that reflect the cultural identity of individual students.
- Learning assessment: Proponents of multicultural education tend to argue that “one-size-fits-all” approaches to assessing student learning could disadvantage students from different cultural backgrounds—e.g., when students are not fluent in the language used on a test, when assessment questions are phrased in a way that could be misinterpreted by students (because the students are unfamiliar with American slang, customs, or cultural references), or when a testing situation does not make sufficient accommodations for students with disabilities. One alternative to standardized tests, for example, is to measure student learning progress using a wider variety of assessment options, such as teacher-created tests, oral presentations, and various demonstrations of learning that give students more opportunities to show what they have learned. Generally speaking, proponents of multicultural education tend to advocate that students from different cultural backgrounds should be held to the same high expectations as other students, but that schools should adopt more flexible and inclusive ways of teaching them and measuring what they have learned. For related discussions, see test accommodations, test bias, and stereotype threat.
- Teacher education: Multicultural education has also affected the preparation of teachers. Beginning in the 1980s, accrediting organizations and state departments of education started requiring teacher-education programs to include multicultural coursework and training. States such as California, Florida, and Massachusetts undertook ambitious efforts to train teachers in multicultural education and English as a second language.
- School staffing: Districts and schools are also being more intentional or proactive about hiring educators of color from diverse cultural backgrounds. While proponents of multicultural education would not claim that teachers of color are more skilled than other teachers, they are likely to argue that staffing decisions reflect a school’s fundamental values and that students will benefit from having educators and role models from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.
- Legislative and legal issues: The rise of multicultural education has also coincided with a number of legislative and court actions. Laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1974, among many others, increased the visibility of multicultural education and led to the widespread adoption of more multicultural approaches to education in American public schools. Federal, state, and district policies, in addition to major legal decisions related to desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), the education of bilingual students (Lau v. Nichols, 1974), and fairness in school finance (San Antonio v. Rodriguez, 1973), for example, have also had a major effect on multicultural education in schools.
As demographic changes in the United States have significantly increased the cultural diversity of student populations in public schools—many urban districts, for example, are already “majority minority” districts—multicultural policies and practices have become important and sometimes contentious issues.
At the center of many debates about multicultural education is the question of whether such approaches might actually serve to divide rather than unite Americans, and whether certain strategies are fundamentally fair to all students. In the view of some educators, parents, and others, increasing emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism in schools has shifted attention toward economically disadvantaged students of color, and away from white students from wealthier and more educated families. For example, strategies such as “heterogeneous grouping”—the grouping of students with different abilities, backgrounds, and levels of preparation in a single class—often leads to concerns about whether the practice disadva