Race And Ethnicity In Education Essay

Race and ethnicity are two topics that can be difficult in secondary education. Many teachers are afraid of the topic and try to stay away it in their classrooms. Fortunately, the area of social science confronts the topic. Race and ethnicity in and of themselves are never negative. It is when one race wants to make another race into the “other” that creates the negative aspects of race relations. Each and every student has a race and an ethnicity and it is something that needs to be celebrated and understood in the classroom. While race and ethnicity can be difficult topics to confront in the classroom, a teacher needs meet these difficulties to create a safe and effective learning environment for their students. Oftentimes teachers want to try and ignore any race or ethnic differences in the classroom, but by ignoring these parts of who our students are we are not teaching students to the best of our abilities. Understanding our students’ ethnicities is important to teaching because it provides a

Statistically many minority students score lower on standardized tests than white students. One of the sad facts about this is that a teacher might pigeon hole a student of color automatically because of the statistics. Gollnick and Chinn (2012) explain how these scores do not accurately determine intelligence by writing, “Standardized test scores can help in determining how assimilated into the dominant culture and how affluent one’s family may be, but they provide less evidence of how intelligent a person is” (p. 68). Standardized tests are geared toward the dominate culture and to base our students intelligence on these tests is foolish. Every student no matter what their ethnicity or race has the right to be taught by their teachers without their teachers preconceived notions of how intelligent they think a particular race or ethnicity might