Educated in Whiteness: Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools by Angelina E. Castagno (review)

While its title is a bit misleading, this book examines schools undergoing social change, like many others in the United States. Castagno’s treatment of these developments is under-theorized and offers a somewhat thin ethnographic account of the events at hand, but it does provide telling insights into apparently typical public schools. In the end, it is a somewhat revealing examination of how such institutions function to sustain existing relations of social class and ethnicity in American life.

Given its title, perhaps the most obvious problem is the book’s conceptualization of whiteness in institutions such as schools. Castagno devotes just four pages to this, much of it a quick review of various authors’ viewpoints on the general question. She does discuss how whiteness can appear in an educational setting, but complicates the matter by linking it to “niceness,” another theme in the study. Other theoretical constructs, such as cultural and social capital, are not even mentioned.

The setting is a school district in metropolitan Salt Lake City which has undergone considerable change. It now has a more ethnically diverse population than earlier, with most “non-white” students being Hispanic or non-Hispanic immigrants. Relatively few are African American, potentially compromising her treatment of race. She focuses on two high schools, although differences between them do not figure prominently in her conclusions.

Although Castagno does not state it clearly, whiteness appears to represent norms or expectations for appearance, behavior, and academic performance that are rarely, if ever, voiced explicitly. Instead, she suggests that it is concealed and subtly enforced by “niceness,” often resulting in “hurtful” experiences for students but not exactly oppression. Teachers discussed differences in student performance by using terms such as “culture” and “learning styles” to denote distinct groups, but they rarely discussed race or ethnicity outright. In this way important underlying assumptions about children were often masked, and opportunities for achievement constrained. This, of course, is more harmful than merely hurtful.

Castagno has long been familiar with the district and started out to investigate multicultural education. The schools were supposedly leaders in this respect, but she discovered a celebration of diversity that ignored manifest evidence of inequity. In particular, English language learning students were segregated in one school and many other non-white students were tracked into less demanding classes program-matically. Some “colorblind” teachers had little tolerance for non-white students. Ruby Payne fostered deficit theories of low SES performance, and teachers readily accepted these ideas. Liberal ideology confounded more critical analyses of problems they faced.

These, of course, are familiar patterns of inequity, but Castagno suggests that whiteness was a factor in the background. She doubtless is right, but the case surely would have been stronger in a setting with more African American students. It will be left to yet other scholars to take up these themes in settings where they can be explored in even greater depth, with a bit more conceptual sophistication.