Ya es Tiempo de Aprender Otro Idioma: Expanding Access to Internationalized K-12 Education in the U.S.

“Why have we normalized that we are primarily a monolingual country – even though our nation has only become more multicultural, more interdependent with the rest of the world? Why is it that in 2023, in many school systems in our country, we treat our English learners as students with deficits – rather than assets in a globally competitive world?” These were the questions U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona asked at the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) 52nd Annual International Bilingual and Bicultural Education Conference. While it is impossible to formulate a simple answer to these questions, it is clearer now in 2023 than any other time in the twenty-first century that school reform has become an overwhelmingly polarizing issue with little bipartisan agreement over policies, resource allocation, or school reform. In an increasingly competitive marketplace of education reform ideas, internationalized K-12 education finds itself moderately supported but ultimately neglected due to “more pressing” issues within the education landscape, such as COVID-related learning loss and addressing political polarization. One could argue that doubling down on Mandarin classes for middle schoolers who are grade levels below their expected math proficiency should be somewhere at the bottom of our most vital education reform ideas, but this could not be further from the truth. As demand for school reform grows and new education policies are rapidly proposed and implemented, expanding access to internationalized K-12 education must be prioritized by the federal government, state governments, and schools.
From learning loss recovery policies to school voucher programs, recent U.S. education policies aimed at fixing what has been broken have been prioritized over revitalization efforts. Policymakers look at “failing” inner-city schools and see an emergency that must be fixed rather than a hub of resilience, innovation, and multicultural expertise waiting to be plugged into our globalized society. Within a damage-centered framework, U.S. K-12 students have lost too much learning from COVID-19 to be focusing on much else beyond meeting basic grade-level requirements, and the best path forward is ensuring students “catch up” by focusing solely on literacy and math proficiency. This damage-centered framework would also lead us to believe increased family-school tension and polarization are irreparable, and the best path forward is a school voucher system that allows families and educators to self-sort into private schools most aligned with their views. As any educator will understand, however, there is rarely ever one right way to solve a problem, and the current zeitgeist of the 2020s calls for the prioritization of internationalized K-12 education policies that work to creatively and equitably address a myriad of issues including but not limited to COVID-related learning loss and polarization. To America, Dr. Cardona passionately called for the bringing in of a “new era of multilingualism,” and to students? “¡Ya es tiempo de aprender otro idioma!”

Conceptualizing Internationalized Education

Internationalized education can be described as “a process of incorporating international, intercultural, and global perspectives into different education contexts.” Framed as a necessary tool to sculpt young Americans into globally competitive citizens, internationalized education remains very popular in higher education institutions. Internationalized education materialized in the K-12 sector through the creation of private, internationally-minded schools. With the purpose of internationalized education being framed as primarily economic, policymakers and school leaders seemingly had little reason to support expanding access to internationalized education for poor students. International schools first came into existence with the goal of engaging in missionary activities and colonization, and while the restricted access of Black and Brown students to language classes and K-12 study abroad problematizes the claim that international schools have changed drastically from their exclusionary roots, internationalized curricula and programs can be seen in both private and public schools today. It is precisely this - the internationalized public school - that has the power to redirect the path that U.S. education reform is heading from deepening polarization and further inequities to a generation of multilingual, globally competent Americans. 

Access to dual-language immersion programs, K-12 study abroad opportunities, and instruction from educators with a global perspective not only increase economic outcomes and career opportunities for students but also help develop students’ social and emotional development in cross-cultural settings, reduce polarization, and increase a sense of belonging and excitement within school communities. Amid the growing implementation of school voucher programs and pressure on “failing schools” to increase test scores, refraining from incorporating internationalized education into public K-12 schools across the U.S. will only make our next generation of global ambassadors more homogenous. If the federal government, state governments, and schools work together to rapidly implement education policies that prioritize expanding access to internationalized education for all students, it is very likely that the most pressing educational issues of our time will be thoroughly addressed in the process.

Federal Policy Recommendations for Expanding Access to Internationalized Education

As the federal government navigates internationalized education reform, the priority must be well-informed but hands-off investments in public K-12 schools and making international partnerships. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how innovative and effective schools can be even in dismal circumstances. From Kansas’s use of COVID-19 relief funds to offset the cost of field trips to museums and historical sites to South Carolina using the funds to make school bus Wi-Fi a reality, it is evident that states have different needs and are most innovative when policies are imagined using a bottom-up approach as opposed to top-down. To expand access to internationalized education in public K-12 schools, the federal government should invest in well-informed but hands-off grant programs for state education departments to use within their public school systems. A competitive global education grant program, accompanied with comprehensive monitoring and evaluating practices, will give states the capital they need to ensure stronger multilingualism and global educational opportunities in public schools while still having the freedom to address their own state-wide or community-wide needs. Additionally, the federal government should prioritize working with other countries’ education ministries as well as international education organizations from other regions to connect states’ education department leaders with international perspectives and policy suggestions. These ideas can then be used to inform and inspire leaders at the community or city level to use grant funds for expanding globalized education access in ways previously not considered. Global cooperation between the U.S. Department of Education with other countries’ education ministries will set the foundation for comprehensive, globally-minded R&D on K-12 internationalized education initiatives in the U.S.

State Policy Recommendations for Expanding Access to Internationalized Education

State governments play an essential role in expanding student access to quality internationalized education in a public school setting. Moving forward, it is vital for states to not only implement education policies that address COVID-related learning loss but also policies that increase students’ global competency and language skills. While some may argue falling literacy and math proficiency scores are proof that language skills need to be put on the back burner for now, there is data that dual language immersion boosts proficiency in other subjects for both English-speaking and ESL students. Not only are other academic subjects bolstered but dual language programs increase friendship and cultural competency between students of different racial or cultural backgrounds and increase overall confidence. When states neglect language immersion for “failing” schools, they often end up barring predominantly lower-income Black and Brown students from the internationalized education that sets so many upper-income white students up for success at the collegiate and vocational level. State governments must prioritize education policies that incentivize private-public school collaboration to put public schools in conversation with international schools within their state. This can also look like incentivizing state colleges to work with local K-12 public schools to grow language immersion programs or allow for high school students to audit college courses on intercultural communication and global politics. Additionally, states should center internationalized education at the core of their teacher shortage efforts. This could look like teacher pipeline programs that incentivize bilingual adults or immigrants within the state to pursue a teaching role through lowered teaching requirements at public schools and a pipeline that leads to these teachers earning a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in education.

