Introduction

Next to the family, formal education is the most important socialization institution of our nation’s youth. From its beginnings, public education in the United States has been shaped by social stratification processes, especially classism, racism, and sexism, leading to struggles by marginalized populations for the expansion of access to inclusive schools with effective educational programs. The struggle for equality in public education by ethnoracial minorities has occurred in two overlapping long-term phases: 1) desegregation of public education, and 2) inclusion in the curriculum.

Early efforts to desegregate public education began in the early decades of the 20th century. Following gains that culminated, at least in the legal arena, with the decision in Brown v. the Board of Education Topeka, the struggle turned to the quality of education received by students. During the civil rights movement ethnoracial minority groups pressed for inclusion in the curricula of schools, colleges, and universities. In this historical phase, demands led to the development and implementation of multicultural education curricula and ethnic studies programs. In the late 1960s, courses and programs in Black and Chicano Studies began to be offered at colleges and universities. Courses provided content on these populations that had been left out of the curriculum, and programs promoted the production of knowledge that shed light on the many institutional mechanisms and processes that maintained their subordination.

The Struggle to Desegregate Public Education

Perhaps the earliest successful challenge to racial segregation in the public schools was Maestas v. George H. Shone in 1914 in Alamosa, Colorado, where “Mexican” and “American” students were forced to attend separate schools. In the Southwest at the time, “Mexican schools” were commonplace purportedly to promote the Americanization of the students. Prominent at the time was the idea of the “melting pot,” which held that all immigrants could be transformed into “Americans.” It did not recognize that Native Peoples, Africans, and Mexicans were conquered peoples that entered the United States by force.

Alamosa at the time was divided by railroad tracks into the north side and the south side, with most white Americans living on the north side. “Mexican” students were forced to attend the school on the south side of the tracks. The Maestas family lived north of the tracks but Miguel, a 10 year-old, was forced to cross the tracks to attend school, something his father considered dangerous. A lawsuit was filed in 1913, and in 1914, District Court Judge Charles Holbrook ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, Maestas and others, and ordered the school board and the superintendent to allow students to attend the public school that was most convenient to their homes.

Sixteen years later, in 1930, in Lemon Grove, California, the school board decided, with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and the PTA, to build a “special school for Mexicans,” citing overcrowding, sanitary, and moral problems created by Mexican students at the school they had been attending with white students. Without informing Mexican American parents of what was to happen, in January, 1931, their students were not allowed to enter the school building they had attended during the fall semester. Instead, they were told their students were to attend a two-room building, the Americanization school, that looked like a barn and where inferior educational programs were provided. The majority of parents refused to send their students to the “caballeriza,” or barnyard, as it came to be known in the Mexican American community. Instead, the parents organized and formed the Lemon Grove Neighbors Committee and sought community and legal assistance to challenge the school board’s right to build and maintain a separate school for Mexican American children. Although the students did initially attend the separate school, the case was filed against the school board in the Superior Court of San Diego County with Roberto Alvarez, a student, selected to be the representative of the students. The case mobilized both Mexican American and white American communities in southern California, with a bill to legalize the segregation of “Mexican” students introduced in the California State Assembly that ultimately failed. Legal counsel for the plaintiffs held that school segregation violated California law, which allowed the separation and segregation of Japanese, Indian, Chinese, and Mongolian students but did not include Mexican Americans, who were considered “white.” On March 30, 1931, Judge Claude Chambers ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and against the school board, holding that a few students could be separated for special instruction, but the separation of Mexican students as a class was a blatant act of segregation that violated California law. In his view, the mingling of Mexican American students with white American students facilitated their acquisition of the English language. Judge Chambers ordered the immediate reinstatement of the Mexican American students at the main school.

The 1930s was a period when African Americans also challenged racial segregation in schools and colleges by filing complaints in the courts, but none of the cases were successful. Such was the situation in Texas, where Mexican Americans challenged school segregation in Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra. In 1930 the City of Del Rio passed a bond measure to fund the construction of new school buildings at the Intermediate School District. At the time, Mexican American students attended a segregated elementary school known as the Mexican school. In Salvatierra the plaintiffs were successful in obtaining a court injunction preventing the ISD from entering into contracts to construct the buildings, on the grounds that they would be used to continue segregation. On appeal, however, the ISD was successful in having the injunction dissolved. The court in this case held that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that the board intended to put the proposed buildings to the unlawful use of race segregation. The board had denied that such was its intent.

Following Salvatierra, the desegregation of public education moved slowly. It was in the 1940s that school segregation challenges by Mexican Americans were based on violations of the 14th Amendment (1868) to the U.S. Constitution, which provided equal protection and other rights to citizens. The 14th Amendment holds that:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (Cornell Law School, (n.d.), para. 1).

