Designed & Powered by MediaTek_

Not surprisingly, a fear of multiculturalism is inextricably linked to a fear of Black identity (and other minority identities) within an integrated America. Just as Blacks are expected to accommodate to White institutions, rather than vice versa, the integration of African American history within the broader national account must adapt to the traditional narratives of freedom and democracy if it is to be widely disseminated. But because the reality of African American history is not consistent with the rhetoric of freedom and democracy (nor is most social historical scholarship), multiculturalism is feared and countered on many levels, including standardized testing that does not include multiculturalism. For example, on a somewhat superficial level, a young student in Virginia learned the hard way about the perils of multiculturalism. He was forced to ditch a project that he worked very hard to complete on African American explorer Matthew Henson and was told instead to research Christopher Columbus because Columbus, not Henson, was included in the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exam. The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System's 10th-grade history and social sciences test is representative of knowledge that negates multiculturalism: of fifty-seven questions total, forty asked about European history, five about capitalism, and the remaining twelve dealt with the rest of the world. In the words of one Massachusetts teacher, "We work so hard at teaching our students useful information and critical thinking skills and then we give them a test that tells them their people are nothing. It's crushing!" The axiomatic logic of capitalism- and of American (White) identity-thus represses the challenge to it represented by multiculturalism.⁴⁵

Toward a More Just Standard

Although some experts concerned with Black educational achievement support standardized testing reforms because, as with earlier possibly liberating trends, "African American students have the most to gain," these reforms by themselves are unjust. Yes, African Americans theoretically have the most to gain by submitting to these tests. However, the standardized tests do not ensure equality of opportunity; in fact, Blacks are losing rather than gaining ground as a result of standardized testing reform. High-stakes testing levies sanctions against the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of educational inequalities. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the current standardized testing reforms have resulted in increased minority dropout rates, and nine of the ten states with the highest dropout rates use standardized testing in decisions concerning graduation. Furthermore, according to Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, schools that serve large numbers of Black students are the least likely to be able to meet the new standards, due to lower funding, a lack of courses, fewer resources, and a deficient number of good, qualified teachers. Scholar and education activist Asa Hilliard wrote, "If you want elephants to grow, you don't weigh the elephants. You feed the elephants."⁴⁶

In 1992, the National Council on Education Standards and Testing issued a report entitled Rising Standards for American Education. This report argued for standardized testing, but acknowledged that such a program would result in further disparities if not supplemented by policies ensuring equal access to resources. It outlined a strategy: school equity reform should predate any implementation of high-stakes standardized testing. If standardized testing is to have an egalitarian impact, it should not be utilized as a sorting and labeling mechanism. Instead, coupled with reforms that seek equal resource allocation across race, class, and regional barriers, it should be used as a device for identifying student strengths and needs in order to enhance educational opportunities where enhancement is required. These would be reform measures worth supporting.⁴⁷

In America, quality education costs money-a lot of money. All children deserve an equal opportunity to acquire a decent education, and since this is costly, hard choices need to be made, including a massive reallocation of resources. It is strange that Americans rarely support increased educational funding due to concerns that an inefficient bureaucracy is misspending their tax money, when at the same time military budgets are never constrained according to this logic. Sometimes very expensive bombs miss their intended targets too, yet we fund for the construction of more than enough bombs so that all targets will be destroyed. Educational funding should function according to similar reasoning, as ensuring increased and egalitarian educational funding is a necessary pursuit. However, knowing the historical forces driving education reform in America, such egal- itarian financial measures seem removed from reality. But, despite this pessimistic outlook, some liberating opportunities do exist.

With the disappearance of civil society, education bureaucracies are slowly suffering from increased tensions, and teachers are leveraging more power in their professional lives. In locations where the disciplinary structures are disappearing, there are momentary opportunities for liberating action. In 1987, the teachers in Rochester won a collective agreement for more control over their profession. Although this does not ensure revolutionary change, or even minimal change, a local group of teachers is much more likely than stifling bureaucrats-beholden to a corporate and government elite-to allow their profession to evolve critically and demo- cratically. If nothing else, and this should not be glossed over, empowered teachers are more inclined to further the necessary multicultural curriculum and fend off the powerful constituents who continue to attempt to derail multiculturalism.⁴⁸

In the current framework, there is at least some room for teachers interested in social justice. The dialectical nature of education implies both the reproduction of the dominant ideology and its unmasking. In this regard, standardized testing inevitably generates tough, critical questions and conflicts about social issues. Yes, standardized testing is a form of social production that reproduces a capitalist society, entrenching inequality; yes, American standardized testing is adherent to the peculiar and nefarious American cultural construction of race. However, standardized testing is also a naked representation of knowledge deemed official. Teachers trained in critical pedagogy, armed with documentation of official knowledge, surely can divert the axiomatic logic of capitalism and do some damage of their own. In the words of Foucault, "the will to knowledge is simultaneously part of the danger and a tool to combat that danger." Black female educators Anna Julia Cooper and Fanny Jackson Coppin exemplified how teachers could achieve some measure of justice for their students by both working within and countering the dominant paradigm.⁴⁹

