Coded Language Is Part of Our Racist Education System

Schooled is a series by Zach Schermele, a freshman at Columbia University, that explores the nuances of the American education system.
A studentled march against racism
Richard Lautens

During her tenure at a school district in North Carolina, Jess Johnson left teacher workshops “disgusted” by the implications of certain words used by education professionals to describe students of color.

“I regularly attended professional development sessions where white leaders would praise ‘grit’ while failing to acknowledge the unique challenges that students of color face,” the former English teacher told Teen Vogue. “Grit, for my students, came with a cost. My students experienced trauma, housing and food insecurity, gun and gang violence, lack of education, and poverty.”

According to some education activists, grit, a recently popularized term in the college admissions process, is one of many examples of what they see as the coded language of education. Coded language, as defined by the National Education Association (NEA), is language that “substitut[es] terms describing racial identity with seemingly race-neutral terms that disguise explicit and/or implicit racial animus.” In practice, the concept is nuanced and subtle; for some educators, it’s an umbrella term for rhetorically placing value on the traits of marginalized students without understanding the challenges that gave rise to those traits. Class Trouble, a group of progressive educators, counts terms like college ready, achievement gap, and at-risk youth as similarly problematic. Grit, in their words, is just a way of “saying a child survived the conditions of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and capitalism without having to name those systems of oppression directly.”

“When professionals glorify grit, they glorify trauma,” Johnson said. “They erase systems responsible for trauma and put the responsibility on students to navigate these systems despite the fact that these systems were built for their white counterparts to succeed.”

Watching the students she loved become “criminalized by the systems that were supposed to uplift them” took a “huge toll” on Johnson’s health, she said. That toll ultimately prompted her to leave teaching in 2017.

Although racial inequity has long plagued K-12 education and the college admissions process, the historic protests born out of George Floyd’s death have shifted public understanding of systemic racism in America. As a result, many schools are axing names rooted in racist history; there’s been a new push for the integration of New York City schools; and the nation’s largest charter school network has jettisoned its decades-old slogan over the phrase’s racist implications. The reckoning has sparked conversations about anti-racism in the classroom and ignited calls for schools to purge certain oft-used phrases from their policies and practices.

On July 1, KIPP charter schools publicly announced the retiring of its 25-year-old slogan — “Work hard. Be nice.” — over concerns that the motto diminished “the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism.” In a public statement, KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth admitted that the slogan placed “value on being compliant and submissive.” The move had been in the works since 2019, when KIPP surveyed 6,000 students, teachers, alumni, school leaders and staff about the organization’s vision for the future as part of a larger institutional commitment toward anti-racism. Benny Vásquez, KIPP’s chief equity officer, told Teen Vogue the slogan “wasn’t accurate” and reinforced ideas of control, conformity, and silencing.

“There’s a myth of meritocracy that we function in as a country,” Vásquez said. “So we can work hard and be nice all day long, but we need to also acknowledge there is systemic racism, systemic barriers, that our students consistently face.”

Those barriers are often underpinned by the coded language used to describe Black and brown students, writes Bettina Love in her book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Terms like grit are “racially coded feel-good, work-hard, and take-responsibility-for-my-actions buzzwords,” Love writes, that reside in the mission statements and curricula of schools, particularly those with large populations of minority students. Coded rhetoric influences the way educators see their students, she says.

“We never add the context to the language that we use to describe Black and brown children,” she told Teen Vogue. “We always talk about them in a very deficient way — and words matter.”

The data on school discipline offers a prime example of how those words manifest into more overt forms of oppression, says Harry Lawson Jr., director of human and civil rights at the NEA. Across the country, Black students are much more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. Coded language criminalizes Black and Latinx students, who are often described through the dog whistles as “aggressive,” “violent,” and “disrespectful,” Lawson said.

“The national debate around school discipline policy has been going on for more than 20 years,” Lawson told Teen Vogue. “And the deep disparities we see in discipline are the result of how students of color — particularly Black boys, girls, and Latino boys — are viewed, resulting in the overuse of suspensions and expulsions in response to minor and subjective infractions.”

A decade of watching the consequences of certain popular descriptors play out in the classroom prompted self-described anarchist educators Millie Viajerx and Andrea Alakran, the founders of Class Trouble, to compile a list of some of what they viewed as the most problematic phrases they’ve come across. Their “Guide to Coded Language in Education” seeks to identify and explain the oppressive implications of terms such as growth mindset, under-resourced, and adversity score, all of which they say either rely on systemic racism or dismiss the exploitation of nonwhite youth. They hoped the guide would help educators hold their peers more accountable.

“Power, in part, is the ability to escape accountability for the harm a person causes and or perpetuates,” Viajerx told Teen Vogue. “The path to escape is often hidden within coded language.”

“We support efforts to expunge coded language from campus materials,” Alakran added. “That said, no, we don’t think it’s enough.”

From demanding anti-racist curriculum to decreasing police presence on campus, schools nationwide have been fielding demands for short-term reforms and longer-term transformational change. As the paradigm shifts, educators are being asked to examine widely used academic descriptors and move to a vernacular informed by anti-racism.

“Adults who work with students have to ask why they think what they do about their students,” Lawson said. “And most critically, how is what you think impacting the decisions you make about what to teach, who to call on, who you help, who you get to know better, and who you think can succeed?”

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Colleges Are Facing a Reckoning Over Students’ Racist Posts

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