Multicultural Education in the United States and Canada: The Importance of National Policies

Abstract

Education is a state responsibility in the United States and a provincial responsibility in Canada; nonetheless, the federal governments in both countries have had a significant influence on multicultural education policy. In the U.S. this has been accomplished primarily through civil rights policies and federal education policies. In Canada, the work has been done through multiculturalism and other related policies, in the areas of citizenship, identity, and social justice. Both Canada and the U.S. also have a history of local and regional policy development in multicultural education. Our work to date (e.g., Johnson and Joshee, 2000) has convinced us that the story of multicultural education in both the United States and Canada is an on-going narrative of contestation that is best understood by situating current local policies in the historical, political, social, and organizational webs of which they are a part. Following from Edwin Amenta and his colleagues (2001), we believe that “[l]ines of research combining portable argumentation and cross-national and historical perspectives are likely to be the most productive ones in the future, as scholars develop new conceptualizations and images of social policy and devise new questions about it” (p. 2). In this paper we will describe the policy webs in the U.S. and Canada, examine their development by using contextualized examples of New York City and Toronto, and consider the value of using a web approach as a way of understanding policy processes