Inequality, inequality, inequality: The material reality of racial injustice in education

In her 2006 presidential address to the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Gloria Ladson-Billings remarked on how commonplace talk of the ‘achievement gap’ has become. Adopting an approach influenced by Critical Race Theory, Ladson-Billings insists on an historically contextualized perspective that calls attention to the centuries of racism and exclusion that have shaped the present situation; creating an educational debt rather than a simple gap. In this chapter I set out a critical race perspective on the inequalities of achievement that characterize the English system.