Thank you for this wonderful exposition! This explains the issues and perspectives very well, with plenty of background to understand the perspectives, and without the hype, distortion, or denial that is so common for the topic.

However, if this is an accurate representation of the best considered wisdom on teaching a diverse group of kids, I'm quite concerned, as there are numerous points that seem highly dubious at best, if not outright contrary to psychological research (albeit on adults).

To be clear from the outset, I don't deny that there's a significant amount of racism, both individual and institutional, remaining in the country. (For anyone who does deny this, check out this curated list of some of the more blatant examples: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/proof-of-systemic-racism-in-america-b8b93c0091d2)

Furthermore, I also don't deny that past injustices can have lingering effects. Indeed, even if we consider socioeconomic effects alone, social mobility is only mediocre in the United States, so we would expect multiple generations of economic impact even in the absence of any other factors at all (social mobility reference: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2012/03/26/the-great-gatsby-curve-is-a-threat-to-the-american-dream).

And, finally, I must confess that I haven't seen the report you're responding to, so I'm lacking a bit of context that perhaps I ought to have. But your arguments seem designed to stand on their own merits, so I will treat them as if they do.

Comments on Perspectives

1. Learning happens best when individuals are invited to bring their whole selves to the lesson

Is there actually any research that supports this? Everything I've seen indicates that interest is by far the most important factor: interested individuals learn faster, recall better, and require less attention to do so (though interest tends also to hold attention).

Anecdotally, anyone who has had a child talk their ear off about minecraft crafting recipes while being apparently flummoxed by simple spelling or math can attest that many children have quite remarkable abilities to learn despite not having "their whole selves" (as defined here) brought to the game. The game dictates that narrow type of experience that you can have...and it's fun! And interesting! And children learn how to do it!

Now, it could be that addressing more aspects of children's lives is a way to generate interest--that's fair. But absent some research showing that it isn't just interest, I would offer that bringing their whole selves is a secondary goal. If you can use that to generate interest, great. If you don't need to, great. This is critically important, however, because assuming this is a primary goal (and that their group identity is a critical part of their "whole selves") drives many of the other recommendations and perspectives.

2. Adapting instruction to meet the needs of individual learners benefits all learners.

Every example given was a racial or ethnic group: "Indigenous learners, or Black learners, or Latinx learners, or Immigrant learners, or ANY learners". This isn't what "individual" usually means. If Maia is having trouble remembering the names of the states because they're presented in a big long block and all just seem to swoosh by in a blur, this isn't a Black thing or a White thing or a Latina thing: she is just a child having trouble because of flaws in the pedagogy and if you adjust to make it easier for her, you have a good chance of helping others, too. Likewise, if James is too busy trying to get laughs by acting out to learn anything, that's just a classroom discipline problem--and an indication that the material isn't holding James' attention, and probably not all the others' either--not an Indigenous problem or an Immigrant problem or an Asian problem.

So, even in the context of an article on race, this point seems bizarre to me. It seems fixated on mostly cosmetic differences. Of course if all your examples are about indoor heated pools that only a few of the white kids actually have experience with or access too, well, yeah, you have a problem: you need broadly accessible examples. And if three quarters of the black kids are starving because they're from the most desperate families economically, well, yeah, you have another problem--but the problem is that they're hungry, not that they're black, and if you have to adapt things to put the more demanding subjects after school lunch, you're not adapting for "Black learners", you're adapting for poverty-stricken hungry learners.

As it stands, the question smuggles in an assumption that really needs to be robustly justified: that the salient difference between the needs of individual learners is due to their race.

3. Appropriate and respectful criticism of our shared history is an act of love.

Agreed.

4. Others’ voices and stories give us a clearer awareness of the significance of past and present.

I agree with the overview. Focusing on "the ways past events continue to negatively impact other individuals and communities" seems a heavy burden for children, though, especially younger ones. If you focus on groups like you did, and you tell stories about one group being bad to another with consequences that last today, like you say to, how do you expect kids NOT to draw the obvious conclusion that "group one is bad" and "group two is helpless"? That is literally the narrative.

The issue is important, but the framing seems like playing with fire. You'd have to be really careful to get this to have uplifting rather than negative consequences, wouldn't you?