In 1947, the case Mendez v. Westminster made significant progress in the struggle for desegregation with a ruling by the first federal district court to address desegregation in public education. The plaintiffs filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California which granted injunctive relief. The case involved a class action suit against the Westminster, Garden Grove, and El Modeno school districts, and the Santa Ana City Schools in Orange County, California. The plaintiffs alleged that some 5,000 Mexican American and students of Latin descent were denied the equal protection of laws through systematic class discrimination against the petitioning elementary school children.

The court held that providing separate schools for these students did not meet the equal protection of the laws of California pertaining to public education. The court also held that Spanishspeaking students were “retarded” in their learning of English due to segregation, which limited exposure to its use. Further, the court held that segregation fostered antagonism in the children and suggested inferiority where none existed. The school districts appealed the lower court’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the grounds that the lower court did not have jurisdiction. The motion was dismissed by the appeals court. As such, Mendez was the first case to successfully challenge the constitutionality of public segregation under the 14th Amendment. What is little known about the Mendez case is that Robert L. Carter and Thurgood Marshall, both African American attorneys with the NAACP, were among those that represented the plaintiffs and would be involved in the Brown v. Board of Education Topeka case a few years later.

Following the ruling in Mendez, Mexican Americans in Texas challenged the arbitrary segregation practices of local school districts by filing against the State Board of Education in U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, Austin, Texas, on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment. The case, Minerva Delgado, et al., v. Bastrop Independent School District of Bastrop County, Texas, et al., resulted in Civil Action No. 388 on June 15, 1948. The court accepted a motion by the State Board of Education and its members to drop one of two clauses in the complaint then ruled on the remaining clause. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the school districts had prohibited Mexican American children from attending public school with white children in violation of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The court restrained and enjoined the state superintendent of instruction from segregating students of Mexican and Latin descent in classes and schools separate from white students. It did allow separate classes on the same campus for Spanish-speaking students in the first grade who, on scientific and standardized tests, could not demonstrate sufficient command of the English language to understand instruction of the subject matter. Since Texas law allowed the segregation of African American students, the custom and practice of racially segregating students continued. As regards Mexican Americans, the de facto segregation of students also continued in the local school districts.

Six years later, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue of the racial segregation of “Negro” children in public education in Brown v. Board of Education Topeka. This case involved both Robert L. Carter and Thurgood Marshall, the attorneys who had prominent roles in pleading the case of the plaintiffs in Mendez v. Westminster in 1947. It is commonly believed that the 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court was the first successful case in desegregating public education, and it was at the national level, but the decision was heavily based on the decision in Mendez, in which Carter and Marshall had honed their argument. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court did not address the merits of Plessey v. Ferguson, the case in which, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed “separate but equal” segregation by race. In 1954, the court held “that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Because court decisions did not always lead immediately to the desegregation of school districts, demands for their implementation gave rise to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which included demands for multicultural education.

Multicultural Education and Public Education

Multicultural education focuses on providing equal educational opportunities for all students by transforming public school curricula to reflect the historical experiences and contributions of historically oppressed ethnoracial populations, namely Native Americans, African Americans, Chicanos/ Latinos, and Asian Americans. James Banks (2016), a leading scholar in the field of multicultural education, identified the following five key components of multicultural education: “1) content integration, 2) the knowledge construction process, 3) an equity pedagogy, 4) prejudice reduction, and 5) empowering school culture and social structure” (p. 4).

Implementation of these components is a process that takes time, but schools that have only added relevant historical and cultural events on a limited and superficial basis continue within a monocultural framework that adds to rather than transforms the curriculum. Perhaps the lack of progress can be attributed to two major trends in the politics of education: 1) conservative politically motivated criticisms of multicultural education and 2) the use of school performance standards that transformed schooling processes into teaching to the tests.

Conservative politically motivated critics of multicultural education assume that the education process is politically neutral, cast proponents as radical extremists, claim that it lowers academic rigor and expectations, and assert that it leads to divisions rather than a unified American culture. These criticisms stem from ideological and political views rather than from research studies and undergird the current moral panic that attacks and bans inclusion of diverse histories in the curricula of public schools and universities. These panics are part of today’s broader nativist social movement that responds to growing economic inequality by mobilizing the general disenchantment that attends it to scapegoat immigrants, promote white supremacist views, and support an authoritarian regime.

The emphasis on standards and accountability processes in public education stems from the 1983 report titled A Nation at Risk that raised concerns about the nation’s mediocre educational performance and its declining preeminence in “commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation” (p. 5). This perspective was part of the broad movement emphasizing free market fundamentalism and the importance of centering a philosophy of entrepreneurialism in the education process. Together the many threads that have constituted the standards and accountability reform movement have generally failed to improve student performance, especially among ethnoracial minority students.

Today, the nation is at political risk due to rising wealth inequality, downward economic mobility experienced by middle-class families, and a long period of wage stagnation among working-class families. In this context, multicultural education becomes all the more important if the aim is to achieve a unified nation, but it cannot be one framed by the “melting pot” ideology of yesteryear nor the Americanization schools of the days of segregation. It has to be on the basis of respect for cultural pluralism. The University of Washington College of Education states on its website that “An important goal of multicultural education is to help students acquire the knowledge and commitments needed to make reflective decisions and to take personal, social, and civic action to promote democracy and democratic living” (para. 11). To this can be added the results of a host of research studies that demonstrate the positive outcomes of multicultural education.

