“Real-Life Needs”: How Humanitarian Techniques Produce Hierarchies of Science and Mathematics Education

Background and Context: Racialized disparities in curricular tracking have long been ascribed to narrow tests that create a hierarchy of perceived ability. Consequently, teachers are urged to reject deficit views of ability and embrace more expansive techniques to reveal and respond to the real-life needs of students, especially those from minoritized groups. Paradoxically, these tools, upheld as equity strategies today, had prior careers racializing populations along a hierarchy of perceived needs. That hierarchy, which gave a humanitarian basis for curricular tracking, continues to produce racializing effects today. Purpose: This article rethinks how teachers are taught to distinguish the real-life needs of students from marginalized communities. As a history of the present, it examines how demographic distinctions in health-related needs emerged historically and became tied to lower track science and mathematics instruction. We ask: To what extent do current strategies persist in dividing populations and prescribing distinct pedagogies? Have the normalizing impulses of past tools been removed or rearticulated in recent reforms that promote educational and health equity? Research Design: We first analyzed articles reviewed as exemplary of culturally responsive science and mathematics education to identify techniques recommended to uncover students’ real-life needs. Next, we compared these techniques with similar tools promoted in early 20th-century U.S. science and mathematics education journals, when these fields began distinguishing types of students and matching them with distinct tiers of instruction. Conclusions: Despite key shifts over the century (e.g., from treating inherent pathologies to redressing inequities), similar tools operate as humanitarian techniques today. That is, they classify populations as having “immediate needs” for intervention in daily life that preempt “future needs” for academic preparation. The resulting hierarchy of perceived needs orders students and subject matter from applied relevance to abstract rigor. This yields four dangers: (1) positing target students and families as not-yet-capable of self-direction, (2) prioritizing for target groups an applied and often lower prestige curriculum with consequences for their academic trajectories, (3) depoliticizing systemic inequities as problems of attitude adjustment, and (4) depoliticizing mainstream science and mathematics education by isolating sociopolitical concerns as compensatory interventions. We argue that school science and mathematics are not unique in these respects but epitomize risks present whenever social scientific tools offer an ostensibly neutral basis for seeing and sorting difference.