Special Issue Introduction: Demystifying Academic Understandings of Critical Race Theory to Transform Discourse With Policy Makers

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue, we describe the socio-political context that spurred our efforts to disrupt the anti-critical race theory (CRT) that has seeped into popular and political conversations about the US educational system. Noting the lack of preparation educational researchers have for sharing their nuanced, academic CRT understandings to policy-making audiences, we endeavored to address this issue. With use of funding support provided by the Spencer Foundation’s Conference Grants Program and in conjunction with Penn State University’s Research-to-Policy Collaboration, we identified a panel of CRT experts, facilitated their training in translating research into policy factsheets, and hosted a Day on the Hill conference during which the factsheets were shared with policy-making professionals. This introduction provides additional details about our process and about the resulting special issue which pairs together two written products covering the same CRT topic from each author, one written in the format of a traditional academic essay and the other as a two-page factsheet. Taken together, we hope that the paired publications serve as an example for how education researchers might demistify academic understandings of CRT in order to transform discourse with policy makers.

With this special issue, we set out to respond to the ideologies marking the current sociopolitical moment in which racial inequities in education have deepened. The intensity we are witnessing is due in part to the lingering effects of the COVID-19 public health crisis, growing economic challenges, and increased public outcry against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence. The conglomerate of these factors leads us to recognize the heightened need to harness the power and potential of applying critical race theory (CRT) across methodological and disciplinary divides as a means to identify salves to these social ills. This recognition comes at a time, however, when federal and state obstructions to “promoting divisive concepts” have been deployed with the intent to obfuscate the potential for this framework to expose the ways in which white supremacist logics have been used to shape society since the forced colonization of the United States (López et al., 2021). While CRT is being actively applied within education research to examine ways that far-right and neoliberal policies exacerbate inequities in communities of color, the knowledge and understandings generated thereby are not always easily transmittable to political realms. In this special issue, we offer a sampling of how we might begin to bridge these two worlds—those of academic educational researchers and policy makers poised to impact educational issues.

We conceptualized this project (funded by the Spencer Foundation Conference Grants Program in spring 2021) in fall 2020 in a context where CRT was rapidly becoming a household name. Though CRT was severely under attack in school board meetings, conservative political media outlets, and halls of government across the country, the average individual did not have an accurate understanding of what the framework actually is. That did not matter in the campaign being levied against it, and in fact, the far right sought to leverage the lack of familiarity most individuals had with CRT to use it as a conduit to persuade the public away from progressive educational movement. As of March 2023, 44 states had introduced legislation seeking to ban CRT from K–12 and postsecondary curricula and government-funded diversity training, and 18 states had passed such regulations (Schwartz, 2023). These victories were fueled by this ignorance, enabling those on the far right of the political spectrum to create a caricature of CRT to which all evils of wokeness could be ascribed. One means for interrupting the impacts of this strategic false characterization is to rectify misconceptions with empirically supported data and to then get that information into the hands of policy makers in an accessible format.

State and federal legislators are discussing and enacting laws about the very issues on which academic education scholars conduct research. The yields of these research endeavors stand to inform legislative actions—actions that could otherwise be unduly influenced by abstract, overly generalized or misunderstood concepts—in clear, concise ways that disrupt instead of contribute to racist social systems that disproportionately negatively impact communities of color. And while it is true that their academic contributions position them to make useful policy-influencing contributions, researchers are not typically provided with guidance or training on how to communicate research to legislative officials, those who are most proximate to the articulation of the policies that maintain social orders. Without this skill, research can be marginalized into echo chambers that do not have a means for influencing policy. One reason that CRT as a concept has been so vulnerable to exploitation by far-right political pundits is that it was formerly a topic restricted to academic discourse. Thus, the ability to effectively translate the key messages of academic educational research findings into communications that are easily understood by policy makers is of the utmost importance for researchers seeking to make an impactful difference.

To facilitate this process, we envisioned a project wherein we would identify educational scholars from across the country who use CRT to inform their research efforts. We intentionally sought to identify an intergenerational collective of CRT and education experts who would represent a diverse array of specific educational disciplines and topics of focus while also contributing diversity in perspectives such as race, gender identity, linguistic background, and geographic location within the United States. Though we recognize that CRT is usefully applied in international contexts, our intended focus on directing messaging toward U.S. legislators—along with the fact that conceptualizations of race vary greatly across the globe—prompted us to limit our invitations to scholars working within the United States. With funding from the Spencer Foundation Conference Grants Program, we invited a cohort of 10 scholars to participate in the project that would culminate with a “Day on the Hill” (held virtually because of ongoing COVID-19 induced health concerns). During this event in March 2022, these scholars met with policy makers to present CRT-related research material and to engage in informative conversations about applications of the framework.