School Policy Recommendations for Expanding Access to Internationalized Education

At the school level, low-cost policies can still lead to high-impact results when it comes to making internationalized education a reality for all students. Dual-language programs have been extremely successful in providing English-speaking and ESL students the opportunity to hone their language skills, build cross-cultural friendships, and gain tutoring experience. School districts can also reward student engagement in cross-cultural contexts or with language programs through biliteracy or bicultural certificates. A certificate program could function in a cohort-based model with a lead teacher mentoring students seeking biliteracy in or outside the classroom. Other school policies could include investing in a more internationalized library, organizing dual language exchange programs for parents and teachers, supporting student efforts to obtain passports for study abroad, prioritizing the hiring of bilingual community members and family members when filling part-time school positions, emphasizing teacher professional development on bilingual students as assets not deficits or tools, and ensuring students on vocational or technical tracks can still engage in internationalized education through work with immigrant-owned businesses and professionals in the community.

Conclusion

From polarizing international events being broadcast everyday on the news to deepening disparities in graduation and attendance among students across the country, the current zeitgeist of 2023 can be used to implement successful and equitable expansion of internationalized K-12 education that has the potential to address COVID-related learning loss, fill teacher shortages, increase global cooperation, and reduce polarization. With school voucher systems becoming more commonplace across states and family dissatisfaction with public schools on the rise, it is vital that public school innovation and autonomy in addition to family-school engagement is incentivized and encouraged at the federal and state education policy level. Internationalized public education proves to be an overlooked but much-needed reform strategy that may look different in each school or state but could ultimately unify America’s students as they grow up in a world more globalized and interconnected than ever before. Upper-income private school students can no longer be the only young Americans engaging in internationalized education in 2023. A global education must be accessible to all students. With the right policies from the federal and state government in accompaniment with innovative school policies, teachers can confidently tell their students: “¡Ya es tiempo de aprender otro idioma!”

The Pandemic's Effects on Educational Disparities Between Mongolia's Rural and Urban Students

COVID-19 has resculpted the global landscape of education, resulting in devastating learning loss that widened the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers. By exacerbating inequities around the world, the pandemic has spurred teachers and policymakers everywhere to rethink education. While various organizations attempt to make collective statements about the pandemic’s effects on the international education as a whole, invaluable information can be gained by using a more singular lens to approach the issue of COVID-19’s impact as it relates to a particular country’s education system. As the world’s most sparsely populated independent country and one whose pandemic response has been largely successful, Mongolia makes for an interesting focus point upon which the pandemic’s effects on education can be examined. Surprisingly, there are few reports exploring the ways in which Mongolian schools have been challenged by and interacted with the pandemic. In this report, I aim to explore how the pandemic affected Mongolia and what inferences can be made regarding the pandemic’s effects on Mongolian education.

Mongolia and the Pandemic

March 9, 2022 marks two years since Mongolia first came in contact with the coronavirus through a French national working in the country. From this moment on, the nation has been grappling with serious questions regarding how to best shape government policy to combat the pandemic and keep people safe. Even before the virus found its way into Mongolia, the government had been on high alert. This trend can be seen as early as January 10, 2020, when the Mongolian government issued its first public advisory, aimed at urging all Mongolians to wear a mask. This was soon followed by the closing of borders to its neighbor China with whom Mongolia shares the longest land border. The transportation restriction meant no Chinese citizen or person traveling from China could enter Mongolia. Through the implementation of its early response to the pandemic, Mongolia had managed to entirely evade any COVID-19 deaths until December 30, 2020. The Mongolian government’s determination to rapidly implement high-impact COVID-19 prevention policies stemmed not only from concerns over its shared border with China, but also from insecurity regarding the country’s health infrastructure. “Here’s the thing: we don’t actually have a great public health system,” explained Davaadorj Rendoo, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Public Health in Mongolia’s capital and largest city Ulaanbaatar. “That’s why our administrators were so afraid of COVID-19.”

As of April 2022, the number of active COVID-19 cases in Mongolia has dropped below 1,000 for the first time since late 2020. With the number of daily infections declining and the percentage of fully vaccinated people exceeding 65%, things seem to be looking up for the Mongolian people. However, while pandemic-related policies in Mongolia seem to have enabled the country to evade overwhelming fatalities, the pandemic has inflicted serious damage to the Mongolian education system. Since all schools were closed on January 27, 2020 to combat the spread of COVID-19 among students, the education system has been forced to undergo significant, unprecedented changes. These changes disproportionately affected Mongolia’s most vulnerable students living in remote areas with limited internet access and electricity. Even in Mongolia’s most populous cities like Ulaanbaatar, the immediate switch to remote learning has left no student unscathed. While UNICEF estimates that schoolchildren across the globe have lost over 1.8 trillion hours of in-person learning due to the pandemic, it is difficult to precisely conclude how much learning loss the students of Mongolia have experienced. Data is still being collected, and the pandemic has not yet been eradicated. 

Mongolian Education: Pre-Pandemic

In order to gain a better understanding of the pandemic’s effects on education in Mongolia, it is important to be acquainted with the pre-pandemic state of Mongolian schools. Mongolia’s 2018 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey provides valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the Mongolian education system before the pandemic. Developed by UNICEF, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) program is the largest household survey on women and children worldwide. Its purpose has been “to assist countries in filling data gaps on children’s and women’s health statuses.” Mongolia’s 2018 MICS fortifies the argument that rural/urban educational inequity has existed in Mongolia before the pandemic, opening the doors to explore how the pandemic has interacted with that inequity. According to the report, 58.2% of rural children aged 36-59 months were attending early childhood education institutes. Compared to the 81.4% of urban children, it is evident that living in urban Mongolia comes with a higher likelihood of obtaining access to early childhood education, which has been proven to lower risks of school dropout and contribute to higher learning and employment outcomes later in life. Additionally, having access to early childhood education means that a child’s caregiver can participate in the workforce, which is key to “breaking stubborn cycles of intergenerational poverty.” Early childhood education inequity explains why higher education inequity also exists in Mongolia. According to UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, 53% of 18-22 year olds living in urban Mongolia attend higher education institutes. Compared to the 15% in rural Mongolia, it goes without saying that Mongolia’s “regional variation in poverty” contributes to wealth disparities between rural and urban regions of the country.

Turning back to the 2018 MICS, it can be observed that 4.3% of male urban schoolchildren of lower secondary school age were out of school in 2018 compared to the 8.1% of male rural schoolchildren. However, there are still some nuances to be explored, considering more female urban schoolchildren are out of school than rural female schoolchildren. This is a point upon which I would advise further research to identify what causes female urban schoolchildren to leave school and what incentivizes female rural schoolchildren to remain in school much longer than their male peers. Despite women in Mongolia being better educated than men, a gendered hierarchy still exists in which men are likely to be paid more than women in Mongolia. 

