ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework to look at the way legal efforts have worked to both ensure and deny educational opportunities for students of color. It discusses the way schooling in the United States (U.S) continues to uphold and reinforce racial inequality and how that inequality contributes to the achievement disparities extant in the nation’s schools. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is more precisely a set of theories that argue that racism is normal, not aberrant in US life. The major tenets of CRT include the following: racism as normal, not aberrant, and constitutive of the fabric of US life and culture; much of reality is social constructed; storytelling or more accurately, counterstorytelling is a way for marginalized groups to address their marginalization; use of critical social science as a tool for analyzing inequality in the society; and interest convergence as a vehicle for moving civil rights agendas forward.
