White privilege bolstered by teaching math

[Dill]

(10-27-2017, 04:30 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I'm curious. Has anyone expressing an opinion, negative or positive, about Dr. Gutierrez' statements read the entirety of them in context? Have you read the supporting documentation and statistical information, if it exists? Can you explain your reasoning for agreeing or disagreeing with her statements in a manner that displays an understanding of the base sociological and anthropological concepts used to make these assertions?

I have not read Guitierrez newly published article, but the statements are pretty clearly an extension/repackaging of other work she has done. Funny this is presented as something new as she has been publishing and researching on these matters for well over a decade. I'll take a stab at "displaying" my understanding of the base sociological and anthropological concepts etc.  In my view her work fits in with the larger global project of resistance to neoliberalism, and not only in education.
 
Just limiting myself to US educators for the moment, across many fields they are concerned about how their disciplines are being shaped by forces external to schools and universities, especially government and what I will loosely call "market forces."

For most of those external forces--the ones with real power--knowledge is merely a value-neutral, instrumental means to an end, amenable to quantitative testing.  Social/Democratic/critical educational goals beyond vocational training are suspect or clash outright with the values of those who see themselves as the real "endusers" of public education--corporate employers.

Guitierrez is a university researcher who has traveled around the country researching schools and school programs in which traditionally underachieving populations have outperformed their peers. Her work is partly motivated by the numerous instances such model programs, rather than being studied and replicated, have been dismantled to conform with externally imposed testing/curricular standards.

Identity and power concerns enter this picture at several levels.  People's identities are constructed across time and multiple sites (e.g., home and family, church, workplace, the military), and the classroom is one of those sites. So how knowledge is presented to students, especially young ones, and how they perceive/receive it is critical. They may come to see that knowledge as remote from them (and people like them) or they may come to see it as pleasurable, mind-expanding, and full of opportunity. Hence the attention of educators like Gutierrez to student perceptions of knowledge as racialized (for "them", not me). There is understandable fear the testing regime is erasing recent progress in reducing education gaps in traditionally lower achieving demographics--progress made possible by educational materials tailored-for and addressed specifically to those groups--via standardization of subjects like math.

Guitierrez' perspective on math instruction also recognizes that the supposed neutrality of knowledge subjects often hides their interested deployment in actual institutions.  ("Disinterested" science research, for example, begins to take very interesting directions once public funding is replaced by corporate.) Gutierrez also mentions the imbalance in grants slanted towards math and math based subjects; one of those points where private interests powerfully shape publicly funded education. She is a researcher who questions this imbalance--others prefer the imbalance continue on as normal and unremarked. They want her to shut up.

Race also figures into assumptions of knowledge "neutrality," if one accepts that social background plays a role in receptivity to current public education, especially math education, and one accepts that some groups come from more educationally disadvantaged backgrounds than others, and further, that those backgrounds are embedded in a long history of racial and economic inequality. If you grant all that, then embedding math education in a larger social and historical context--i.e., beyond a history of largely white achievement--makes sense. Of course, it is very hard to do that without stepping on toes.

I have more to say but I am late for dinner.  Again, thanks to Vlad for posting the FOX version of Guitierrez's work. Maybe some substantive discussion can come of it if people adhere to forum standards of civility.