Looking beyond lower secondary school students and onto upper secondary school students, the urban/rural gap in school attendance expands. While only 7.5% of urban upper secondary students were out of school during the year of 2018, the percentage jumps to 25.9% for Mongolia’s rural upper secondary students. This can be explained by the disproportionate lack of support faced by rural students; urban students exceeded rural students in every “Support for Child Learning at School” category in the 2018 MICS— “percentage of children attending school,” “percentage of children for whom an adult household member in the last year received a report card for the child,” “school has a governing body open to parents,” “an adult household member attended a meeting called by governing body,” “a school meeting discussed key education/financial issues,” “an adult household member attended a school celebration or sports event,” and “an adult household member met with teachers to discuss child’s progress.” In the context of the social determinants of learning framework, these factors have the potential to contribute highly to student achievement but are disproportionately denied to rural students. It is important to remember that this is not due to an inferiority on behalf of rural Mongolian parents or a superiority on behalf of urban Mongolian parents. Considering that they are more likely to face poverty than their urban counterparts, rural families are more likely to work more frequently in order to support their children. This means that there is not always time for rural parents and caretakers to meet with teachers and attend school meetings or events. Additionally, schools increase parent involvement—and thus student success—by building community. While developments like Mongolia’s Rural Education and Development program have contributed significantly to tightening the gap between rural and urban schools, the inequity still remains, likely posing the reason as to why rural schools may lack the resources to engage rural families living in poverty. 

The Pandemic and Mongolian Schools

Mongolia’s 2020 MICS offers insight into how the pandemic has interacted with the increasingly urbanized country and its schools. The report’s information on early childhood education offers interesting doors through which more research could be conducted, specifically on the disparity between children of Khalkh ethnicity and children of Kazakh ethnicity. The report also found interesting data on rural school children outperforming city students in foundational numeracy skills in 2020. However, when it comes to information and communications technology (ICT) skills, urban students outperform rural students overwhelmingly. An observation is made in the report that ICT skill acquisition is “hugely influenced” by wealth quintiles. The ICT skills examined in this report include but are not limited to sending an email with an attached file, transferring a file between a computer and another device, creating an electronic presentation using presentation software, connecting and installing a new device, and using a copy and paste tool within a document. In our increasingly digitized world, the importance of ICT skills for students cannot be underestimated. Considering this, it is evident that rural students have faced more barriers throughout online learning than urban students. This is supported by Sodnomdarjaa Munkhbat’s comment to Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung Mongolia. As the Director of the Science and Technology Department at the Mongolian Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, she said, “School children were taught through classes broadcasted on TV and universities used remote learning technology. Both had to be developed and implanted on extremely short notice which put a lot of stress on teachers, professors, and students. TV classes were especially challenging.” 

The 2020 MICS also found that parents’ engagement in ger districts of Ulaanbaatar was 10 percentage points lower than those living in apartments. The study concluded that “the low rate of engagement is also common in rural area[s] and especially in [the] Western region.” When looking at the data on parental homework help, the report found parents with certain qualities were more likely to offer their child homework assistance; these qualities include having obtained a higher education, not having migrated within the last 5 years, and having attended a public school. This offers an explanation as to why in the 2018 MICS, similar findings on lack of support for rural students were identified. This information lends itself to the acknowledgement that, in order to achieve educational equity between rural and urban students, the Mongolian education system must work to enhance resources for students whose parents have not obtained a higher education.

Although the 2020 MICS offers little insight into the pandemic itself, popular Mongolian news sources like Зууны мэдээ (Zuunii medee) supplement this deficit with their article on textbook availability. “The education sector has collapsed due to the pandemic,” journalist Ch. Gantulga wrote mournfully. Gantulga points to a lack of textbook availability as a huge problem facing Mongolia during the pandemic. D. Delgermaa, a middle school teacher, told Gantulga, “I am in charge of the seventh grade. Our class has 31 children. Due to the small number of textbooks distributed by the school, only one book is used by three children. In particular, there are not enough books on Mongolian language and social sciences. Some potential families buy textbooks for their children…Some students have problems with not being able to read e-books because they do not have smartphones. If these children have enough textbooks, there will be no problem.” Put in the context of the wealth disparities between rural and urban students previously established, it is evident that more needs to be done by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science to repair the learning losses exacerbated not only by the pandemic but also by lack of school resources. This sentiment does not seem to have been lost on Munkhbat, who said to FES Mongolia, “The pandemic made it very clear that the education system must be ready and responsive to high risk situations. What happened this year can happen any time again. Our way forward will be to enhance online education particularly for the higher education sector. This will be embedded in the government’s strategy of a ‘digital transformation.’” While a digital transformation is likely highly anticipated by students in Mongolia, the data leaves us with an understanding that, in addition to education as a whole, digital literacy instruction is not equitably distributed to all students in Mongolia. It will be important, moving forward, for Mongolia to put adequate resources toward building all students’ ICT skills, paying special attention to rural students.

Having analyzed the state of Mongolian education before and after the pandemic, it is evident that the pre-pandemic challenges faced by rural students have been exacerbated by COVID-19. These challenges are an extension of the poverty faced disproportionately by rural Mongolians. The disparity in school attendance between rural and urban students highlights the presence of class barriers in Mongolia. These inequities may stem from disproportionate access to early education, which has been proven to result in higher learning and employment outcomes later in life. The ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated educational inequity in Mongolia is important to analyze, considering its impact may materialize as a generation divided unequally by their level of access to education. This may be seen in the construction and perpetuation of intergenerational poverty for Mongolians who were in school during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mongolia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science has the ability to change this by financing high-quality schools in rural regions of the country, implementing poverty-reduction policies for rural families so that students are not incentivized to choose work over school, ensuring school resources are equitably distributed, implementing educational policies that focus on honing the digital literacy skills of rural youth, and further analyzing the ways in which the pandemic has differently shaped educational outcomes for rural and urban students.

How the Teaching Methods of PWIs Infiltrate the Teaching Methods of HBCUs

Thousands of PWIs (predominantly white institutions) across the United States have made themselves enticing to marginalized students, but have failed to create inclusive, safe, and accepting spaces for them. Davarian Baldwin’s, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: how Universities are Plundering our Cities, beautifully depicts the impacts of “univerCities” as an ivory tower–a metaphorical location– where primarily privileged people are cut off from the rest of the world, enjoying their own life’s pursuits and how students, residents, and activists of the community rise up to meet the institutions. Andrew Rossi’s film, The Ivory Tower, conducts a rich cost-benefit analysis of HEIs (higher education institutions) and concludes that numerous HEI professors and faculty members disseminate information on such niche subject matter in coursework, often disconnected from students’ life experiences, notably the experiences of underserved students, such as low-income students, Black and Brown students, queer students, students with disabilities, and/or students with ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). The ivory tower’s pedagogy, or method of teaching in the higher education classroom, is deeply embedded in what Paulo Friere has denoted, in Chapter 2 of his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the “narrative” aspects of education in the conventional western classroom under the “banking model of education.” In the model, the teacher or educator is a “narrating subject depositing information” into the students’ minds, with their students as passive agents. The students’ life experiences become disconnected from their instructor’s “narration” because they absorb information without its full context. Not only does it exclude context, but it lacks space for student creativity and expression, and it discourages questions and the production of knowledge, which emerges from constant questioning. The “banking model of education” grants the teacher all knowledge and assumes that the powerless (students) are ignorant, which highlights the crux of the issue in western HEIs. 

