A good understanding of this chapter's content would include an understanding of why each of these terms is important to education.

anti-racist education
an educational approach preferred by some people to multicultural education because it emphasizes the importance of combating racist ideology through educational processes.

Black English Vernacular
linguists' term for the grammatical and phonemic variant of English used today in many African American communities; its origins lie in slaves' success in developing a common language from an amalgam of different African languages and English.

critical theory
an educational perspective that focuses on the problem of how power is unequally distributed in contemporary society. This perspective focuses on the educational consequences of antidemocratic social arrangements, as well as ways to educate people to live more democratic lives. This critical perspective analyzes inequalities based on many social factors including class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.

cultural deficit theory
explanations that find that the cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups are the source of low-income and minority children's relatively weaker academic performance in schools.

culturally relevant pedagogy
approaches to and methods of teaching that seek to respond to and incorporate the cultural knowledge of students, with an eye toward building new learning on respect for what students already know from their own cultural experiences.

culturally responsive pedagogy
approaches to and methods of teaching that seek to respond to and incorporate the cultural knowledge of students, with an eye toward building new learning on respect for what students already know from their own cultural experiences.

cultural subordination theory
an explanation for the learning gap between the haves and the have-nots that emphasizes that the primary thing the haves possess is the power to reward their cultural knowledge, skills, and styles though institutions that favor those factors over other forms of cultural capital.

democratic pluralism
related to cultural pluralism; values cultural differences and seeks to preserve them in processes of self-governance.

ESL instruction
techniques of teaching English as a second language; differs from bilingual instruction in that little or no effort is made to teach in the student's native language; often used when speakers of several languages are instructed at the same time in English.

ethnic diversity
a condition in which people from two or more different cultural backgrounds share a common social or institutional space.

gender sensitivity versus gender bias
a distinction based on the difference between awareness of when differences in gender may contribute to differences in how life and learning are experienced and the assumption that characteristics in individuals are based on their membership in a sex group.

genetic deficit theory
the view that differences in group achievement among different ethnic groups can be explained by a different genetic endowment of intelligence in those groups.

Head Start project
a federal government–funded program that started in the Great Society years of the early 1960s; supported preschool education for low-income children.

multicultural education
an educational reform initiative to improve learning for all children by emphasizing the cultural contexts of learning and helping schools respond better to children of different ethnic backgrounds by using those differences as a foundation on which to build new learning.

pedagogy
approaches to and methods of teaching.

Plato’s myth of the metals
the "noble lie" or "necessary fiction" that people are born with gold, silver, or bronze in their systems and thus are destined to be in one of three levels of society: at the apex, in the second leadership tier, or among the broad masses.

resistance theory
an effort to explain the school performance of low-income and minority children and youth in terms of their noncompliance with school norms that seem "stacked" against them; noncompliance, or resistance expressed in antiacademic and antisocial behaviors, may be seen as an assertion of self in a cultural environment that may not seem to value each child's identity equally.