Though we had confidence and trust in the invited scholars’ CRT expertise, as noted earlier, we also had an understanding that, like ours, their training to become academic educational researchers had featured little, if any, preparation for translating their research-based knowledge into language that would be readily received by policy makers. To assist with developing this set of skills, we partnered with Penn State University’s Research-to-Policy Collaboration (RPC), a nonlobbying, nonpartisan advisory group whose stated mission is a commitment to “strengthening the use of research in policy by facilitating meaningful, action-oriented collaboration between legislative officials and researchers.” Among the services RPC provides is capacity building via web-based participatory trainings. The scholars invited to participate in this project engaged in a series of professional development sessions that both provided a contextual background for the Day on the Hill event and guided them through the process of producing a factsheet written for a policy-making audience. Participants identified their own CRT-related areas of focus that formed the basis of the information featured in their factsheets and simultaneously used the same set of information to craft brief essays outlining the information in an academic register. Authors also had access to consultation with RPC team members in the form of written feedback and individual virtual sessions as they continued workshopping their developing factsheets. After meeting with policy makers during the Day on the Hill, authors had another opportunity to incorporate feedback and ideas sprouted during those conversations into their factsheets, further propelling the drafting process.

The result of this project—what we offer within the pages of this special issue—is a set of exemplary artifacts that showcase information presented by educational researchers for two distinct audiences: one composed of their peers and one composed of policy makers. Each author or set of authors contributed two masked peer-reviewed pieces to this volume: a research essay and accompanying factsheet. The essay-length manuscripts are written in the style of traditional academic research articles. The factsheets, typically one or two pages, were generated as a result of the guidance received from RPC and written in preparation for meeting with the Day on the Hill congressional participants. Indeed, the policy makers with whom we conversed were provided copies of the factsheets before our visit. The paired artifacts provide an opportunity to trace the relationship between the formatting and packaging of the ideas and concepts shared across the two contexts. Through engagement in the processes of noticing where the paired pieces are complementary and how they depart from one another, along with identifying how the same ideas are differently messaged for different audiences, the reader, we believe, has access to a blueprint for how to engage in similar translation efforts.

The project did not come without its own set of challenges. Among them was reticence among the participating scholars to converse with policy makers they presumed would be hostile to arguments in favor of CRT. Because we were undergoing this process against the backdrop of the demonization of CRT in public and politicized media, and with so few of the far right’s arguments against the framework being founded in factual information, hesitation toward publicly engaging with anti-CRT champions was understandable. It is incredibly difficult to quell concerns driven by inaccurate information with fact—a conclusion we believe the far right has come to as well, and thus why the proliferation of fallacy is a fueling feature of its anti-CRT rhetoric. As conveners of the experience, we collaborated with the RPC to mitigate this reality for our participants.

Namely, given that we coeditors identify as critical scholars, as do the contributing authors, we are aware that some key players in our governmental structure will be unwilling to absorb viewpoints that threaten to unsettle the powers they enjoy as a result of its current organization. This perception elicited uncertainties as to whether engaging with policy makers “on both sides of the aisle” would be the best use of academic researchers’ time. After many winding conversations, due to the fact RPC is nonpartisan and nonlobbying, we concluded that our aims were to contribute to the world that we want and that humanity deserves, while also acknowledging that we are living in the world that we currently have. To achieve the former, we cannot shirk from active engagement in the latter. Though this was the case, at times it felt particularly difficult, as curators of the experience, to convey to participants that they were free to speak unapologetically about CRT in the legislative space while also being mindful about language that may not translate as intended to a policy audience. As a group, we navigated the complex waters of feelings, ranging from trepidation about our research efforts and project goals being misrepresented by an antagonistic audience, to feeling bound to maintaining “decorum” throughout the process. Ultimately, one way we addressed this challenge was to meet with legislative offices that exhibited interest in learning about the evidence based on equitable approaches to education. Though we initially intended to meet with legislative offices from both sides of the aisle, only Democratic legislative offices opted to participate.

Another challenge came in the form of actually crafting the factsheets themselves. Many of the featured authors had experience speaking and interacting with members of local and/or national legislative bodies in a variety of capacities, but the majority had not developed a factsheet for policy makers before. As occurs during the process when writing in a new genre, many authors experienced writing pains as they encountered confusion and a lack of assurance around whether they were drafting their factsheets “correctly.” Simply stated, writing the factsheets was difficult. Authors were provided professional development by the RPC about factsheet preparation, and they also had access to the RPC partners throughout the process for further consultation on their drafts. The final forms of the factsheets featured in this special issue are the result of several rounds of revisions driven by feedback both from RPC partners and masked reviewers, as well as conversations with the coeditors. Though they are presented here as concise, tidy documents with high levels of explanatory value for a policy-making audience, we stress that they represent an intensive and intentional writing process that is impossible to capture in a published final draft.

To prepare the essays (articles) and factsheets for this special issue, we invited education research experts to provide masked reviews of the documents. As an additional source of feedback, some of the masked reviewers of the factsheets had served as American Educational Research Association Congressional Fellows and provided thorough and relevant recommendations. We also invited nonacademic researchers, including K–12 superintendents, employees of nonprofit or nongovernmental educational organizations, as well as state congresspeople and their staffers to review. They reviewed these documents without access to the accompanying essays because we wanted to ensure that the information in the factsheets could effectively and independently provide information that would be useful in their professional roles. Though this element of the process did not necessarily alleviate the challenge associated with writing the factsheets themselves, we do believe it resulted in quality factsheets that serve as exemplars of the translation of academic text into documents readily accessible by policy makers engaged in legislating our P–20 educational system.