Scholar bell hooks, in Teaching a Community Pedagogy of Hope, discusses the problematic ways in which higher education transformed its banking pedagogy to invoke more radical and “liberating” ideas in incrementally problematic ways. As white and cis-gendered men have dominated and continue to dominate the academic sphere, they have championed gender equality over racial equality in their analysis. To avoid being replaced in academia, they had to (at least) adopt a gender/feminist lens. In turn, this created a binary between “feminist studies” professors and “Black studies” professors, with an alternative of “cultural studies” professors thrown into the mix. “Cultural studies” professors are established by and comprised of white, cis-gendered male professors, who “recognized” and “incorporated” race and gender into their curriculum, yet primarily fear those who “question,” as Friere’s model indicates. These “liberating” ideals have infiltrated HEIs, starting in the latter half of the 20th century, and persisting across colleges and universities today, including HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). Not only do they exist pervasively within PWIs, but they have infiltrated HBCUs across the United States. 

At their inception, HBCUs were established to develop spaces for Black intellectualism and to center students who have been excluded from white academic spaces– academic spaces that are upheld by an economic ecosystem of racial capitalism. Students at universities are privileged consumers investing in a commodity of education, an exclusive commodity that Black people have historically and continuously been denied. As a hub of intellectual, scholarly, and academic pursuits, universities and colleges have the assets to build certain structures. Universities have also accumulated a social responsibility to not only their students, but to their surrounding community; Baldwin has effectively concluded that they have largely failed to fulfill their social responsibility to the community. 

Moreover, Friere’s “banking model of education” has permeated not just HEIs, but all aspects of western education (specifically in the U.S.), resulting in the “liberal” state of affairs that bell hooks exhibits. It is clear that there has been an infiltration of white supremacy deeply laced into the infrastructure and pedagogy of HBCUs, resulting in a manifestation of white supremacy within these spaces. This cycle of white supremacy is reinforced within PWIs and has resulted in prevalent discourse across academic and social circles regarding the notion of whether Black students are better off attending HBCUs versus PWIs. According to an NPR interview with Dillard University president, Walter Kimbrough, Black students are in search of safe learning environments due to abundant incidence and coverage of the recruitment of white supremacy on college campuses, hate crimes against Black students, among other instances of racial aggression. While HBCUs haven’t been recognized for the same more blatant forms of racism that happen at PWIs, students at HBCUs are not liberated from the dominance of white ideologies that invade academic and social spheres altogether. Research traffic has overlooked the impact of HBCUs as HEIs that perpetuate white ideologies (Feagin 2010, 189). To understand this, it is integral to note the mere control white people have over systems of power, specifically over educational systems of power. Ultimately, the incidence of white control across educational systems of power has resulted in Black Americans internalizing hegemonic methodologies–even at HBCUs. 

Moreover, the history of HBCUs reflects the United States’ failure to attain racial justice in academic and social realms. White supremacist ideas that became laced into these spheres prohibited Black people from succeeding as intellectuals, barred from reaping the benefits of any form of higher education as most HBCUs were established post-Civil War by missionaries. Northern missionaries collaborated with the Freedmen’s Bureau to create Black colleges with the intent to free Black people by providing them with primary and secondary education. The establishment and philanthropic funding of these institutions was produced by northern industrialist white men–its initial pedagogy entrenched in Christian values and moral character (Albritton 2013; Gasman 2010; Wilcox et al. 2014; Cantey et al. 2011).

 The goal of these institutions at their origin was to prepare their students for labor-based work. Leading philosophers of the moment like Booker T. Washington advocated the vocational model for Black folks, emphasizing the need for them to develop useful skills in the labor force that would help industries immediately. Washington argued that with hard work and determination in the industrial sector, Black people would eventually gain the acceptance of their dominant counterparts and of the system. Washington’s theory emerged into a pedagogy of upward social mobility across HBCUs like Morehouse College, Tuskegee University, and Spelman College in the early 20th century to present an identity that would appear “respectable” to white folks (Albritton 2013; Cantey et al. 2013). These universities offered several classes on manners and industrial labor work. The institutionalization of such a theory reifies white supremacy that has been upheld throughout U.S. history. Under Plessy v. Ferguson, slavery was justified by white men to ‘improve the lives of uncivilized Africans who were intellectually inferior.’ This frame persists in HBCUs today where the inferiority of Black students has become laced into the education system through these practices (Feagin 2010). 

Black students and faculty resisted this hegemony across Black colleges and demanded agency over their HEIs and more Black people were hired as faculty (deans, administrators, professors, etc) at HBCUs. This more radical shift paralleled a shift to a liberal arts pedagogical approach–one more closely associated with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois countered Washington’s theory of industrializing students at Black colleges and adopted a holistic curriculum of courses (Albritton 2013; Gasman 2010; Cantey et al. 2013). In the 1960s, HBCUs emerge as epicenters of student activism and resistance. At this moment, HBCUs acted as spaces of validation of Black students’ identities and dares them to use their knowledge to call for justice in the Black community, which still holds true for Black students at HBCUs today. At HBCUs in the south, college campuses were sometimes the only safe space for Black folks to safely radically organize with allied white folks (Mbajekwe 2006).  

While understanding the crucial role these institutions play, how do we sustain the strengths of the institutions while adapting to the hegemonic curriculums that have permeated higher education? HBCUs are challenged with centering Black liberation for their student population, while also preparing their students to live in a society that has been designed to favor whiteness. Although Black Americans will never have full and open access to white spheres of power, HBCUs have certainly accrued politics of respectability. However, it is no question that a radical call-to-action is necessary in order to completely restructure the system that dominates HBCUs. There should not be educators at HBCUs that cannot connect course material to the students’ life experiences, as Paulo Friere asserts. As a white student about to finish my undergraduate education at a PWI, I acknowledge that there is a lot of information I don’t know and haven’t experienced with regard to the racism that happens within the confines of HBCUs campuses, and there is information regarding the personal experiences of Black students that I do not and will not ever understand– both of which speak to my role as a scholar and activist interested in educational reform for oppressed peoples. However, it is imperative to grow aware of the notion that racism doesn’t only seep through predominantly white spaces. 

References

Albritton, Travis. 2013. “Educating Our Own: The Historical Legacy of HBCUs and Their Relevance for Educating a New Generation of Leaders” Urban Rev 44 (3): 311-331.

