot do, rather than what they are capable of doing.
The new study will help school districts understand how to productively address the educational, social and personal issues that occur in schools undergoing racial transformations. Its results will also help the Center develop innovative new programming for classroom teachers.
"For the two decades following the Brown vs. Board decision, there was an emphasis on social science research about equity in education," said Jennifer Holladay, interim director of the Center's education programs, "That research died off as integration lost much of the public's focus.
"The call to papers project we've initiated with Harvard is a first step in reinvigorating that field of research — a field that obviously has direct relevance to our programming."
SPLC Report
June 2004
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