A Brief History Of Multicultural Education: Critical Analysis

The challenge of improving academic achievement among all students of color has become a trending topic in education. The “achievement gap” has grown wider among students of color versus Caucasian students every year. Through the years, our classrooms have been through a lot of cultural changes. “As the United States endures its largest influx of immigrants, along with the increasing number of U.S.- born ethnic minorities, the nation must be prepared to make the necessary adjustments to face the changing ethnic texture of its citizens” (Howard, 2003)(Banks, 2001). There isn't one race or type of student/culture per a classroom. Educators, especially in urban areas, are faced with multiple cultures and races within their classroom. Instructors

The historical roots of multicultural education trace back to the social action of African Americans and other people of color raised against discrimination within public institutions. Educational institutes were the most oppressive. Many people called for curricular reform within the institutes. The author suggests through the multicultural education reform there was a movement for women reform as well. Inequities were starting to rear in both color and gender. The author suggests there was slight progress by groups of color and gender. Through the 1970s organized reform for sociopolitical and human rights emerged. With the reform brought on policies and addition to the traditional curriculum. Through the reforms in the years to come, the gap began to grow. The author discusses from the middle to late 1980s other education leaders provided “more scholarship in multicultural education, developing new, deeper frameworks that were grounded in the ideal of equal educational opportunity and the connection between school transformation and social change” (Gorski,

The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy analyzed the discussion of the pedagogy of teaching and best practice. But the author, Ladson-Billings, adds a twist by stating yes these are good practices for education, but the idea of culturally relevant education. The author starts the article off by providing the reader with background information linking school and culture. Then the author discusses how culturally relevant pedagogy is defined in her study. “Culturally relevant pedagogy rests on three criteria or propositions: students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order” (Ladson-Billings, 1995). The basis of the author's study is that the teachers demanded, enforced and accepted nothing, but academic success from their students. The teachers in the study made academic success an absolute must in their classroom. The author describes how a teacher allows “code-switching” in her classroom to achieve academic success. Students in her class were allowed to speak in their cultural dialect but had to translate their culture dialect to academic language by the end of the year. Another piece of the study was the idea of teachers teaching their students to engage in the world critically. They were instructed to not take the outdated textbooks as the single