Arroyo and Gasman. 2014. “An HBCU-Based Educational Approach for Black College Student Success: Toward a Framework with Implications for All Institutions” American Journal of Education, 121(1): 57-85.

Cantey, Nia, Bland, Robert, Mack, LaKerri, and Danielle Joy-Davis. 2013. “Historically Black

Feagin, Joe R. 2010. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter- Framing, second edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gasman, Marybeth. 2010. Unearthing Promise and Potential: Our Nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. San Franscisco, CA: Jossey- Bass.

Mbajekwe, Carolyn. 2006. The Future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Jefferson,

Washington, Amanda and Marybeth Gasman. 2016. “Why Enrollment is Increasing at HBCUs,” The Hill, August 22.

Washington, Booker T. 1906. “Tuskegee: A retrospect and Prospect”. North American Review, 182(593): 513–523.

Wilcox, Clyde, Wells, Jovita, Hadda, Georges, and Judith Wilcox. 2014. “The Changing Democratic Functions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities” New Political Science 3 (4): 556-572.

Educational Policy is not enough to Address Rural Educational Inequity in China and the U.S.

It has been argued that cities are the future. In recent years, there has been an uptick in highly educated individuals moving from non-urban areas to America’s major cities. Scholarly, political, and social interest in theories about “brain drain” has infiltrated many interdisciplinary fields, analyzing why there seems to be an unspoken agreement among aspiring professionals that rural areas have no opportunity. As the U.S. and China begin competing for first place in what is appearing to become a bipolar international order and as the major cities in both these countries grow wealthier and more urbanized at breakneck speed, the question about what happens to rural areas is inevitably raised. In the contemporary context of increasingly urbanized international superpowers and a pandemic-shaken world, urban/rural educational inequity is becoming a concerning issue despite not receiving nearly enough attention from policymakers around the globe. In this piece, I aim to analyze the urban/rural educational inequities in China and the U.S. and explore whether or not Chinese and American educational policy with its current characteristics and limitations is the most effective solution for tightening the educational equity gap between urban and rural communities.

Since the Chinese market reforms began in the early eighties, China’s GPD has risen dramatically, making income inequality a major policy issue in addition to widening the equity gap between urban and rural students. Although China spends over ¥5.3 trillion ($837 billion) on education, the allocation of this money is inequitable. Cities with large populations like Beijing and Shanghai require more funding, but what does this mean for places like southwestern China’s Yunnan province, among other rural regions with widespread financial instability and suppressed financial mobility? Many would argue that the state of China’s education system is not poor, at least when compared to pre-market reform China. This line of reasoning can be supported by the data showing China’s adult literacy rate rising from 65% in the 1980s to 96% today. In fact, some policy progress has been made in recent years with China’s development of an economic modernization plan, signifying the country’s commitment to basic public education for all by 2035.

However, the problem with urban and rural educational inequity cannot entirely be solved by money. Income inequity between urban and rural provinces is inexplicably related to the problems faced by China’s rural schools. With financial mobility being near impossible in rural provinces, many parents migrate to China’s major cities for work, leaving behind a generation of children widely referred to by Asian studies and development scholars as the left-behind children. Many of these children, saddled with newfound household responsibilities instead of parental academic supervision, drop out of school after the compulsory nine years of public education. Thus, the “increasing intergenerational poverty trap” is strengthened. If China’s market reforms have only aided in widening the educational inequity gap, what kind of supplemental policy has the potential to achieve more equity for rural schools?

Tackling some of the core issues in which rural poverty is rooted is a good start. Beginning in 2011, China launched a nutrition improvement plan designed for compulsory education students living in crowded, poverty-stricken areas in rural China. With ¥52 billion being spent by the central government on nutritious meal subsidies for rural students and ¥100 billion being put toward the construction of rural school canteens, many would agree that educational equity progress is heading in the right direction. Data problematizes this assumption, showing that only an approximate quarter of the rural compulsory students enjoy this policy. This likely has to do with the government’s focus on compiling nutrition quizzes for rural students and advocating more strongly for the funding of nutrition training for teachers than the funding of rural jobs that keep students’ families from having to move to large cities in order to support their children. These strategies do not address integral educational inequity issues in China like the urban/rural college gap. Over 70 percent of students from China’s major cities attend higher educational institutions as opposed to under 5 percent of students from rural, lower-income areas. China’s GPD rise has caused these inequities to increase since China’s western rural regions are struggling to keep up with the increasingly rich and increasingly urbanized cities.

This same “wealth-inequity paradox” can be seen in the U.S. In fact, many of the challenges affecting rural education in China are shared by rural schools in the U.S. As major urban areas in the U.S. like New York and D.C. have become increasingly richer, while the poor are largely excluded from any kind of financial or social mobility, which can be brought about by access to quality education. Many of the inequities facing rural education in America can be linked back to institutional racism and segregated schools. Although rural Americans as a whole have gradually attained better education over the years, students of color have considerably lower rates of college enrollment and completion. Solutions are being proposed for tightening the equity gap between rural students of color and rural white students, such as Dr. Gerri Maxwell’s proposal of more after-school programs for rural students of color and putting more of an emphasis on social justice leadership in rural K-12 schools.

Researchers have also looked into the proposal of attracting and retaining faculty members of color as a way to provide rural students of color with mentorship, but this raises the question of whether after-school programs and mentorship are enough to achieve educational equity in a country scarcely instating any policies to address this issue. While China’s rural education policies have been arguably ineffective at producing any noticeable equity in its most poverty-stricken, rural regions and with the U.S. not fully addressing the unique needs of rural schools, education policy scholars are left with few answers as to how to achieve urban/rural educational equity without the funding and support of government policy. Scholars from both China and the U.S. have supported the idea of technology as a means to bring about meaningful and sustainable change to rural schools. However, only half of the rural children in China have the necessary undisrupted access to online classes, causing a serious increase in the Chinese education gap during the pandemic. This has much to do with the mere 56.2% of rural families who have internet access at home and the staggering 7.3% of students in Chinese villages who own a computer. This problem is shared by those in America, although not to the same extent, with 35% of rural students reporting that they often or sometimes have to do their homework on smartphones and 12% reporting that they often or sometimes have to rely on places with public Wi-Fi like fast-food restaurants to do their homework. This data problematizes the increasingly popular counter to educational policy effectiveness, which argues that technology’s effectiveness in addressing and combating educational inequity seriously outweighs policy’s effectiveness. If poor students in rural America and China are being excluded from the digital age, technology without efforts to make Wi-Fi more accessible is futile.

