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In this chapter, various initiatives have been proposed, including a reinforcement of the school-based curriculum policy, a global, comprehensive curriculum reform toward Learning to Learn (LTL), as well as a heightened awareness of the need to enforce multicultural education through the curriculum and teaching. Moreover, policies such as those that lead to quality assurance, standardization, and accountability in education also influence the development of school curriculum in this global age. This chapter also briefly discusses the issues thus put forward.

With the support of the Ford Foundation, Professor Teng Xing of Minzu University in Beijing has overseen a long-term project aimed at promoting the educational opportunities among the Lahu minority girls of the remote and mountainous Muga township, which is situated along Yunnan province’s border with Burma. In his chapter, Teng and his colleagues reflect on the impact of the specialized Lahu girls’ classes they helped to establish in 2001, and chronicle the impressive academic achievements of two cohorts of students. Putting forward the “Lahu classes” as a successful example of “multicultural integration education,” they argue that the classes provide their lucky participants with the rudiments of a modern education—fluency in Putonghua, basic academic skills and a cultural toolkit—which enables them to survive outside their isolated, rural communities. At the same time, it is argued that the classes help the girls to take pride in their indigenous culture and language through the use of local curriculum materials and pedagogical strategies, while simultaneously promoting the integration of the Lahu minority into mainstream society and the cultural diversity of the Chinese nation

Chapter Two examines the ways teachers at Birch and Spruce understood and engaged multicultural education as either “powerblind sameness” or “colorblind difference.” Although these framing concepts appear to be logically inconsistent with one another, educators ascribed to both simultaneously. These two frameworks of sameness and difference serve as a dual system of support for whiteness.

In her chapter, Zhang Li-fang asks what intellectual styles are the most conducive for good educational outcomes in a multi-ethnic environment like China. She argues that intellectual styles complicate multicultural education, and stresses the importance of balancing group preferences for learning with individual cognitive styles. Furthermore, rapidly developing multiethnic societies like China, must navigate the desire to cultivate “the adaptive values of Type I styles,” which are more propitious to the “creativity-generating” activities of the global economy, with the more conservative style exhibited by some Chinese minorities like Tibetan and Uyghur students. This is made all the more difficult by the PRC’s unique ethnic policies, and the inflexibility they offer at the curriculum level, and, one might add, the institutional scale.

In his chapter He Baogang identifies a distinct linguistic trajectory over the longue durée of Chinese history: what he terms a type of “Chinese linguistic imperialism,” which makes multilingual education an unstable, and possibly untenable, proposition in contemporary China. The spread of Han characters (hanzi), he argues, has closely followed the expansion of Han culture and political rule—a sort of “soft power” that has resulted in the gradual, yet inextricable decline of alternative, minority languages. He suggests that this history of linguistic imperialism, as signified by the traditional concept of “Great Unity” (datong) and the administrative tradition of gaitu guiliu (replacing native chieftains with Han administrators), serves as a powerful counterbalance to Fei Xiaotong’s pluralistic unity paradigm, and ultimately presents a serious barrier to any bona fide and practical multicultural education in China. While He Baogang stakes out a normative claim for multilingualism, language is but one element of cultural diversity, and one can point to numerous examples of ethnicity that is not based on language.

In this chapter, Naran Bilik argues that despite the presence of Han linguistic imperialism, there remains a distinct “linguistic-cultural anxiety” in the PRC. On the one hand, there are those that stress the “unity” (yiti) side of Fei Xiaotong’s formula and call for more emphasis on national integration, while on the other hand, there are those that emphasize the “diversity” (duoyuan) side and advocate increased provisions for ethnic pluralism in China. While market forces have sharpened these contradictions, they are also deeply rooted in the history of the Asian continent. Seeking to uncover the fluid and unstable plurality of past notions of “China,” Bilik highlights the polysemy of Chinese terms like minzu, zhongguo, and zhonghua in the Mongolian language, and suggests that by asking and then validating the different ways “you say China in Mongolian,” one can shatter the myth of “mono-cultural centrism” and promote inter-ethnic understanding in China.

Deeply informed by Western scholarship on multicultural education, Postiglione argues that China is at a crucial turning point as the rapid pace of economic and social reforms opens up new divisions and ethnic tensions within Chinese society. He puts forward two possible directions: the sort of plural monoculturalism discussed by Amartya Sen or a more harmonious, and arguably indigenous, form of multiculturalism. Despite some encouraging signs, Postiglione warns that in terms of educational policy, China appears to be heading in the direction of emphasizing assimilation over any harmonious acceptance of diversity. When compared to Western multiculturalism, Chinese society, with its tradition on Chinese culturalism, exhibits a much more conservative form of multiculturalism than any that currently operates in the West.

In her Chapter, Zuliyati Simayi provides a comprehensive and sophisticated survey of bilingualism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). She highlights some of the important accomplishments over the last couple of decades, and some of the systemic limitations inherent in the current system. In particular, she emphasizes the way in which a minzu-based education, rather than one that takes the individual as its starting point, can undermine learning and social outcomes, echoing the debate in Western liberalism over the relationship between group and individual rights. She concludes: “…one of the essential objectives of school education should be not only the cultivation of respect for different ethnic group’s history, culture and guaranteed development, but also the cultivation of ethnic minorities into equal citizens of the state. The best way to realize this objective is to promote multicultural education that targets justice and equality at the individual level rather than a group basis.”

