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162 Critical Race Theory in Education
Kelly, Deirdre M. and Shauna Pomerantz. Mean, Wild,
and Alienated: Girls and the State of Feminism in
Popular Culture. Girlhood Studies, v.2/1 (2009).
Kress, Gunther, et al. Multimodal Teaching and Learning:
The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom. London:
Continuum, 2001.
Martin, J. Positive Discourse Analysis: Power, Solidarity
and Change. Journal of English Studies, v.4/14 (2006).
Van Dijk, Teun, ed., Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Vol. 4.
New York: Academic Press, 1985.
Woodside-Jiron, Haley. Language, Power, and
Participation. In An Introduction to Critical Discourse
Analysis in Education, R. Rogers, ed. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
Critical Race Theory
in Education
Critical race theory (CRT) focuses on a critical exami-
nation and analysis of race, law and power. CRTs two
main premises include (1) that white supremacy and
whiteness as property are foundational to U.S. legal
practices and the system itself and (2) that the notion
of colorblindness is counterproductive to achieving
racial emancipation. CRT contends that racism is
engrained in the fabric of American society, empha-
sizing institutional racism rather than individual rac-
ism. White privilege, according to CRT, perpetuates
the marginalization of people of color and must be
recognized before any progress is made in the realm
of racial equality.
CRT scholars, including Kimberle Crenshaw,
Richard Delgado, Neil Gotanda, Mari Matsuda, Gary
Peller, and Kendall Thomas, are committed to con-
necting their professional work to social struggle,
specifically within the communities with which they
interact. CRT scholars also emphasize what Cren-
shaw coined as intersectionality, that is, the depen-
dent and interactive ways in which various socially
and culturally constructed categories (such as race,
class, sexuality, religion, gender, and ability) interact
on multiple levels to manifest themselves as inequal-
ity in society. CRT aims to advance a social justice
framework and to challenge conventional accounts
of educational and other institutions as well as the
processes that shape them.
Social Construction of Race
Critical race theorists maintain that race is both
socially constructed and a real lived experience. Social
constructionism became prevalent in the 1970s when
it became widely recognized that, while the biological
concept of race was simply false, race was absolutely
real and consequential as a sociopolitical notion.
Michael Omi and Howard Winants Racial Formation
in the United States has become a crossdisciplinary
classic, widely cited for its critical contributions to the
study of race. Of its many contributions, its primary
assertion is that race functions as an autonomous
field of social conflict, political organization, and cul-
tural/ideological meaning. In contrast to the para-
digms of ethnicity, class, and nation, racial formation,
according to Omi and Winant, is the sociohistorical
process by which racial categories are created, inhab-
ited, transformed, and destroyed.
The constructionist contribution to the understand-
ing of race is crucial because it provides a foundational
starting point and shared meaning from which to
examine the significance and value of race in the con-
text of the United States. Literature by scholars includ-
ing Susan Cameron, Susan Wycoff, and Ronal Takaki
supports that race is neither a biological or genetic
reality but rather a socially constructed reality enacted
and imposed by white supremacy Other scholars posit
that race is a social, cultural, and political creation
which itself continues to change in definition. Omi
and Winants theory of racial formation, emphasizes
the social nature of race, the absence of any essential
racial characteristics, the historical flexibility of racial
meanings and categories, the conflictual character of
race at both the micro- and macro-social levels,
and the irreducible political aspect of racial dynamics.
Critical Race Within Education
CRT has spread to other disciplines including educa-
tion and specifically, has extended into educational
theory, research and practice. Critical race education
scholars analyze and examine the dynamics, impact
and consequences of power and privilege in the
schooling process. Issues such as affirmative action,
acting white, bilingual decuation, tracking, high
stakes testing, school financing, school discipline and
academic inequities are among their focus. Specific
methodological tools such as counter-storytelling and
narrative analysis are utilized in an effort to under-
stand the failure of schools. Counter-storytelling in
this way integrates students (and others) experiential
 Copyright 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.
knowledge as a form of legitimate knowledge. Daniel
Solrzano and Tara Yosso define counter-storytell-
ing as a method of telling the stories of those people
whose experiences are not often told (i.e., those on the
margins of society). The counterstory is also a tool for
exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian
stories of racial privilege. Counter-stories can shatter
complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on
race, and further the struggle for racial reform. Such
story-telling also serves to help overcome ethnocen-
trism by introducing new worldviews.
Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate launched
their critical, groundbreaking work, Towards a Crit-
ical Race Theory in Education, where they argue that
a critical race perspective in education can be analo-
gous to that of critical race theory in legal scholar-
ship. They propose that within education, race con-
tinues to be a salient yet largely untheorized notion
in the United States, that the United States is based
on property rights (rather than human rights) and
that the intersection of race and property create a
useful critical tool for understanding educational
inequities. In other words, racism remains endemic
and engrained within American life, and in this way,
remains as such within the educational sphere.
CRT sees the school curriculum as a culturally spe-
cific artifact designed to maintain white supremacy.
This means that non-white narratives are silenced,
especially when they challenge this master narrative.
The race-neutral or colorblind approach to curriculum
conflates all people of color, presuming a homogenized
all-inclusive group which can be simply explained. This
approach leads to distortions, misconceptions, stereo-
types, and outright omissions of curricular content.
Such limited access to knowledge denies all students,
and especially students of color, of a complete, multidi-
mensional, and accurate education.