Reports from the Asian Institute of Research offer a holistic solution to the inherently multidimensional issue of education inequity in China. The report’s first countermeasure involves “vigorously develop[ing] the rural economy” as one of the preliminary steps in combating the rural education gap. Targeting alleviation of rural poverty is another goal of the Asian Institute of Research rather than specifically targeting schools with nutrition quizzes. An interesting point brought up in the report is the emphasis on improving the social support system of rural teachers and fostering a sense of belonging rather than nutrition training among other training efforts from the government. Many of these ideas are directly applicable to the rural education challenges going on in the U.S. Dr. Gerri Mitchell’s proposal of hiring more faculty members of color is immeasurably more achievable once these faculty members are given the social and professional support needed to enjoy a sustainable career in education as well as a sense of belonging, which is essential for teacher retention. The cyclical nature of rural poverty in the U.S. and China is driven by a myriad of causes, including institutional racism in the U.S., rural taxes in China, and the decline of industries that formerly sustained these regions in both countries. These driving forces prove that development policies would be much more effective in addressing the urban/rural educational inequity gap in the U.S. and China than educational policies alone.

These holistic, economy-focused policies will only work in accompaniment with government acknowledgment of the social determinants of learning. Similar to the social determinants of health, a prominent public health theory analyzing the ways in which one’s surroundings, identity, and lived experience contribute more significantly to their health than their individual choices, the theory of social determinants of education works to place more emphasis on the context of one’s surroundings, identity and lived experience over a school’s individual choices, a teacher’s individual choices, or a student’s individual choices. Specifically for a rural student, one’s social environment and community, economic stability, and physical environment and community are significant contributing factors toward their academic success. For a school, its physical environment and community are overlooked aspects of its success. Rundown schools in communities with failing job markets and economic instability are widespread in rural America and China. They cannot be fixed by educational policies alone but rather policies that address the reasons why these schools and communities are struggling in the first place. Overall, the work to end rural educational inequity in China and America begins with poverty-reduction policies.

The Legacy of the College Board: An Analysis of Puerto Rico's Parallel Education System

In recent years, the United States’ (U.S.) higher educational system has become increasingly dominated by a focus on standardized testing practices: politicians, pundits, parents, and even educational leaders emphasize test scores--whether from AP exams, SATs, ACTs, or state-mandated tests. However, most schools in Puerto Rico do not even encourage students to take the SAT or ACT, two of the College Board’s most popular and widely accepted standardized tests. Instead, schools on the island have opted to use the Puerto-Rico specific Prueba de Aptitud Académia, or “PAA,” known locally as “el College Board.” Due to the widespread acceptance of the PAA in Puerto Rico, mainland colleges’ obsession with tests like the SAT and ACT comes at the expense of Puerto Rican students who wish to study at universities other than the few options available on the island. Further, the Puerto Rican educational system parallels the rest of the country in a way that is undeniably flawed and continues to be fueled by a long record of colonial violence.

The root of Puerto Rico’s educational crisis goes farther back than Hurricane Maria. In fact, it stems from a 1964 decision by the College Board to expand its market to Latin America with a Spanish-language edition of the college entry exam. The College Entry Examination Board (CEEB) was founded in the late 1800s and has since been working tirelessly to promote a Testing-Based Accountability system in the U.S. This system places emphasis on standardized test scores such as the SAT and ACT as an important predictor of student success. During the early sixties, Puerto Rico became the ideal location for the College Board’s base of operations due to its American-style social and economic infrastructure. When their attempts at drafting a “Spanish SAT” failed to aid U.S. admissions due to the low number of test-takers, the College Board instead decided to implement widespread educational reform throughout Puerto Rico. Shortly after--and with the assistance of the College Board--the PAA was adopted as Puerto Rico’s national college admissions exam, marking the birth of a Puerto Rican education system parallel to that of the mainland U.S. As is evidenced by the increasingly low number of Puerto Rican applicants to elite mainland schools, Puerto Rico’s educational system has inadvertently created a status quo that precludes mainland universities as an option for Puerto Rican high schoolers due to the unequal advantages mainland applicants have by means of standardized testing. The College Board saw an economic opportunity and seized it, with little regard for the impact their decision would have on the development of Puerto Rico. The result has been a severe underrepresentation of Puerto Rican students in higher education, as well as a glaring lack of opportunity and educational mobility as a result of mainland admissions standards. 

The average Puerto Rican faces significant hurdles to applying to out-of-state universities, much more than U.S. citizens elsewhere. The biggest driver of this inequity is the United States’ deep-seated commitment to standardized testing practices. Unless educational policymakers address the issue of standardized testing, this disparity will only continue to grow, with an increasing number of students leaving Puerto Rico each year in hopes of achieving higher education due to the crippling economic impact of Hurricane Maria. The University of Puerto Rico is a viable option for students, but it too has become imperiled by hurricanes, the island’s $73 billion in public debt, and competing demands for government funding. As such, more students will consider leaving the island in the years to come, and mainland colleges and universities need to accommodate this influx of students in a way that will best promote equality of opportunity. 

About 30,000 students graduate from high school in Puerto Rico each year, and almost all of them take the PAA. By contrast, only 3,000 Puerto Rican students took the SAT in 2017, which pales in comparison to the roughly 43 percent of all U.S. seniors who took the SAT. This discrepancy, while unnoticed by most educational analysts, has a huge impact on the recruitment of Puerto Ricans to mainland universities. While many evoke a moral imperative for U.S. colleges to use SAT data to recruit students from poor and rural communities, these efforts specifically miss out on those students living in Puerto Rico, who have not been exposed to the same testing structures as mainland students. Since Puerto Rico’s college admissions process solely considers PAA scores and Grade Point Averages (GPAs) to evaluate applicants, the emphasis placed by mainland colleges on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT acts as a barrier to entry for many deserving Puerto Rican applicants. Not only does this represent a failure on behalf of the U.S. government and U.S. educational system to uphold equality of opportunity, it serves to further solidify the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as second-class in relation to the mainland U.S. 

In the words of Harvard Professor and Puerto Rico native Roberto Rivera, the admissions process that developed in Puerto Rico is domestic in nature, but foreign in practice. Just as Puerto Rico’s educational inequities began long before the negligence that followed Hurricane Maria, colonialism has been a part of Puerto Rico’s history since its inception. After the U.S. seized Puerto Rico in the 1898 Spanish American war, what little autonomy the people of the Commonwealth had achieved was taken away. The U.S. quickly attempted to ‘Americanize’ Puerto Rico by implementing the English language, making it a federal offense to have a Puerto Rican flag, and even making it illegal to sing the Puerto Rican national anthem. Notably, despite their relegation to second-class citizenship, Puerto Ricans were the first to be drafted during the Vietnam War. Furthermore, Puerto Rico’s status as “territory” means it can’t re-negotiate its debt to Wall Street banks in a manner similar to how U.S. states can. All of these examples only exemplify the fact that, despite the efforts and victories of those who fought for the Island’s freedom, Puerto Rico has never truly been sovereign. 

