Misidentification, Misinformation, and Miseducation: The Experiences of Minoritized Students and Representation in Public Schools Across Three Societies Around the Globe

Schools and other institutions of learning are intended to be safe havens, where children are protected, even outside their families, but in fact among students from marginalized and minoritized backgrounds, it is all too common for them to have toxic experiences in these institutions where the mission is to serve them and improve their lives. Social role valorization theory, the theory that the social roles that people ascribe to others determine the treatment they receive, applies to schools (Wolfensberger, 1983). In these microcosms of greater society, teachers and administrators will hold the same deficit and stereotypical attitudes that people hold outside the confines of schools (Starck et al., 2020).

The aim of this themed issue is to highlight the stories of students who must contend with structural racism and marginalization at school. Some of these stories have not been told before; some may seem familiar. However, such narratives are usually only presented within what I call a “metropolitan puzzle.” By this I mean that all of the pieces that fit together to tell these stories generally render an image of only one society, typically the United States (U.S.), and sometimes even a subset of the U.S. such as its urban areas. Education journals and the organizations that sponsor them claim to be internationally focused, to seek to advance the greater good by calling attention to systemic barriers affecting educational systems across the globe. Yet published issue after published issue in academic journals contain wholly or mainly articles written by U.S. scholars who have done their research in the U.S. It is time for more globally based empirical scholarship that connects the experiences of students worldwide with those of students in that reputed melting pot or mixing bowl, the United States. In parallel to the claim of a melting pot is the belief that racial and ethnic barriers are intrinsically higher in the U.S. than in some other places, such as Canada (Mullings et al., 2016) and Europe (MacMaster, 2017). In this issue I hope to provide the tools for us all to learn from each other’s struggles by showing that no single locale is working alone to overcome structural inequality and prepare our students for the challenges of the 21st century. These challenges are formidable, and if we continue to fail to train huge portions of the population to meet them—indeed, the majority of student bodies in many countries, the United States included, are not non-Hispanic Whites—we are unlikely to survive as a species.

The authors who contributed pieces to this issue have tackled it in countries and with respect to subpopulations that often receive little attention in mainstream scholarly outlets. These stories and many others need to be told if we are to address inequality in education systems, if misidentification and misinformation are to no longer lead to miseducation. Thus I hope this themed issue will lead other journal editors and publishers as well as scholars themselves to push beyond the bounds of special issues to include such stories with far greater frequency in journals, books, and conference proceedings. In tandem I hope that the concerns addressed here will be taken outside professional development and become part of the fabric of the everyday in classrooms, curriculum development, and training of educators worldwide. The worldwide problem we discuss here—and its global nature itself—requires more than a one and done model of mitigation.

Thus what the authors offer here I hope is the beginning of far more. Pomroy et al., give us a deep examination of the experiences of the Māori (Indigenous) as well as the Pacific Island students in the context of a society dominated by the Pākehā (New Zealand European majority). The researchers found in their study that the socioeconomic status of parents were predictors of the socioeconomic aspirations of students and racial and ethnic background patterned parents’ status. Luoma and Koseunen explored the tensions that exist among teachers, students from the ethnic majority, and students from the ethnic minority in Finland. In their study they reveal that social and ethnic backgrounds were highly predictive of students’ sense of ownership of how they learn. Lee et al., focused on special education in South Korea. There, as elsewhere, special education placement overlaps significantly with social disadvantage. They found that special education teachers held many negative attitudes toward students placed in special education programs and toward their families. In other words, not only is school no haven against the social prejudices prevalent in society but special education classrooms are not even protecting the most vulnerable students. Last, my colleague Kan and I examined the experiences of asylum-seeking and refugee (ASR) students in the U.S. state of Texas. We found that in spite of the fact that they were enrolled in a school dedicated to serving new arrivals they were subject to assimilationist pressures in an environment that did not value their experiences and that envisioning their ideal brought to light how distant their education in the U.S. was from such an ideal.

Learning about the experiences of ASR students reaffirmed for me the importance of this issue, as ASR populations are growing worldwide. These populations frequently enter receiving societies at a disadvantage, socially, linguistically, and economically, even as they may be more likely to have been well-off financially in their sending countries. They also experience high rates of trauma, a problem also common in disadvantaged students in many urban environments. We found that the prior educational experiences of study participants varied widely and believe it would behoove educators and educational scholars to learn to understand those histories, an aim journal editors can help to achieve by seeking out scholarship conducted in a wider variety of places.

The process will not be instant, but it must start now. This themed issue, for example, was over 2 years in the making. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be its editor. I will forever be grateful to Dr. Claire Smrekar, Editor of the Peabody Journal of Education, for taking a chance on a then-postdoctoral scholar to take on a solo effort as a guest editor, and to the authors who trusted by editorial feedback along the way. We all serve the same aim: to better the education, worldwide, of students who have been made to feel that “they are not supposed to be” in their classrooms (Cormier, 2022). In fact, there is nowhere they should be more accepted and valued. On a personal note: I left the classroom where I was among the rarest of unicorns, a Black male special education teacher (Cormier, 2021), in order to become a scholar, but I never gave up my mission of serving minoritized and marginalized students, and I am so glad to offer this issue and to work with these valued colleagues to continue to serve that aim.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Christopher J. Cormier

Christopher J. Cormier is a former special education teacher and an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University. He has taught first through 12th in Title 1 schools in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area. His research program focuses on the social and cultural contexts of minoritized learners and teachers in special education. Under this overarching theme, he has two lines of scholarship. The first is on the professional and socioemotional lives of minoritized teachers. The second is on culturally informed identification of minoritized students in special education.