Tom Rademacher’s recent article about resisting the Equity Backlash identifies a real and present trend in education :
“This year, I’ve seen resistance to equity and anti-racism grow and become more organized. It has adopted a smile, polite language and blue checkmarks. It is comfortable work that erases race, that protects the status quo. It is “Make Classrooms Great Again” and “I don’t see color, I see data. Upholding White supremacy does not always mean being a White supremacist. … it can mean disrupting, erasing or ignoring the work that’s been done, saying we’ve done enough—and this year, there’s been a whole lot of people who are very happy to say, “Does it always have to be about race?”
In recent years, the Equity Backlash manifested in: educators openly mocking anyone who asks questions about why lists of educators we follow on social media end up being so white; mocking people who write about Indigenous movements to decolonize education; mocking people who are transgender.
All of the Equity Backlash I mention above has come specifically from people who lead the #ResearchEd community. That should be worrying.
In a response to Rademacher’s criticism of the Equity Backlash in the #ResearchEd community, the head of #ResearchEd in the US, Eric Kalenze, argues that #ResearchEd supports equity by addressing ‘evidence deserts’ in education. Either Kalenze has no idea what the leaders of #ResearchEd get up to, or he’s whitewashing their behavior.
Katherine Birbalsingh mocking transgender people and Tom Bennett (head of #ResearchEd) liking it:
Greg Ashman mocking people who asked why Tom Rogers’ list of people to follow was so white. Tom Bennett then congratulates Rogers on how he handled himself.
In fact, people who talk about equity are a joke to the leaders of #ResearchEd.
Greg Ashman, head of #ResearchEd in Australia, previously identified “morally dubious” attempts of schools to teach about “‘white privilege’ and ‘intersectionalism’ as if they are established fact” because “there is currently a plurality of views.” On the specific topic of teaching about white privilege, Ashman repeats a Jordan Peterson talking point (without crediting Peterson): “It is debatable whether such privileges are specifically white or whether they might better be described as majority group privilege.” What exactly is the ‘plurality of views’ that Ashman wants us to consider?
Several of the speakers at #ResearchEd events in Canada, such as Robert Craigen and Tara Houle (in a comment on Paul Bennett’s blog about BC schools), explicitly deride any talk about white privilege.
When Eric Kalenze tweeted about the #ResearchEd conference in Vancouver, he received a disturbing number of responses that exemplify the Equity Backlash that Rademacher writes about.
Some responses to Kalenze:
“Entrenched leftists marching to the teachers union drum”
“Seems political correctness is now gatekeeper. Everyone in authority avoids any risk of controversial thought & assumes diversity only works with skin colour.”
“Canada is primarily socialist, and opposition to left leaning governments by their employees is treated similarly as it would be in Venezuela.”
“To much unchecked modern liberalsim “
“the sjw mafia holds a lot of clout with the lefty management at our schools”
Suggesting that ‘sjws’ (Social Justice Warriors), a derogatory term, are the problem in Canadian education lines up with the views pushed by #ResearchEd leadership.
‘Evidence Deserts’?
In analogy with ‘food deserts’, Kalenze argues in his response to Rademacher that educators living in ‘evidence deserts’ do not simply lack the material resources, but the knowledge to teach effectively: “lower-income folks will have worse nutritional habits than higher-income folks over the long terms, and they will in turn experience long-term health issues like obesity and diabetes in much greater proportion.” Kalenze suggests that #ResearchEd works “toward more equitable outcomes for kids by filling gaps in the various educational evidence deserts most education professionals are stuck in — places where research-unhealthy options like 1:1 iPad initiatives and training on growth-mindset interventions.”
It’s an odd analogy.
Kalenze thinks it’s comparable to how Dr. Sonja Santelises talks about redlining in education, but there are some significant differences. Redlining is grounded in an historical analysis of racist policies that systematically cuts Black people off from opportunity in the United States. In Dr. Santelises’ analysis of the data, she shows that even for Black students that are not economically disadvantaged, the systems fails them in that their scores are comparable to the economically disadvantaged white students. The historical legacy and ongoing racism in the United States and Canada is more complicated than “research-unhealthy options like 1:1 iPad initiatives”.
If #ResearchEd is interested in equity, at a minimum their leadership should reflect those values through thoughtfully engaging with experts who have made their whole careers about challenging racism in education. Rademacher points us to EduColor, Clear the Air and Disrupt Texts as some very valuable places. Inviting Dr. Santelises to give a keynote is one good step in the right direction for #ResearchEd.
Yet, the deeper culture created by the #ResearchEd leadership suggests they are not yet serious about engaging with anti-racism in education. To take one example, Kalenze suggests that David Didau’s talk about the “cognitive-scientific evidence about the importance of background knowledge to all other learning” (Philadelphia, 2019) supplies the kind of equity-based relief for ‘evidence deserts’ that we need. However, in 2017 Didau was promoting white supremacist race science about IQ on his blog. Tom Bennett and Greg Ashman both supported Didau throughout the criticism on Twitter.
Didau wrote several blog posts about the importance of genetics and intelligence. In the comment section on one post, someone asks Didau,
“Why do we see certain cultures doing much better (or worse) than others within the same education system?”
Didau responds, “Well, firstly there’s peer effects, and secondly — despite the unpopularity of discussing such things, there are fairly clear racial differences in IQ.”
Didau performed a dirty delete on these comments, but the Wayback Archive has them. As a source, Didau points us to Linda Gottfredson, who is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of scholars that mainstream scientific racism. Elsewhere, Didau points his readers to the HumanBioDiversity website, an archive of white supremacist thinking about genetics and IQ.
Didau began to write about genetics and IQ after encountering Andrew Sabisky at a #ResearchEd conference in 2014. Around the same time, Sabisky attended the secret UCL eugenics conference. Dylan Wiliam, one of the directors of #ResearchEd in the UK, endorsed Didau’s book, where Sabisky writes about ‘ethnic differences’ in IQ in the Appendix:
“Ethnic differences in IQ are much larger and of far more serious social importance. Assuming a white gentile norm of 100 (standard deviation 15), black African-Americans average a score of around 85… the United States has a substantial black population with a long history of educational underachievement.”
“Large, permanent individual differences in talent are a fact of life and are not going to go away for the foreseeable future. To a very great extent, these differences are due to variations in the innate qualities of persons and are not the result of manipulable differences in environments.”
When I asked Wiliam for comment on Twitter, he said in his opinion, those passages are ‘factually accurate’. Accepting the ‘race science’ around IQ at face value flies in the face on what research shows about how IQ tests were constructed to uphold white supremacy.
Given the deep entrenchment of an anti-equity stance in the #ResearchEd leadership, and the fact that Didau is still invited to Kalenze’s events in the United States and highlighted as a speaker, we need more than Kalenze’s reassurance that #ResearchEd is addressing ‘evidence deserts’.
Header image by Michael Longmire on Unsplash