Critically Examining the Experience of Students of Color in High School Magnets and K-8 Global Citizenship Education

As schools nationwide seek to provide a high-quality education for all students, there is an increasing need to interrogate if and how policies ostensibly designed to support marginalized students and communities actually achieve these goals. Often, magnet schools are used as a strategy to facilitate educational equity (Wang & Herman, 2017). This paper examines student experiences at an interdistrict magnet high school with a college preparation theme. Drawing on critical theories, we argue that the school's narrow focus on college preparation reinforces hegemonic beliefs in meritocracy and racialized and gendered assumptions about who deserves high-quality educational opportunities.

Asian American secondary students, particularly in “elite” secondary schools such as the specialized high schools in New York City, often face pressures to adhere to the societal expectations of high academic achievement based on the “Model Minority” conceptualization. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory and Culturally Responsive Teaching as depicted in the existing literature by theorists such as Ladson-Billings, Gay, and Paris, my research attempts to devise potential methods for secondary educators to address high-achieving Asian American secondary students’ educational challenges which are often unaddressed due to the expectations of the high-achieving stereotype.

In a radically interconnected world where differences seem more salient, I interrogate cosmopolitanism as the major philosophical underpinnings of global citizenship education using ethnographic data from a K-8 bilingual school. I argue that teaching students to engage with “otherness” pre-constituted by inherited colonial frameworks influences students to pronounce cosmopolitan capabilities centering on differences. In so doing, we teach students to draw reductive, uncritical boundaries. My research suggests the need to look to the heterogeneous moments before certain capabilities are codified as cosmopolitan, to understand and unsettle the frameworks we use to consider students' positionalities as global citizens.