Abstract
Reviewed by: Tony Dreise, Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne, Australia
‘What turns students who were ready for and cheerful about the potential of school into ones who hate it?’ Rich Milner poses this and other challenging questions in his book on race, poverty and inequity in the United States. Through provocative questioning and deep socio-educational analysis, Milner asks us to consider big social policy issues in education in the US.
In reading Milner's book, I was immediately struck by the similarities between the experiences he shares, and the educational situation of Indigenous people here in Australia. Notwithstanding the need for context and locational sensitivity, there are nevertheless salient lessons within Milner's book for Australian educators and policy makers. Here, I reflect on a few of them.
But firstly, some context. Milner is a leading African-American educator and researcher, serving as the Helen Faison Professor of Urban Education and Director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. His previous works include ‘Start Where You are; But Don't Stay There’ where he offers insights into teaching successfully in environments of social and cultural diversity.
As the title of his new book suggests, Milner's central argument is ‘confronting’. Milner explores the issue of racism and disadvantage in urban schools in the US, especially those with large populations of Hispanic and African-American students. Milner offers a troubling account of inequity, injustice and unfulfilled promises. Despite sizeable public and philanthropic investment, 1 the creation of a number of flagship education initiatives and big political edicts at a federal level over many years such as ‘No Child Left Behind’ (the Bush Administration) and ‘Race to the Top’ (the Obama Administration), the fact remains that glaring educational, economic and social gaps persist between white Americans and minorities (namely African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans). Milner points out that Hispanic and African-American families in the US are twice as likely to live below the poverty line compared with white people and this, in turn, undermines education achievement. However, Milner rails against using poverty as an excuse for second-rate education provision, without ever running from the fact that a major correlational relationship exists between poverty, race and educational outcomes. He posits that ‘poverty is not a culture or a descriptor of an individual or group of people, poverty is a condition of a system’. In other words, his work seeks to define poverty as opposed to allowing it to define people.
Poverty is inherently political, and Milner's text serves as a political wake-up call. At the same time, the book is instructive and practical in providing teachers and school leaders with a toolkit of skills and mindsets that they will need to adequately and effectively confront the myriad of social and economic problems in economically marginalised schools and disadvantaged neighbourhoods, without reducing such advice to simplistic educational ‘how-toisms’.
Many of the lessons that Milner seeks to share are equally relevant to Australia. Thus, he advocates to adopt a ‘strengths based’ approach to learning and shying away from a ‘deficit-based’ thinking about students. He also argues for a humanistic approach that does not measure the worth of children by their test scores or focuses merely on academic performance but attends to the needs of the ‘whole child’ in terms of health, psychological wellbeing and personal safety. Moreover, he emphasises the importance of building strong and productive relationships between schools, homes and communities (Milner contends that complementary action is required both inside and outside school gates) and the power of positive cultural/racial identity. In summary, Milner argues that ‘…we need to think about these children in a nuanced, anti-deficit, and compassionate manner’. In his quest for answers, Milner warns against reducing these highly complex social situations to overly simplistic solutions.
Milner's book is both a work of political advocacy – he challenges us to ‘fight’ against present inequities and second-rate outcomes in education systems – and a piece of reflective writing. He writes in an accessible manner, especially in adopting a narrative based approach by sharing lived experiences in and among families, schools and neighbourhoods. As a former classroom teacher, he actively pursues and builds insights aimed at helping teachers and school leaders faced with sizeable barriers. His book recounts his personal experiences, shares the experiences of other practitioners and presents detailed case studies.
Milner moves effortlessly between the classroom (pedagogical advocacy) and the boardroom (political advocacy). His book tackles and synthesises a multitude of interconnected in-school and out-of-school issues that undermine equity and justice in education. The multidimensional prescriptions he offers are grounded in theory, research, lived experience and classroom practice. By considering the issue of racial inequity at both microlevels and macrolevels, Milner's insights are likely to be appealing to community advocates and educational practitioners alike.
For those with a systems-level interest in lifting educational outcomes in culturally diverse and socially disadvantaged areas in the US, Milner's text could be read alongside the work of Anthony S. Bryk whose research in Chicago emphasises the critical nature of strong school leadership; positive parent-community ties; professional capacity among teachers; student-centred learning environments and an aligned organisation of the curriculum. 2
Milner's book is not the first of its kind, and is unlikely to be the last if present inequities, prejudices and poor quality outcomes persist. While Milner looks through a ‘race-based’ prism to explain and counter social disadvantage, fellow African-American leading academic Sheryll Cashin adopts a ‘place-based’ approach to the same issues in her seminal work called ‘Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America’. Whether one chooses to look through Milner's window of ‘race’ or through Cashin's window of ‘place’, chances are we are looking at the same children. All young people – in the United States, Australia and elsewhere – deserve a high-quality education, which means greater equity in places and between races. Now there's a place worth racing to.