The Search for More Complex Racial and Ethnic Representation in Grade School Books

Education Trust. 1250 H Street NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20005. Tel: 202-293-1217; Fax: 202-293-2605; Web site: https://edtrust.org/

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40

Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

Culturally Relevant Education; Elementary School Students; Textbooks; Textbook Content; Ethnicity; Textbook Evaluation; Cultural Awareness

Children gain immense benefits from representationally diverse curricula that allow students to see themselves and others in complexity. Unfortunately, curricula have never been representationally diverse, and this lack of diversity and inclusion in school curricula harms students--more than half of whom are students of color. Implicit biases are embedded across publishing, curriculum development, and teaching fields, all of which are themselves far less diverse than student populations. The purpose of this report is to offer a deeper understanding of what a high-quality and culturally relevant curricula should look like. The Ed Trust team convened experts, consulted publishers, and examined a variety of 300 books, from kindergarten through eighth grade, from leading curriculum publishers whose materials partially or fully met measures of high quality by EdReports, an organization that evaluates curricula based on alignment to the Common Core standards and other indicators of quality. They analyzed and synthesized components of the many valuable tools being used to understand cultural responsiveness, bias, and inclusivity across curricular disciplines and student populations. The analysis highlights the need to look at authorship and at how authors portray people, cultures, and topics to readers. For there to be representational balance, people from traditionally marginalized groups must be depicted in all their complexity.

ERIC

2024

ED641895