Critical race theorists suggest that African Ameri-
cans are seen as intellectually and culturally deficient
by educators, therefore instructional strategies that
usually involve some sort of remediation rather than
focusing on higher order cirtical thinking skills are
promoted. New research efforts are rejecting deficit
models and calling for educators to teach about rac-
ism explicitly so that students can recognize this par-
ticular form of oppression and engage in proactive
measures to struggle against it. Intelligence testing
and high-stakes testing, according to critical race the-
orists, has further exacerbated the idea that African
Americans are deficient. These assessments tend to
Critical Race Theory in Education 163
illustrate what students may not know on a specific
test but fail to demonstrate the strengths and skills
that students bring to the educational experience.
School funding particularly underscores inequity
and racism in schooling. Critical race theorists argue
that the inequality that exists in school funidng is a
direct function of institutional racism. The inability
of African Americans to access and qualify for educa-
tional opportunities, employment, and housing cre-
ates an ongoing cycle of low educational achievement.
Thus, African Americans can conceivably not suffer
from one act of racism, and, at the same time, suffer
from the consequences of systemic racism. Critical
race theorists further argue that funding inequities
stem from racism and white self-interest. Schooling
is administered differently by variou state legislatures.
One of the most common practices of states is to fund
schools based on propterty taxes. Typically, this trans-
lates to wealthier communities having better-funded
schools. Critical race theorists reject the notion that
per pupil spending does not matter when educational
inequity is discussed. They challenge those reformers
who claim that property is somehow irrelevant in pre-
dicting academic achievement.
Critical race theorists argue that desegregation
has not served as a solution to schooling inequities
but rather has only benefited whites. So, while Afri-
can American students continued to be underserved
and African American student achievement con-
tinued to suffer, whites were able to take advantage
of opportunities such as magnet programs without
having to leave the system altogether and without
any inconvenience on their part. CRT is the fastest
growing and most controversial movement in legal
scholarship, inspiring debate in the same manner
that critical legal studies did in the 1980s. While it is
still a young movement, it is one that shows no sign
of slowing down. The field of educations adoption
of CRT has raised consciousness regarding equality
within schooling processes. The challenge for criti-
cal race theorists in education is to continue to move
from intellectual theory to mainstream practice.
Aurora Chang
University of Wyoming
See Also: Racial Climate on Campus; Racial Inequality:
Achievement; Racial Inequality: College Enrollment and
Completion; Racial Inequality: High School Dropout
Rates; Racism in Education.
 Copyright 2013 SAGE Publications. Not for sale, reproduction, or distribution.
164 Critical Theory of Education
Further Readings
Crenshaw, K., et al. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings
That Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, 1995.
Delgado, R. and J. Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An
Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Delgado, R. and J. Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: The
Cutting Edge. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2000.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria and William Tate. Toward a
Critical Race Theory in Education. Teachers College
Record, v.97/1 (1995).
Matsuda, M., et al. Words That Wound: Critical Race
Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
Omi, M. and H. Winant. Racial Formation in the United
States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Parker, Laurence, et al. Race IsRace Isnt: Critical Race
Theory and Qualitative Studies in Education. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Solrzano, Daniel and Tara Yosso. Critical Race
Methodology. Qualitative Inquiry, v.8 (2002).
Valdes, Francisco, J. M. Culp, and A. P. Harris. Crossroads,
Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Yosso, T. J. Critical Race Counterstories Along the Chicana/
Chicano Educational Pipeline. London: Routledge, 2006.
Critical Theory of
Education
Critical theories of education are philosophical, polit-
ical, and pedagogic responses to real world circum-
stances, which attempt to shift the purposes, scope,
aims, and delivery of education to enable cultural and
social transformation through the progressive growth
of individuals. They pay particular attention to the
situation of oppressed and marginalized groups and
seek to contest the ideologies of dominant social rela-
tions and established needs, which proponents view
as key to the reproduction and naturalization of cur-
rent social and global inequalities. A critical theory of
education is rooted in an understanding of the fea-
tures of currently existing capitalist societies, their
relations of subordination and domination, but also
their contradictions and the openings these produce
for progressive social change through transformative
practices that proponents believe will generate a bet-
ter society. Critical theorists argue for the reconstruc-
tion of education systems along what they see as more
genuinely democratic and multicultural lines, while
rejecting what they view as obsolete elitist, idealist,
antidemocratic, and traditionalist concepts of edu-
cation. Critical theories of education are therefore
normative projects for social transformation that can
even be viewed as having strong utopian dimensions.
A critical theory of education and society denotes
ways of viewing, conceptualizing, categorizing, and
mapping connections that makes visible vested inter-
ests and power relations, with the aim of constructing
more egalitarian alternatives.
The philosophical background for such critiques of
education consists in the main part in the work of the
Frankfurt School of critical theory that was developed
in the mid-20th century by a group of German Amer-
ican scholars, such as Herbert Marcuse, who built
on and adapted the theories of Karl Marx. Further
developments have also seen the incorporation of the
pragmatist philosophies of John Dewey, the critical
pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the critiques of post-
structuralism, in order to adequately face and chal-
lenge the realities of societies today. Moreover, critical
theorists provide radical critiques of existing systems
of education while providing progressive alternative
models that, they argue, are more democratically rel-
evant within the contemporary world.
Greek and Marxist Theories
A foundational belief of all critical theory approaches
is that education is a process that has transformational
benefits for the individual, and that such benefits will
culminate in an enriched, inclusive, and socially just
society. A critical theory of education therefore has
many common elements with the classical Greek phi-
losophies of education. For the Greek philosophers, a
proper education involved the search for the good life
and the good society. Critical theorists of education
do not, however, unreflectively employ ideas from
this period because the Greek education system was
highly elitist in its production of citizens, who were
mainly male and upper class. Rather, their approach
is one of redemptive criticism, where (in a similar
vein to the work of Walter Benjamin) ideas from the
past are resurrected and reconstructed in order to
build critical theories of the present and proposals for
a better future. Through a radical historicism then,