Instead, the people of Puerto Rico have been subjected to a capitalist dominated empire that sacrifices the lives of the less fortunate in the name of big business interests. As such, the college admissions process that developed mirrors the second-class status of Puerto Rico within the U.S. Rivera argues that standardized testing practices cannot be isolated from the history of colonial neglect that has shaped the Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical development. He instead sees the island’s educational system and reliance on the PAA as a mere extension of the same legal disenfranchisement employed by the U.S. federal government throughout history, borne out of the desire for profit and control instead of commitment to equality. The question, however, remains to be answered: What should governments be doing to address this inequality? 

Independently, many colleges are beginning to shift towards test-optional policies, in which students are able to determine whether or not their test scores are included in the admissions process. This could be an indication that mainland schools are taking notice of the harmful effects of testing focus. Further, test-optional policies represent an opportunity to alleviate the burden of testing practices on Puerto Rican students, and thus offer a potential alternative to a total elimination of test scores in admissions. However, such independent movements are unfortunately not standardized across the U.S. and Puerto Rican students still face considerable barriers to entry when attempting to enter the higher education realm. 

The federal government should therefore mandate that all colleges and universities in the U.S. no longer consider standardized tests when deciding whether or not to admit Puerto Rican applicants. This would go a long way to mitigate the barriers to accessing  higher education that results from the mainland’s focus on standardized tests at the expense of Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, research on testing policy from Johns Hopkins indicates that an increased focus on GPA in place of standardized tests would favor minority students in the admissions process. For instance, students that identified as African American, Hispanic, female, or lower-income tended to have slightly higher standardized GPAs than ACT Composite scores. Conversely, white, male, and middle and higher-income students tended to have slightly higher standardized ACT Composite scores in comparison to their GPAs. This is an indication that forcing colleges to reform their admissions procedures and shift away from a focus on standardized testing could have overwhelmingly positive impacts with regards to equality of opportunity. 

In considering the facts, the data speaks to a larger trend: the tendency for standardized testing to foster inequality at a systemic level. While history points to the urgent need for addressing the crisis of educational equality in Puerto Rico, this analysis also sheds light on the exclusionary tendencies of the College Board and U.S. government writ large, begging investigation into the harmful effects of the testing culture on mainland communities as well.

Nationalism in Asian Education

Origins and Impact

Franklin D Roosevelt stated that “we cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” The use of nationalism in education is prevalent in many countries spanning from the United States to India. Often, state-sponsored and regulated education is synonymous with selective education, including and rejecting certain narratives and stories over others, bolstering the good and glimsming over the bad. Thus, through education policy, governments control the effective indoctrination of mass populations into a constructed idea of society. The use of selective education and taught nationalism creates biases that prohibits clear and effective diplomacy.

Combining the control of information and ideas with impressionable youth can result in a continuation of taught ideals and politics and ultimately control of a population. When taught values and stereotypes are passed down from generation to generation, prejudice and discrimination exist.

Every human has a set of values and habits that are based in language, religion, philosophies, and communal cultures. Taught nationalism is both good and bad; it is inherently a part of a culture identity. Nationalism creates an alterity that often results to discrimination, bigotry and at worst genocide for those who don’t fit into the nationalistic idea.

This concept is not only positively used in everyday cultural communication that creates identities, but also used negatively to manipulate people. Taught nationalism diffuses throughout the world, regardless of region, language and religion. This article explicates the causes, forms, and impact of taught nationalism in Asia, specifically in China and India, where textbooks are rewritten to curate students’ ideas of their national identity.

Asian Nationalism in Education - looking at China and India

Education is often a tool through which state sponsored nationalist ideas are instilled. With an increase of foreign influence from Western nations such as the United States, countries turn towards more conservative approaches as nationalism is on the rise globally.

China

Scholar Suisheng Zhao of University of Denver argues that the origin of Chinese nationalism came into existence during the Opium War in the 1840s that ultimately opened China to Western imperialism. Nationalism takes on many forms in China from Han ethnic based nationalism to ideological liberal nationalism, or “the nation as a group of citizens who have a duty both to support the rights of the state and to pursue individual freedom.” While China opened its doors to the West, a 3rd form, pragmatic nationalism gained popularity allowing legitimacy and political control of the Communist party. The pragmatic nationalism allowed for the adoption of democratic ideals and loosening of communist ideology as long as it aided the continued growth and stability within China. From this movement came about the Patriotic Education campaign.  

The Patriotic Education campaign began in 1991, and shortly after the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.  The campaign targeted young school-aged children to teach about past greatness and the “humiliating experience in the face of Western and Japanese incursion” and how the Communist led revolution created China into the power it is today. A primary mode was through the use of changing the narrative of collective Chinese history with a version in favor of the communist one party rule. The textbooks were replaced and “the old class struggle narrative” was replaced with a “ Maoist ‘victor narrative’ (China won national independence) was also superseded by a new ‘victimization narrative; which blames the ‘West’ for China’s suffering”. The teaching of this narrative by Chinese textbooks instills a sense of shame and effectively associates China’s problems to the West imperialism and forces. This goes as far as questions of national humiliation have become topics in the nationwide examination for attending universities.

India

The rise in nationalism originated with the decolonization movements at the end of the 1940s and 1950s. While the idea of a national identity, especially in the case of India and Pakistan was formed before the founding of the nation-states, it wasn’t until after full independence from the British Empire that nationalism was able to fully manifest.

The decolonization of British India and the creation of India and Pakistan left complex feelings, with celebrations of independence tinged with regret surrounding the violence brought about by partition - essentially, a divided freedom. The independence movement of 1947 created different narratives in the history of partition in Pakistani and Indian textbooks. Many Indian textbooks often portray the Muslim League as focusing solely on Muslims’ interests and the National Congress party as “Guardians of all Indians, regardless of religious affiliation”. Many Indian textbooks focus and revere the work of Gandhi. Where as comparsionly the same events in 1947 are taught in Pakistani textbooks as freedom and created a nation-state focused on social justice and Islamic Ideology, and more critically, the justification for the creation of Pakistan and the Two-Nation Theory. In the past few year in India as the BJP party has come into power and the rise of Hindu Nationalism within India, has resulted in the rewriting of history textbooks to portray Muslim Mughals as military brutes and Hindu rulers as victorious. Standard social science textbook for class 8 fail to mention Prime Minister Neru and the events of Gandhi’s assassination, which is particularly significant because the assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a member of the RSS which was the precursor to the BJP, the current political party in power.

