Gloria Jean Ladson-Billings FBA (born 1947) is an American pedagogical theorist and teacher educator known for her work in the fields of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory, and the pernicious effects of systemic racism and economic inequality on educational opportunities.
During the 2005 AERA annual meeting in San Francisco, Ladson-Billings delivered her presidential address, "From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools", in which she outlined what she called the "education debt", highlighting the combination of historical, moral, socio-political, and economic factors that have disproportionately affected African-American, Latino, Asian, and other non-white students.
[16] Education debt is a theory developed by Ladson-Billings to attempt to explain the racial achievement gap.
It was prohibited by law in many places across the United States, specifically the south, for African Americans to attend school.
As a cause of this lack of education, there were extremely high rate of illiteracy in the African-American community following the Civil War.
After forced labor and genocides, the remaining population was funneled into boarding schools focused on religious teachings and assimilation into European culture.
In the case Mendez vs. West Minister, Latino fathers challenged the courts as their children, and thousands of others, were victims of racial segregation.
The concept of separate but equal, made constitutional by Plessy vs. Ferguson, allowed a significant of amount of funding disparity between school districts to be perpetuated.
[17] Although affirmative action benefited white women the most, observations show that the emergence of the Black middle class was aided by the policy.
"No nation can enslave a race of people for hundreds of years, set them free bedraggled and penniless, pit them, without assistance in a hostile environment, against privileged victimizers, and then reasonably expect the gap between the heirs of the two groups to narrow.