Education scholars argue that the term "achievement gap" promotes deficit orientations toward certain students of color, focuses the field on individualistic rather than structural sources of inequality, and narrows viable policy solutions for equity concerns. Using a randomized survey, I examine whether the term "racial opportunity…

The racial "mismatch" between a non-White student public school population and a primarily White teaching force continues to be underexamined through an appropriate cultural lens. This literature review provides examples of how White teachers must properly recognize non-White students' actions and rhetoric in classroom settings as…

Globally, over the last two decades, attention to culturally responsive, multicultural approaches to teaching have largely been supplanted by standardized curricula and pedagogy that derive from neoliberal business models of school reform. In this essay, I discuss three factors that contribute to the marginalization of culturally responsive…

This article interrogates the construction of ethnoracial categories in everyday classroom life and how ethnoracial classroom dynamics contribute to larger patterns of inequality in achievement and unequal college futures for minorities. The study compares one urban and two suburban schools. Drawing on observation data from six classes and 57…