Dr. Oscar Jiménez-Castellanos, is a Visiting Scholar at USC Rossier School of Education. He previously served as the Murchison Endowed Professor and Chair at Trinity University. He was an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Latinx Education Research Center at Santa Clara University. He began his academic career at Arizona State University (tenured institution) and held an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley.
He is a national education policy expert with an emphasis on school finance and English Learners. He has been awarded several prestigious awards in his career and published over 60 academic papers, served as a consultant/expert witness in several states, and serves on various editorial boards.
We invite you to view highlights from this featured speaker presentation, provided in brief segments below. You may also watch the entire presentation, or review Dr. Jiménez-Castellanos’ PowerPoint slides.
Embracing Multilingual Learners: Towards an Anti-Xenophobic and Anti-Racist School Finance System
|
1. The Changing Face of America (6m 47s) “We are living through a racial reckoning and juxtaposition with two diametrically opposed forces. The call has been to tackle systemic racism in the U.S. and across the globe.” |
|
2. Confronting the past to transform and reimagine our future (4m 30s) “Equity and adequacy are necessary, but insufficient to fundamentally transform our school finance system. We need to critically interrogate and acknowledge that our school finance system is grounded in [colonialism] and white supremacy that have historically marginalized black indigenous, Latin X and immigrant communities.” |
|
3. Racist and Xenophobic School Finance System: California Case Study (6m 35s) “The United States pretends to be in a fair colorblind, non-racialized school finance system, yet, I will argue that itis grounded in the racist and xenophobic ideology that continues to undercut the plights of BIPOC communities, especially those in poverty and that are non-native born.” |
|
4. Race, Taxation and creation of California’s Public School System (3m 1s) "Policymakers view these early restrictions on state funding as necessary for the creation of a segregated school system for white and non-white pupil, and in turn the colonization of California.” |
|
5. Segregation and Exclusionary Housing and Education Policies (5m 31s) “Between 1910 and 1930 California’s Mexican American population grew from about 50,000 to over 350,000... public policies in finance, housing and education created new connections between race, the uneven geographic distribution of wealth and the school funding disparities that persist.” |
|
6. Discriminatory Education Policies and Segregation (4m 27s) “Starting in 1910 local districts began to establish separate schools for Mexican-American children. These schools ensured that even when school districts were not segregated, Mexican-American and White-American children would be placed in separate educational facilities.” |
|
7. Consequences for School funding on Mexican-American Communities: Racial and Linguistic Civil Rights (5m 30s) "Policies related to housing, public finance and education, all had the cumulative effect of creating schools for Mexican-American children that received substantially lower levels of funding and fewer educational opportunities than White-American children.” |
|
8. California School Finance: A remedial Distributive Justice (1m 54s) “While [...] federal education programs have expanded, they do so within a broader society that has failed to truly grapple with inequality and instead lays more and more responsibility upon schools to remediate the dysfunction of the greater economic system.” |
|
9. CA School Finance--Three “Waves” of Litigation for School Finance (7m 32s) “[After] Separate but Equal Doctrine was overturned, and the Civil Rights legislation passed, communities of color, after 32 generations of oppression were able to fight for their rights in a legal manner.” |
|
10. The impact of School Finance Litigation (1m 34s) “School finance litigation has had some impact, but it has not been transformative yet.” |
|
11. Current EL Funding and current EL Finance Research (4m 6s) “The school finance system has seen language as problem, a deficit perspective… We need to move towards language as a resource.” |
|
12. Transformative Justice in School Finance (4m 43s) “A transformative justice paradigm in school finance requires fundamental rethinking of how we fund public schools at the federal, state and local levels to serve the most vulnerable populations." |
|
13. Recommendations to develop an Anti-Racist and Anti-Xenophobic School Finance System (4m 58s) “It is not just the outcomes, it's not just the resources, but it is what opportunities are provided especially for those that are most marginalized.” |