5. Inequities that don’t infringe on our comfort are difficult to see.

Absolutely agree. The "my own level of discomfort" bit seems like a non-sequitur, though.

6. Trauma has both social & biological sources and implications.

Agreed. (I wouldn't put too much faith in the epigenetics just yet--they're tough experiments to do well.)

7. Race is a subjective, social construct with real world implications.

Sure. Summary's good. But not this:

"Dismantling the hierarchy [of races] means acknowledging the hierarchy"

Why? Why doesn't deciding that race is no longer a salient cue also dismantle the hierarchy?

I mean, do we have a hierarchy of birth order in the United States? Do we have a hierarchy of hair thickness? Do we have a hierarchy of canine tooth length? Of webbed vs. unwebbed fingers? Race is pretty obvious, but the evidence I see from psychology studies is that it's not terribly hard to get people to ignore race if they have other more important things to think about.

I could come up with an almost opposite arrow to the Intercultural Development Continuum: multicultural mindset (bad) to monocultural mindset (good)

(a) denial--they are different and cannot understand our experiences; hostility and animosity

(b) polarization--they are deeply different; we judge them

(c) acceptance--fine, they are them, we are us, and we have to live together

(d) adaptation--hey, we can work together on a lot of things

(e) minimization--why did we ever care about these differences? We're all just people.

I would argue that your point "because some students are not a “good match” for this teacher’s culture of delivery, communication style or ideology, these students may have far less success — not because they aren’t as capable, but because the teacher’s capacity and tools for engaging across differences aren’t well developed" is exactly the danger from the multicultural perspective with an identity-group-heavy bias: because the teacher is using race and gender etc as proxies instead of actually connecting with the individual student ("we're all just people"), their capacity and tools for engaging across individual differences won't be well developed.

That is, if you take seriously the call to help individuals, group identity mostly gets in the way. Occasionally there will be some commonalities worth noting that you'd otherwise miss, but mostly not, because you're paying attention to the individual.

Your characterization of the student's perspective is worth considering: To do well in this teacher’s classroom, this student thinks, “I must not talk about this…” or “I must make sure to act like this…” or “I won’t mention that I believe this…”

This is why accepting viewpoint diversity is extremely important. But that's completely different from minimizing racial differences--if you have viewpoint diversity, you automatically get the diversity of opinions and perspectives that might have been caused by race. If you go the other way around and think everything's about identity group diversity, when someone has the viewpoint that it doesn't matter (or is black and doesn't like hip-hop): well, that student must not talk about it, must be sure to act like they care, can't mention that they believe/feel something else....

So, I agree with the perspective of being able to bridge differences. The part that you state without justification is that the differences should be at the group level rather than the individual, despite us knowing that for most traits, differences between individuals vastly outweigh differences between groups.

Comments on Monocultural to Multicultural

Unsurprisingly, given my critial view of your setup, I think you have many of these wrong.

(1) Learning happens best when individuals are interested in the lesson. Compliance and whole selves are both poor proxies.

(2) Right on! Adapting instruction to individuals can benefit everyone! This has nothing to do with monocultural or interculturalism, though!

(3) Right on! Except saying that criticism has anything to do with mono- vs. interculturalism is unjustified.

(4) The monocultural perspective has it right: subjective stories can absolutely be a distraction. Great care must be taken to keep them representative or our cognitive biases will ascribe unwarranted significance to them.

(5) Both perspectives have validity: sometimes people need to take personal responsibility for things that are their own failing, and sometimes there are inequities that are hard to see.

(6) Both perspectives can be true at the same time: even if past traumas have implications today, the best approach could still be to move forward.

(7) Given the steady decline in people's judgment of how positive race relations are, without any correspondingly dramatic improvement in anything (let alone anything clearly driven by interculturalism), empirically the monocultural perspective has the edge on this so far.

Comments on Criticisms of Pamphlet

Again, I didn't read the pamphlet, as I'm assuming the arguments can mostly stand on their own.

Achievement gap: the three options seem correct, but do not preclude intermediate mechanisms for "historical racial inequities [...] impacting students' capacity to achieve" that involve situations that can only really be solved by encouraging personal responsibility, for instance.