China is home to over one million ethnic Koreans who have long thought of themselves as part of the Chinese nation, making significant contributions to the nation’s development. Due to their high educational outcomes, Koreans are often viewed as a “model minority” in China, a cultural stereotype that can carry a weighty burden. Arguing in her chapter that multicultural education requires protective and discursive spaces for minority languages, Gao Fang demonstrates that for ethnic Korean teachers, at least, the pressure to succeed and live up to the model minority tag has led to a gradual hollowing out of Korean-Chinese identity. In place of the Korean language, which is increasingly devalued, commodified cultural practices like kimchi and karaoke have come to define the boundaries of Korean identity in China. Gao’s chapter also highlights the nested yet fluid hierarchy of minzu categories and identities in the PRC, with several of her Korean informants viewing themselves as innately superior to Tibetan and Uyghurs students but still inferior to the Han majority.

In her chapter, Linda Tsung draws on her fieldwork in primary schools in southern Xinjiang, and asks the question of what happens to educational outcomes when English is introduced into a bilingual curriculum in the XUAR. She concludes that due to poor teaching materials, inadequate teacher training, and limited resources, Uyghur students struggle to keep up with their Han peers in this sort of trilingual environment, and the end result is poor academic achievement, and increased disparity between Uyghur and Han students. This situation is further exasperated by the gap between urban and rural schools, with urban schools and students better equipped for bilingual and trilingual education, while rural Uyghur students fall further and further behind. Finally, in her opinion, the government-backed merge of schools in Xinjiang has largely failed to address these inequalities, with significant barriers remaining in place (linguistic, cultural and institutional), which prevent any meaningful interaction either inside the classroom or on the playgrounds

In her chapter, Yu Haibo explores the attitudes of Han university administrators, and stresses the importance of listening to and surveying mainstream attitudes on ethnic minorities and minority education. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty university administrator in 2010 and 2011, Yu demonstrates how a range of opinions co-exists among Han educators, including discriminatory perceptions of minorities as slow, violent and/or backward. She calls for further education, but also stresses that the minorities themselves have an important role to play in leading by example, allowing their own efforts to shine through with the help of their teachers and other educators.

In his chapter, Chen Yangbin suggests that given their different responses to the growing complexity of the “Xinjiang problem,” Uyghur graduates from specialized dislocated schools are likely to form a new educational elite group. These Uyghur youth, who attend boarding schools in inland cities (Xinjiangban) and undertook the university entrance exam in Putonghua, have gained access to universities across inland China, including some of China’s most prestigious. Based on an initial survey of these graduates, Chen delineates the uniqueness of their experiences both at university and in their daily lives in eastern China. He demonstrates their feeling of superiority in terms of educational achievement, which they attempt to balance with an equally strong sense of representing Uyghur culture. The chapter also analyzes the implications of this new group of elites when viewed against the background of identity, multiculturalism and ethnic integration in China

Chapter One examines the Zion School District from the district, or central office, level. Within the district, central office leaders claimed equity as a priority but simultaneously claimed that the responsibility for failed attempts at equity resided in individual schools. When there existed a convergence of interests, some progress was made around diversity, but this progress was always narrowly defined and limited by the possessive investment in whiteness. When no such interests converged, responsibility for equity was consistently displaced elsewhere.

Chapter Four highlights how schools differently engage diversity and, specifically, the notion of equality. At Spruce, a powerblind, colorblind understanding of equality shaped the ways educators understood excellence and the efforts they made to provide a high quality education to Spruce students. At Birch, however, educators engaged a more race- and power-conscious form of equality, but they were so constrained by the pressures of standardized accountability, that their diversity-related efforts were also limited and ultimately failed to approximate what was needed to advance equity..

Chapter Five examines current federal efforts to “turnaround the nation’s worst schools” through targeted School Improvement Grants. With a foundation in individualism and classical liberalism, this school-reform model results in the loss of students, teachers, and actual schools. The resulting neoliberal transformation exacerbates inequity and reifies whiteness.

Chapter Three discusses some of the meaningful silences around–and silencing of–race and sexuality in schools. Even though done with the best of intentions, efforts at maintaining politeness end up maintaining the status quo rather than facilitating social change.

The concluding chapter suggests that while whiteness shapes what diversity-related policy and practice look like, the resulting policy and practice, in turn, further strengthen whiteness. Thus, whiteness operates as an almost perfect system. It is effective and efficient at what it does. As a key element of whiteness in schools, niceness makes equity very difficult, so we must be awake, vigilant, and strategic.

The prevailing post-war paradigm on education and social class is based on a direct association between these two concepts, such that they are inseparable in the minds of many. That is, education leads to class mobility as a direct result of the education system. In extending this argument, the idea that minority children underperform in education due to their ethnic and class characteristics should hold sway, but research has also claimed that stronger schools can raise the average performance levels of pupils from weaker backgrounds, while weaker schools tend to reduce the average performance of pupils from lower-class backgrounds. Many see educational underperformance among young Muslims as an intractable problem; however, in reality, the poor educational performance of young British Muslims is often due to policy decisions made at a local or national level. The education of British Muslims has evolved in the context of the policies of post-war immigration, integration and diversity policy. In reality, in situating these groups, popular systems of multiculturalism endorse notions of tolerance and secularity through the popularization of a multiculture that racializes the civilized, modern or backward in the construction of national identities.