Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Promoting Culturally Relevant Education

Presidential candidate Senator Warren is known for having a plan for every issue—and now she has a plan to expand access to culturally relevant education (CRE). Last week, the candidate released her proposals for improving public education, which includes a bold commitment to “fully fund” programs that support CRE not only in traditional public schools but in alternative schools and juvenile detention facilities, too.

Though her plan doesn’t provide a definition, CRE or culturally responsive teaching is generally defined as a way of teaching that ensures students’ everyday experiences and racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds are reflected in the classroom.

A focus on this approach is long overdue. In 2014, students of color became the majority of students enrolled in public schools. But while school demographics have changed, curricula and teaching practices have remained stuck in the past. In fact, ethnic and racial diversity continues to be strikingly absent from popular school curricula, and some teachers say they have not been properly trained on how to support racial and ethnic diversity in the classroom. Experts have long-argued this mismatch—between students’ identities and what they see and experience in schools—plays a critical role in the racial achievement gap.

Efforts to address this mismatch have traditionally been sparing and local, though states have made recent strides. New York State, for example, recently developed the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, a comprehensive guidebook that gives recommendations for bringing this approach to New York schools. Wisconsin has offered culturally responsive teaching training statewide for a few years. And other states have passed laws to ensure the history of different groups—such as Native American history and LGBTQ+ history—is a part of all students’ education. These efforts are laudable and should continue.

What Warren’s plan shows, however, is that there are some things that can be done at the federal level to make inroads in building a culturally responsive workforce.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of her plan is her commitment to funding more research into CRE. According to campaign representatives, Warren intends to do so by fully funding the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), including the Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) which work closely with states and districts to improve the use of data and research. She also plans to direct these agencies to conduct research on CRE. In sharp contrast, the Trump administration has proposed cutting IES funding and eliminating the RELs.

Today, a few rigorous studies have already found that CRE initiatives can impact student attendance, grades, graduation rates, and assessment results. Still, most studies that exist on the subject are small in scale and don’t always investigate the connection between specific CRE practices—such as the effect of deploying more relevant instructional materials—on particular student outcomes. What the field needs are more experimental and quasi-experimental studies that explore how different CRE practices impact different groups of students in various contexts.

Strengthening the research base for CRE matters a great deal. For one thing, education leaders should strive to use research evidence to make choices about which interventions to fund and implement. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Education’s non-regulatory guidance on “evidence-based” decision-making under the Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) recommends that states and localities invest in interventions that are supported by higher levels of evidence—that is, evidence from at least one well-implemented experimental or quasi-experimental study. Notably, this type of evidence is still difficult to find for any topic.

In some cases, however, strong research evidence is not only encouraged but required. For instance, ESSA stipulates that Title I, section 1003 funds, which specifically support school improvement activities, should only be used to implement “evidence-based” interventions with higher levels of evidence. Some competitive federal grants also call for rigorous empirical backing. This is the case for the new Education Innovation and Research program, which offers school districts, nonprofit organizations, and state educational agencies funds to support the development, scale-up, and evaluation of “evidence-based” innovations in policy and practice that can deliver results for high-need students. Under the current guidelines, applicants who propose innovative projects that are supported by “limited evidence” can receive awards but at smaller amounts than those who propose activities that are already backed by rigorous evidence.

Aside from opening the door for more research, funding RELs could potentially help states and districts receive the technical assistance they need to support CRE-related activities. RELs are already sharing information on CRE with states and school districts nationwide. But more support is needed. States, districts, and schools continue to grapple with how to align teaching and learning standards to CRE, how to measure teachers’ culturally responsive practice, how to identify and share culturally responsive practices that are most effective, and more.

Warren has also pledged to ensure “all the communities that make up our public schools are reflected in school curricula.” While more relevant curricula are sorely needed, it's not clear how she intends to push for any curricula given that choosing and implementing curricula is traditionally a state and local issue. Earlier this year, in her plan for Native communities Warren similarly made a commitment to supporting what she calls "curricular inclusion" efforts that aim to ensure public school curricula include Native American history and culture. She added that she'd back these efforts through “grants and other means.”

Warren is the first presidential candidate to emphasize the value of CRE. While some questions remain, the Warren plan does show promise as a strategy for promoting the use of culturally relevant teaching practices.

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