<em>The Value of a Triangle: Mathematics Education in Industrial and Classical Schools in the Segregated South</em>

Abstract

Mainstream education research and policy is dominated by social science orientations that primarily rely on positivist theories, models, and interpretations of the mathematical competence of African Americans or Blacks (terms are used interchangeably). Contemporary scholarship and national discourse surrounding the education of Blacks often center on the notion of pathology, a view largely supported by deficit perspectives (Martin, 2009a; Stinson 2006). As Martin has pointed out, research and policy is a site where degradation of African American children occurs (Martin, 2009a, p. 1) in part because of the on-going discussions of racial achievement gaps and comparisons to White and Asian American students.An official and public conversation about achievement gaps has been going on at least since 1969 when The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began reporting racially disaggregated achievement data (see National Center for Education Statistics website at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/). Most policymakers and researchers use NAEP data to make consequential claims about U.S. students' outcomes - Black students' outcomes in particular. The claims can be consequential because school districts, teachers, and even families and students themselves view the interpretations of the standardized assessments as normative, correlated with intelligence, and generally disconnected from institutional issues and contexts.There are explanations in the literature for why achievement gaps exist. Some researchers point to factors such as inequitable distribution of quality teachers (Adamson & Darling-Hammond, 2012). Others position Black parents negatively, blaming them for placing low value on early education (Jencks & Phillips, 1998). Still other scholars contend that the U.S. does not have an achievement gap at all, but an educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Mathematics education research and policy continue to use achievement gap language in decontextualized ways despite a growing body of literature that suggests race-comparative approaches position Black students at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of ability (Martin, 2009a, b, c). These approaches do not address issues of identity and power, which are important for decentering the assimilationist perspective in many education policy documents (Gutierrez, 2008). The perspective can be viewed as assimilationist because there is little recognition of the linguistic and cultural resources that marginalized students bring to the classroom or to the discipline of mathematics (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 361). Moreover, there is limited effort by mainstream education research and policy to understand what it means to learn while also being Black (Martin, 2012). Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 2000; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) points out that race and racism are endemic in U.S. society; therefore, it is critical to analyze the intersection at the teaching and learning of and the story of race to interrogate ways race influences Black people's educational experiences and production of mathematical knowledge.The rise in national focus on the achievement of Blacks using state and national summative assessments can be marked by important legal decisions beginning with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. What did the education of Blacks look like before these legal decisions? While very little is known about the education of Blacks pre-Brown, there is some documentation of important issues we might find at that intersection of teaching and learning and race during segregation (Russell, 2014). The field also knows that new narratives describing the segregated schooling of Blacks, mainly in the South have challenged the master narrative that reduced all Black schools and students to unilateral inferiority (Anderson, 1988; Siddle-Walker, 2009). …