Standards, Stigma, Surveillance / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

"Theoretically rich and empirically rigorous, this book calls us to pay much closer attention to race, class and language in schools. Working in a critical anti-racist tradition, Cushing engages with the complexity of racist structures and colonial histories, and refuses to absolve the state of culpability. A must read for all who are interested in education and inequality."

-Remi Joseph-Salisbury, University of Manchester, UK

"This book shows how the education system constructs the language of racialized and working-class subjects as "deficient", and how that contributes to the maintenance of ideologies and power structures which can be traced back to the colonial era. Simultaneously fascinating and disturbing, it should be read by any linguist, teacher or policymaker with an interest in current debates on education, (in)equality and social justice."

-Deborah Cameron, University of Oxford, UK

This book traces raciolinguistic ideologiesin England's schools, focusing on post- 2010 policy reforms which frame the language practices of low-income, racialised speakers as limited and deficient. Across interviews, policy mechanisms and classroom observations, the author shows how raciolinguistic ideologies are rooted in British colonial logics which continue to shape contemporary education policy. He shows how these policies require marginalised speakers to modify their speech patterns in line with normative standards of whiteness under new guises of social justice and research robustness. Finally, new visions for language education and linguistic justice are offered, demonstrating how teachers can see themselves as language activists to identify, resist and reject faults in a hostile and oppressive policy architecture. This book draws on fields including critical language policy, educational sociolinguistics, genealogy, raciolinguistics and critical language awareness.

Ian Cushing is Senior Lecturer inEnglish and Education at Edge Hill University, UK. His work examines the ways in which language ideologies get transformed into policies and pedagogies, and how these work against marginalised groups. His work has appeared in journals such as Language in Society, Language Policy, British Educational Research Journal and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies.