The Achievement Gap Initiative

Mica Pollock, Associate Professor

Harvard University

Mica Pollock, an anthropologist of education, studies how youth and adults struggle daily to discuss and address issues of racial difference, discrimination, and fairness in school and community settings. Her first book, Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, winner of the 2005 AERA Outstanding Book Award and an American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Book Award, 2005, explores when it helps and harms to talk in racial terms about people and patterns in schools. Colormute introduces Pollock's concept of colormuteness, or the deletion of race labels from everyday and policy discourse. The book pinpoints six core race talk dilemmas that plague education and demonstrates that while talking about race has pitfalls, not talking about race can exacerbate orders of inequality. Pollock's forthcoming book, Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools (Princeton University Press, 2008), builds on her experience (1999-2001) working in the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, where she investigated and addressed claims of discrimination in schools. Because of Race explores ongoing American debates over opportunity denials experienced by students and families of color in educational settings. The book examines rebuttals to demands for the daily provision of specific opportunities within schools and districts. Pollock argues that in an era when racial patterns like “achievement gaps” are produced by countless interactions across multiple domains and racial inequality is no longer ordered and applauded explicitly by laws and policies, “everyday justice” analysis provides the necessary ingredient for opportunity analysis today: detailed consideration of the provision of named opportunities by specific actors within complex systems. 

Pollock is editor of a forthcoming book for educators, Everyday Antiracism: Concrete Ways to Successfully Navigate the Relevance of Race in School (The New Press, 2008). In Everyday Antiracism, dozens of experts in race and education studies offer educators short, clear, and concrete strategies for equalizing opportunity across racial lines on a moment to moment basis. Designed for educator inquiry groups or professional development efforts, Everyday Antiracism sparks ongoing inquiry into the most complex race issues of an educator’s typical day. Pollock is also spearheading The Project on the Preparation of Educators for Diversity, a new national research effort examining efforts by universities, nonprofits, and school districts to prepare and assist teachers to serve diverse populations. 

Pollock previously taught high school in California. She is a member of the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association. Before receiving her M.A. in anthropology and her Ph.D. in anthropology of education from Stanford, Pollock taught high school in California.

Papers on the AGI website:

2006	Toward Everyday Justice: On Demanding Equal Educational Opportunity In the New Civil Rights Era
Anthropology News, Volume 47, No. 2: pp. 9-10. Feb	Everyday Antiracism in Education

Video presentations on the AGI website:

June 2006	Talking About Race in Education
June 2007	How do we get get educators to consider and engage in the topic of race and opportunity?
June 2008	Discussion: Raising Achievement and Narrowing Gaps in Montgomery County, MD
May 2005	Closing the Nation's Racial Achievement Gaps I