Gay (2003) notes that multicultural education is a necessary component of a quality education and should be a central part of the curriculum. A comprehensive multicultural education program includes “policy, learning climate, instructional delivery, and evaluation” (p. 31). Comprehensive implementation requires making connections between multicultural education and subject-based curricula, and must go beyond history, literature, art, music, and social studies to include math and science. In the process, students learn to think critically and analytically. Importantly, an accurate and inclusive history of the nation must be taught to students. In this way, education has relevance for all students. Too often, the Eurocentric perspective taught to students leads many to disengage from academic learning. Further, students must be taught about racism and other institutionalized processes that marginalize selected populations if they are to envision and commit to a more equitable and just social order.

In a review of the literature, Sleeter (2011) found that programs that are centered on the viewpoints and experiences of ethnoracial minorities have a positive impact on academic achievement and students’ sense of agency, including white students, who show improvements in racial attitudes. Research shows that students who identify with their ethnic origin have higher levels of self-esteem, a stronger sense of purpose in life, and higher levels of self-confidence (Martinez & Dukes, 1997). It makes sense that students who are offered curricula that have relevance for them would engage with academic learning, perform well academically, and graduate from high school. One of the most consistent findings by Sleeter’s (2011) review of the literature is that ethnic studies courses have a positive impact on reducing students’ biases. Such courses may initially be emotionally challenging for some students, especially white students who have not previously grappled with the issues, but as they take more courses, they experience significant gains in the reduction of intolerance.

In the Tucson Unified School District, (TUSD) students were offered courses through the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program established in 1998 in response to a desegregation court order to improve the academic performance of ethnoracial minority students. The desegregation case dated back to 1974 when Mexican Americans and African Americans filed class action suits. As a result, TUSD was under federal oversight until 2022 for discriminatory school segregation and ordered to design and implement a unified plan. The MAS program yielded significant positive outcomes for students. However, in 2009, conservative politicians launched a coordinated legislative attack on the program and banned it in 2010, with the school board closing it in 2012.

A study by Cabrera, Milem, Jaquette, and Marx (2014) on the effectiveness of the MAS program was conducted at the request of the superintendent. The Cabrera et al. study shows that students who participated in the program were more likely to be low income, English language learners, and less likely to be designated as special education students than non-MAS students. Further, those who participated in the program beyond one course and who had failed the state’s standardized tests were more likely to pass the tests upon retaking them and were significantly more likely to graduate from high school than counterparts who did not take MAS courses. Beginning in AY 2013-2014, the TUSD began offering newly developed culturally relevant courses reflecting the history and experiences of Mexican Americans and African Americans, but they are different from those of the program that was eliminated in 2012.

Finally, a recent study of the longer-run effects of a yearlong, pilot ethnic studies course offered to 9th graders in the San Francisco Unified School District concluded that there were significant positive outcomes for students who took the course. Students assigned to the course had a grade point average of 2.0 or lower in the 8th grade. Students were given the option of opting out of the course. The study, based on five cohorts that took the course in AY 2011-12 through 2013-14 in three of five high schools that piloted the course, found that participants in the course significantly increased their attendance throughout high school, their probability of graduating, and the likelihood of matriculating at a college or university. Unlike other studies that had found positive effects in the short run from participating in these courses and programs, this study provides findings on the longer-run effects on students.

Conclusion

Today there is a crisis in public education. Despite decades of education reform movements, poor student performance continues to raise serious concerns in the public arena. Worse yet, there is a resurgence of conservative efforts to censor the education of students in public schools and to ban books that teach about racism, the limits of capitalism, and the oppression of persons who differ from heteronormative norms. There is a conservative populist movement that openly attacks the principles of democracy, appeals to emotions over objective facts, organizes misinformation campaigns using social media, promotes violence against those with ideas that differ from those of the movement, as well as white supremacy, misogynistic, and homophobic views. Not only are these dangerous ideas, they have engendered a dangerous period for the nation as a whole. Rather than moving the nation toward greater equality and justice, they promote neofascist ideas that halt social progress and can literally take the country backwards.

It is important that approaches for addressing the low levels of student performance be firmly grounded in the principles of multicultural education. As the nation becomes more diverse, it is important that unity be achieved through the values of equity, inclusion, and social justice, and the principles of democracy. The unifying moral order called for by conservatives can only be achieved by embracing and respecting cultural pluralism on one level, and promoting the values of equity, inclusion, and justice on another. Multicultural education emphasizes all of these values while closing the achievement gaps in education, reducing biases and stereotypes, and promoting civic engagement in a democratic society. Formal education has the tasks of promoting personal growth among students, increasing their stock of knowledge, and their technical skills. Multicultural education does that while preparing students for an increasingly diverse and global period in human existence.

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