Experts from the University of Birmingham and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are investigating the role of racism across the education system; from national policies to school-level decisions about discipline and academic selection.
Despite occasional ‘good news’ stories about fluctuations in statistics, the reality is that race inequality persists, and is deeply entrenched.
Using ‘critical race theory’, and building a compelling evidence base including national level statistics, the group are looking at how race inequality is shaped and legitimised across the system and ask ‘what if education policy is not designed to eliminate race inequality but to sustain it?’
BRIDGE Fellow – Dr Claire Crawford
Claire joined the University of Birmingham in September 2016 as a BRIDGE Research Fellow within the Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE). She is a PGCE qualified educator with several years teaching experience at both further and higher education levels.
Currently, as part of the University of Birmingham and University of Illinois BRIDGE Fellowship, Claire is applying CRT principles to shape a critical examination of government issued testing data in both the UK and US. More specifically, Claire is exploring the potentially racist, classist, gendered and dis/ablest assumptions contained within government published attainment statistics and related policy pronouncements. This work will build into a detailed cross-national study of how the ‘achievement gap’ is constructed, managed and policed on either side of the Atlantic.