Countering the Dominant Paradigm: Anna Julia Cooper and Fanny Jackson Coppin

Many early educators interested in social justice for peripheral students were Black women-women who represented a Black female identity endeavoring to leap the barrier that inhibited inclusion within American identity. For, although Black women suffered the double burden of race and gender oppression, and often also class oppression, education (and thus standardization) was theoretically, and in rare moments practically, liberating. Among Black women, only those who were educated were taken seriously, even within the Black community. Being taken seriously, though, allowed them the authority to be teachers and reformers, or, as they were often called, "racial uplifters." However, dialectically, education was also constraining for Black women, for it also required their adherence to a certain standard. A columnist for the Washington Bee, a Black newspaper, exemplified this thinking in 1891:

Once upon a time most people were of the opinion, except if a woman was a schoolteacher or employed in government service, she was lost to civilization. I think they are learning some sense and have begun to realize that there are as many cultivated ladies outside of government employment as there are in.⁵⁰

Anna Julia Cooper, Black feminist educator, displayed an understanding of education that transcended the Washington-Du Bois false dichotomy (as previously described), and thus also understood how Blacks were identified according to where they stood in relation to national norms. Cooper's conceptualization of education was much more universal, in terms of class, race, and gender, and her universality was an attempt to redefine and expand American identity. She understood the rhetoric of freedom in America, and sought to test its possibilities and its limits. She wrote: "There can be no doubt that here in America is the arena in which the next triumph of civilization is to be won; and here too we find promise abundant and possibilities infinite." But, in Cooper's eyes, any such "triumph" demanded an expansion of American identity. Cooper lived and struggled for a much more inclusive integration than definitions of integration standardized according to (White) American identity.⁵¹

This inclusive integration was dependent on the role of Black female educators like herself. Cooper taught at M Street High School in Washington, D.C., then a school for African American students, for more than forty years. It was as the M Street principal that she was victimized by the Washington-Du Bois paradigmatic "either-or" of Black education. Cooper was more apt to support Du Bois's liberal curriculum, as she taught classics, language, history, and science. Later in life, at 66, exemplifying her lifelong commitment to scholarship, she received her doctorate from the Sorbonne, writing a thesis on French attitudes toward slavery during the French Revolution. As the M Street principal between 1901 and 1906 she pursued a strategy similar to Du Bois's "talented tenth" and it paid dividends for her students. In those five years many young M Street graduates were accepted at some of America's most elite universities, including Harvard, a huge accomplishment considering the ubiquitous absence of Blacks on these campuses of privilege at that time.⁵²

In 1906, Anna Julia Cooper was fired from her position as M Street principal due to the influence of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Machine. Washington and the "machine" targeted her for her opposition to the view that industrial education was the sole (or even best) channel for racial uplift. Beyond appearing to take the wrong side of the Washington-Du Bois false dichotomy, Cooper was condemned because she was too successful as a Black educator and integrator. There were reasons why Washington and the Tuskegee Machine wielded so much power, not the least of which was its adherence to the dominant, White standard. White members of the D.C. board of education, likely devoted to their racist assumptions of integration (or segregation), allied with Washington and Tuskegee to sabotage Cooper's reputation and force her out as principal. After teaching in Missouri for five years, she returned to teach at M Street in 1911 until her 1930 retirement, but she was never again the principal. Cooper did not adhere to the racist, White standard of how and why Blacks should be educated. She believed in, and worked for, an expanded form of integration that would allow Blacks to not only attend Harvard, but help shape American identity.⁵³

Although Cooper was, conjecturally, victimized for her Du Bois-like stance on Black education, ironically she supported industrial education at M Street for some students, and she was not explicitly aligned with Du Bois when she was fired in 1906. Her philosophy of education could be much more closely categorized alongside the later, mature Du Bois who understood that his struggle with Booker T. Washington was one of power, not ideology. The Washington-Du Bois opposition was concerned with the questions of 1) what class gains could be obtained through higher education, and 2) how these class gains could be made. Here lies the contradiction: although Washington and Tuskegee supported a philosophy of education that served poor African Americans, he and those he surrounded himself with enjoyed class privilege inherent in their affiliation with White standards. Contrarily, Du Bois and Cooper believed in what was considered an elitist philosophy and yet they were personally economically marginalized for their lack of adherence to the national master narrative. But even more importantly, Cooper would not let her actions be constrained by the false dichotomy of her male counterparts, and she spent much of her life serving the poor. Later in life, reflecting on the M Street controversy, she wrote (referring to herself in the third person):

The most significant fact, perhaps, in Mrs. Cooper's contributions to education in Washington and certainly the most directly provocative of the cause of her own segregated group is the courageous revolt she waged against a lower "colored" curriculum for M Street school.⁵⁴

After her retirement from M Street, Anna Julia Cooper was president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C., a school that served the Black working poor, until she was almost 90. She sought to unite the goals of an academic curriculum with those of industrial education through her work there, educating domestic workers. Speaking on education in the 1930s, she theorized that the salvation of Blacks was every bit as dependent on the education of the "submerged tenth" as on that of the "talented tenth." She sought a dialectical approach to racial uplift that included educating both downtrodden and privileged Blacks, and she theorized that the downtrodden required both industrial education for economic survival and a liberal academic curriculum to serve their "mind, body, and spirit." She said, "The only sane education, therefore, is that which conserves the very lowest stratum. and (through education) creates a beneficent force in the service of the world." She continued:

We must insist on those studies which are calculated to train our people to think, which will give them the power of appreciation and righteousness [while at the same time giving] the one line of training necessary for the occupation or trade of the individual.⁵⁵