Affinity groups: the comment seems fair.

Antiracism: It's important to include structural and institutional racism under racism if you're going to use the term broadly. However, in that case it is also important to include all forms of racial bigotry as "racism" (including anti-white racism, including racism between non-white groups, etc.). To do otherwise is to attempt, unjustly, to claim an intellectual victory through linguistic manipulation rather than careful argumentation: the implication is that some things are worth decrying and others are unimportant or morally permissible.

Colorblindness: the response seems completely off target. You can simultaneously be colorblind, in that you don't make racial preferences for anyone, and be completely sensitive to them as an individual, including those ways in which their race shapes them as an individual.

Critical race theory: absolute nonsense, epistemic hogwash. This was plenty well worked out in, like, Plato's time. Anecdotes are unreliable. It doesn't matter if you call them "anecdotes" or "stories" or "lived experience" or "case studies" whatnot. When it's all you can get, sure, a story is better than nothing. If you aren't aware of what people are thinking, well, listen to their stories. You might learn something you missed. However, the emphasis that I've seen from CRT-afficionados for "lived experience" and like stories indicates that they think their story is as valid as a careful study. It is difficult to overstate how wrong this is. It's as wrong as saying, "All the tools we have are sticks and rocks." Well, maybe most everything we use is from biological or mineral sources, but we have fashioned them into spears, cars, iPhones, etc.. No: it is not all stories. We have fashioned our stories into the scientific method, into legal proceedings, into comprehensive reviews, into statistics. It is not all just stories! Absolutely unequivocally not, except in the most trivial, pedantic, misleading way.

Culturally responsive teaching: the mistake that you say that people make when describing this is the natural mistake given your repeated reference to race when describing related things here. So...maybe if by "cuturally responsive teaching" you mean "individually responsive teaching", it should be phrased as such?

Equity: yeah, easy to imagine the pamphlet had a straw man here.

Implicit bias: could also be a strawman. No particular comment (except that you forgot to explain why an educator needs to become aware of their own biases if we don't know how to change bias--taking on the "challenge of change" shouldn't be like taking on the challenge of walking in the clouds. It's got to be actionable, if that's the reason.)

Meritocracy: agreed, for the most part. Mismatch between achievement and what measuring tools can measure is a big problem with group instruction. At some point perhaps we just have to bite the bullet and accept it (certainly when it comes to actual application of engineering or accounting or journalism or whatever), but grade school seems awfully early. If there are ways around overweighting tests that don't involve sapping students' drive to achieve, they sound like a good idea.

Microaggressions: being kind to others is important, agreed. Being resilient is important, too, which you didn't mention. If we rely on only one, there will still be a lot of incidental harm. So: resilience and kindness. Both.

Restorative justice: I don't know enough about the challenges of classroom discipline to have a meaningful opinion.

White fragility: Everyone is fragile about their in-group when challenged (even if you simultaneously plop them into the group and then immediately challenge it). The discussion is fine, but the term is silly (or should be applied universally--white fragility is the set of characteristic reactions that white people in particular have to a challenge to their white in-group, when they are placed into that group; but Zionist fragility is the set of characteristic reactions that supporters of Israel have etc. etc.).

White supremacy: the discussion is mostly about traits that people in modern industrialized societies have had to adopt as a consequence of the functioning of the society. That this has anything to do with "white" needs a careful argument, unless one just means that by historical accident it's happened this way. In which case, we should also be talking about white aircraft, white rockets, white semiconductors, white nuclear power, etc.--all ridiculous; it's historical accident.

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I do strongly agree that engagement is the way to go, rather than dehumanization and tribalism. So I again thank you greatly for this long essay on a very pertinent topic. However, as you've seen, I find many of your arguments unconvincing and others just plain wrong--and I'm not even your intended target audience! But that's how to engage, isn't it? Find areas of agreement, and areas of disagreement, and hash them out.

Preferably with reason and evidence, not storytelling. I promise, for any story you tell, I can invent three others that give totally different perspectives. (Zero to three of them may be complete fabrications, but that's one of the issues with stories....)