Minority Education Policy: Assumptions and Propositions

ABSTRACT

Educational policy for minority persons, particularly for those with low traditional educational participation, attainment, and achievement levels, is riddled with conflict at every step from basic problem definition to policy response and evaluation. Churchill's (1986) recent framework for minority education policy analysis is a rich source of understanding and insight regarding bedrock issues of social and educational policy for “disadvantaged” minorities. An exploration of the assumptions of that framework recreates the journey of belief over the last two decades of educational policymakers who deal with minority issues. Educational policymakers throughout the world have abandoned their longstanding belief in the Tightness and educational efficacy of assimilationist policies that excluded minority languages and cultures both from schools and from officially accepted visions of education and the educated person. This journey has taken policymakers toward a vision of education that is increasingly eclectic, multilingual, and multicultural. The belief that nonmainstream languages and cultures compete with mainstream learning is giving way to a conviction that education significantly shaped by the languages and cultures of minority persons in fact enhances their educational and life chances. Finally, because of the pervasive presence of minority groups that have been stripped of their ancestral languages and cultures by assimilationist educational and social policies, the Churchill framework invites conceptual integration of the special cases of minorities who have lost their ancestral language and culture.