A Personal Reflection on our Journal amidst the Events Across our Nation

As the nation erupts with demonstrations and protests against the police killing of George Floyd and the long years of systemic and institutional racism that it represents, I have been thinking about the role each of us has in trying to form a more perfect union.  Since 2006, the Journal of Educational Controversy has been trying to shed light on the inequalities in education by examining topics like “The School to Prison Pipeline,” “Black Lives Matter and the Education Industrial Complex,” “The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education,” “Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models,” “Schooling as if Democracy Matters,” “Who Defines the Public in Public Education?” and “Jonathan Kozol's Nation of Shame: the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America Forty Years Later,” among others.

We cannot examine the tensions in our schools without understanding their roots in our larger political philosophy and history.   How do institutions like schools reproduce the larger inequities in society?  How does the socializing experience of the hidden curriculum contribute to the reproduction of class and racial injustices? How are taken-for-granted assumptions rooted in history experienced at the level of our commonplace understanding?  How does such understanding provide categories that tacitly accept an ideology about what counts as “normal”? How do the values embedded in school culture contribute to the powerlessness of students of dominated cultures?  How does the way we define our problems contribute to the ways we construct our solutions?

At this time, our efforts seem so small and insignificant when you watch the moral courage of protesters on the streets and all the pain and suffering that is being experienced.  Still I have to believe that there is some power in the pen. The late philosopher Maxine Greene who fought tirelessly for social justice wrote the words that we have used as our logo:  “This journal opens and reopens spaces for thoughtfulness and concern.”  Perhaps, in some small way, we can face boldly the controversies, injustices and tensions of our time and help to clarify and deepen an understanding of their moral significance.  Hopefully, this will contribute in some small way to the understanding and solutions we seek.