What Taught Nationalism means in IR

Nationalism itself is a purely constructivist political theory in that it is centered on collective ideas and communal identities. Nationalistic portrayals of collective identity can instill a chosen trauma, or “the horrors of the past that cast shadows onto the future” and a chosen glory “myths about a glorious future, often seen as a seen as a reenactment of a glorious past” in an attempt to strengthen a group identity. This directly impacts international relations when countries, such as in the case of China, blame “Western” powers for economic, political and social challenges.

How the collective Chinese population views Western powers creates challenges during diplomatic exchanges. If nationalistic educational narratives instill distrust in Chinese leaders and Western leaders, actors will either work to deconstruct biases held against them or they will internalize those biases if their experiences validate them. As relations between the United States and China are currently marred by economic tension in a trade war, knowing of the biases of collective histories in the United States with anti-communism movements and the Tiananmen Square anti-democracy movements could aid in more diplomatic solutions. When nationalism is effective, chosen trauma and chosen glory impacts generations and cannot easily be corrected or significantly altered.

In the case of India, the distancing of Indian history from Mughal history is another example of how education can increase tensions between Hindus and Muslims. As political parties focus on Hindu identity, often hate-crimes become overlooked and a narrative of religious-political battle becomes prevalent in the media. As India becomes more Hindu-centric, it disengages from the realities facing the nation and surrounding states. India, known for taking in Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils and other persecuted people purportedly turned away Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar in the name of national security, while in reality the religious difference plays an important role in the decision.

Conclusion

Young Adults are powerful political entities that are often forgotten, however even without the right to vote, their voices are undeniable. Youth are often easily impressionable as well. Education systems instill their young students with values, ideals and cultural understandings. While schools instill positive qualities for youth, they can just as easily instill  discrimination and hatred. China and India are not alone in the attempts to erase or hide specific aspects of their national histories. In understanding history, it is always important to be aware of what stories are being told and which ones are not. The education in the United States often glosses over many of the complexities of American History such as Native American massacres, freedom struggles for African Americans, modern-day race relations and institutional racism. When considering the impact of national education curriculums, it is important to ask what is missing and, more importantly, why?

Violence in the Schoolhouse: The State of Corporal Punishment

Corporal punishment was the preferred method to keep America’s students in line for much of American history. Paddling, spanking, and other forms of violent punishment have slowly been replaced by other techniques such as positive reinforcement. However, today corporal punishment still exists in many American schools, with disastrous consequences for youths, families, and the United States as a whole. These consequences range from mental and physical harm to children, a tarnished international image, harm to families, and a discriminatory punishment system.

Where Does Corporal Punishment in American Schools Stand Today?

Corporal punishment has existed for many centuries. It was used in the Middle Ages to punish school children and until 1948 was used in Britain to punish minor criminal offenders. Some infamous examples of corporal punishment include the flogging of Christ and the use of flogging by the British navy during the 18th century.

The good news is that corporal punishment is on the decline. During the 2006-2007 school year 223,190 students received corporal punishment in comparison to approximately 1.5 million students in 1976. However, nineteen states (shaded red in Figure 1 below) still allow corporal punishment.

Why Should The U.S. Ban Corporal Punishment?

Aside from the more obvious arguments against corporal punishment, such as the negative effects on children’s ability to learn and so on, the administration of corporal punishment has discriminatory factors associated with it. Table 1 below outlines some striking statistics. Overall, African Americans disproportionately receive twice the amount of corporal punishments that their percentage of school population would suggest. It is hard to convince young African American students to behave in school when they are unfairly administered corporal punishment by their discipliners.

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Table 1: Corporal punishment minority statistics

Differently abled students also bear an unfair burden. One study showed that in Tennessee disabled students are twice as likely to be paddled as their peers. This is especially true for students on the autism spectrum, since their disability interferes with their ability to follow what would otherwise be considered appropriate social behavioral norms.

Aside from the discriminatory nature of corporal punishment, the negative effects on children are severe and sometimes irreversible. A study by the Brookings Institution revealed that students who are subject to corporal punishment at a young age are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol. These students are also more likely to imitate such abuse later in life through domestic violence or emotionally abusive relationships with their children. The study claims that these students “may learn to associate violence with power or getting one’s own way.” Children who are punished physically—regularly or severely—are more likely to develop mental health issues later in life.

Corporal punishment can be physically devastating for children as well. According to Time magazine, “[t]he Society for Adolescent Medicine has documented [...] severe muscle injury, extensive blood-clotting (hematomas), whiplash damage and hemorrhaging” in cases of corporal punishment. These gruesome injuries have sometimes caused parents to give up jobs to homeschool their children, thereby negatively affecting students’ family lives. Not to mention that these injuries unnecessarily contribute to skyrocketing healthcare costs when they require medical attention.

The effects that corporal punishment has on students boil down to one simple fact: in the United States of America—one of the most developed and democratic states in the world—one of the only groups of citizens who can be beaten legally are school children. This, of course, exhibits a terrible confusion of our priorities.

The last reason for banning corporal punishment is the simple fact of embarrassment. Over 70 nations worldwide have laws that explicitly prohibit corporal punishment in schools. The United Nations has criticized countries that still allow corporal punishment saying that “there is no doubt that corporal punishment is a violation of children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child because it is constitutive of violence that causes . . . suffering.” That the U.S. has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child is further proof of its negligent policy towards children. Therefore, the U.S. should A) ratify the Convention, and B) respect its basic obligations towards its citizens under the age of 18.

If Corporal Punishment Were to Be Banned, How Would We Do It?

A simple answer would be for schools to just stop doing it. No law requires schools to paddle or hit children. However, with that route being perhaps too far away, legal action seems necessary.

States without specific regulations prohibiting corporal punishment could amend their laws to define it and outlaw it. These states should take a similar route as Iowa and New Jersey, for instance, both of which ban the practice in both public and private schools. As Figure 1 showed, the states in which corporal punishment still lingers are typically more conservative states. This is not a coincidence, Republicans in general tend to view the practice more favorably. So all else being equal, passing laws in these states will be theoretically more difficult than passing laws in more left-leaning states that do not already ban it.

The federal government could use its spending power to incentivize schools or state governments to ban the practice. A program similar to Race to the Top or to a statute such as Title IX where schools will lose funding if they do not abide by prohibitions on corporal punishment could be effective. Alternatively, and to the benefit of those in the disabled community, Congress could introduce an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act that specifically protects disabled students from corporal punishment in schools. If a lawsuit arose that claimed that corporal punishment constituted child abuse, and was thus unconstitutional, the Supreme Court could overturn its 1977 ruling that allowed corporal punishment via the “Trop” standard which allows for evolving standards of decency in America society or another similar mechanism.

Regardless of which legal or social path is taken to end corporal punishment in American schools, it needs to be done quickly. Hundreds of thousands of students are affected every year and this practice is clearly detrimental to society.