We learned a great deal from the process as an editorial team. Some ideas were new, and other ideas were emphasized in new ways. Though we were inspired to take on this process by prior knowledge that the discourses of academia and policy-making are starkly different, we were reminded, throughout the endeavor, of the degree to which this is true. As we attempted to guide authors through the undertaking of translating their academic ideas into those digestible by legislative professionals, it became exceedingly apparent just how seldom average members of the two communities exchange ideas and intellectually engage one another. The differences across the typical characteristics of the two discourses were also ever-present. Academics are regularly prized for their voluminousness and for developing highly theorized, abstract concepts. In contrast, policy makers value and deal in brevity and accessible clarity. The directly oppositional nature of the foundational traits of these two communicative styles necessitates a strategic, intentional crossing of discursive boundaries.

One new learning that was particularly satisfying for our team was the discovery of the willingness of the policy makers with whom we connected during the Day on the Hill to listen and engage. Our hill visit took place in the midst of intensifying anti-CRT publicity, and we made no effort to minimize our intent to endorse CRT and showcase its potential for strategic application in educational policy decisions. Although the individuals who chose to meet with us reflect a self-selection bias, we were encouraged by the Day on the Hill participants’ readiness to learn about the research evidence that CRT can inform. The engagement resulted in thoughtful, fact-based conversations about the topics we were highlighting, and specifically about how CRT could provide an analytical lens for more acutely impacting the identified problems. Though we are not so naive as to think that this stance could be universally applied to all congressional representatives and their team members, it was heartening to have encounters that we felt surpassed the superficial obligation of hosting constituents who had requested their presence.

As this project comes to a close, marked by the publication of this special issue, questions remain for our editorial team. We wonder if there is a way to make the process of speaking to policy makers in the language style to which they are most ready to receive information more accessible to more academics. Relatedly, we wonder if there are ways to signal to academics that this is a worthy, though admittedly challenging, skill to develop. For us, this experience has contributed to a deeper understanding of the work that academic researchers must do to engage in generative discussions with policy makers. If our aims are to ensure that research is translated into policy, this endeavor is worth the time and energy to bridge the divides that currently exist.

Without further ado, we present to you a brief overview of the eight sets of paired documents and the closing reflection included in this special issue. As we finalize this publication, 18 states currently have education gag orders in place, with seven aimed at higher education. Accordingly, the featured articles and briefs reflect some of the most urgent issues we are facing in education in this moment. Reflecting controversies currently debated in Texas, Valenzuela and Epstein (2023, this issue) provide evidence on the benefits of ethnic studies. Stewart (2023, this issue) shares how equity-focused curricula can invigorate and sustain college student civic engagement, illuminating the vital role of postsecondary education to ensure that an oligarchical governing structure does not replace U.S. democracy. The article and brief by DeCuir-Gunby and colleagues (2023, this issue) provides recommendations that counter the education gag orders based on evidence on the effects of microaggressions on African American students. The ongoing issues with equitable access to higher education are poised to limit equitable outcomes. For that reason, the article and brief by Sansone (2023, this issue) provide valuable information on efforts to expand higher education access to rural Latinx youth. Stovall (2023, this issue) directs attention to what he conceptualizes as “engineered conflict”—the structural conditions that exacerbate violence in urban communities while underscoring the importance of multifocal (rather than singular) policy strategies that address inequities at the intersection of public housing, education, and criminal justice issues in the Chicago context. Annamma and colleagues’ (2023, this issue) work sheds light on disparities in the representation of disabled girls of color in prison-schools and identifies ways that educational practices within these carceral facilities harm disabled girls of color via culturally devoid teaching practices and curriculum, physical gendered violence, and careless interpersonal relationships. Boveda and Boveda (2023, this issue) invoke ongoing CRT debates through the perspectives of young people, noting the historical marginalization of youth from progressive public conversations even though they comprise the category of individuals often most impacted by them. Deo’s (2023, this issue) work extends attention beyond the undergraduate setting to food insecurity and mental health challenges experienced by law students. Deo offers suggestions for federal legislation and law school policies to provide financial relief through loan forgiveness and support for mental health services. In the conclusion to the special issue, Dixson (2023, this issue), as one of the most influential voices on CRT within the education field, provides insights that tie together the ideas shared while contextualizing them within our current sociopolitical moment.

A special thank you to each of our contributors, the partners whose collaboration made the project behind this special issue possible, including reviewers and RPC staff, as well as to the Spencer Foundation’s Conference Grants Program for funding support. We hope this offering will serve as a guiding beacon in the ongoing struggle to achieve the standards of educational equity that learners need and deserve.