Racing Toward Educational Reform

In his influential history of curriculum debates, Herbert Kliebard has documented that educational issues have consistently involved major conflicts and compromises among groups with competing visions of “legitimate” knowledge, what counts as “good” teaching and learning, and what is a “just” society (Kliebard 1986). That such conflicts have deep roots in conflicting views of racial, class, and gender justice in education and the larger society is ratified in even more critical recent work as well (see, e.g., Rury and Mirel 1996; Teitelbaum 1996; Selden 1999).