Grant draft very rough

I am applying for the award based on my commitment to working on racial issues in Minneapolis schools. My adult life has been spent working on creating a deeper understanding of cultural issues related to both ethnicity and race. I grew up in a mono-racial culture as a bi-cultural child and student. As a student both in Iceland and in the US, I have struggled with being an invisible outsider. I am racially and ethnically European American, however being both Icelandic and Irish American I have worked to function in disparate cultural enclaves. The skills I developed as a child and an adult have carried into my research interests. My focus on better understanding the US racial divide came when as a young college student I became the parent of a mixed race child. I was forcibly entered into this racial divide that I had not experienced before as a white European American. However, my real wake up call came when my son began having academic issues in high school and after I read bell hooks’ We real cool. Suddenly I realized that the problems we had been experiencing were not due to a deficiency of his home life or his ability to learn, but rather based on how he was perceived in his school community. Then by chance many of the parents who’s children were of mixed race origins began describing similar experiences with their students. I began to suspect that this was a much greater problem and could perhaps be traced at the institutional level. These experiences shaped what then developed as my doctoral dissertation topic.

Currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative International Development Education, I am gathering data. I spend two days a week volunteering in classrooms at a local high school. I have struggled to finish my program, as a single parent working full time on my degree with little support from outside funding sources. My goal as a PhD is to further explore and develop deeper understanding of the racial divide that persists in U.S. schools. My dissertation topic focuses on teen racial identity, more specifically on multi-racial teen identity. In a culture as diverse as ours, the continued reliance on simplified racial categories for understanding and reaching out to students is stunting our ability to help students achieve at higher levels. Over and over again we hear stories of students failing. The Twin Cities continues to have in-excusably low minority graduation rates (50%), yet in the classrooms little changes. For sure there are minority students who do succeed, but my current project has reveled that the average minority student is getting a 2.0 or less, just enough to stay on the basketball team (Observation notes 2.10.2011). Their only desire is to be done with high school and what little enthusiasm they muster is clamped down to follow the set agenda for the day, even when the questions are related to the material and cover things that have previously been discussed. I do not doubt that there is a sincere desire on the behalf of teachers and administrators for the students to succeed. But the one size fits all model is failing. It is failing rapidly, in a time when budgets are getting tighter and tighter, the need include everyone is stronger than ever. We are slipping in status world wide in terms of innovation and college completion. Yet schools is where we hope develop students for an innovative society, and we leave out 50% of the possible population by continuously failing to help minority students, we close down under-preforming schools, bring in business models to educate students, and still show no or little performance improvement. Is this solely tied to race? no I do not believe it is, social and economic class plays a large role in it as well. My research examines how these three aspects affect students who come from largely middle class white backgrounds, even though the students are mixed race. The largest proportion of interracial couples is among more educated groups, yet these students have been labeled as the students who face the most challenges academically. My goal is to expose the myths surrounding the mixed race arguments of instability, social unfitness and the categorical penchant to label all students mono-racially. Chances are any student at teacher encounters, is ethnically, culturally, economically or racially mixed. Just as we say we can’t judge a book by its cover, we can’t judge students by their covers yet we do so daily.
This grant would help me finish gathering my data enable me to purchase analysis software and allow me to spend some time working directly with students so that I can get a more holistic view of their experiences and some space to just write, by minimizing my financial worries. It is difficult to write and conduct research when a student is worried about loosing housing or whether she can pay the heat bill or buy food for her small but important family.