The claim that anti-racist education has undermined academic achievement rests on a misunderstanding that continues to shape how we talk about schools. It assumes that attention to race, history, and power comes at the expense of intellectual discipline, as if rigor exists only where complexity is reduced and learning is made predictable. That assumption narrows both the meaning of rigor and the purpose of education.
We can define anti-racist education as an approach to teaching that treats race, history, and power as subjects worthy of serious study. At its strongest, this work does not displace academic content. It deepens it. It asks students to engage more carefully with what they read, to think more deliberately about what they are learning, and to consider how knowledge is shaped over time. The issue is not whether this approach weakens rigor. It is whether we have defined rigor in a way that reflects what it actually means to understand.
For too long, schooling has been organized around what can be measured easily. Success is tied to performance, often reduced to producing expected responses within a given frame. Over time, this has shaped a version of rigor that privileges efficiency over depth and correctness over understanding. Students learn how to demonstrate knowledge, but not always how to make sense of it.
A better understanding of rigor assumes that students are capable of sustained intellectual work and organizes instruction accordingly. Knowledge is not treated as fixed, but as something to be interpreted, questioned, and applied. The work is more demanding because it requires students to remain engaged long enough to encounter uncertainty and work through it. In classrooms where this kind of rigor is taken seriously, content knowledge becomes more significant, not less. Students read closely, write with precision, and build fluency with key ideas. What follows is less predictable.
I have seen students build strong content knowledge and then use it to interrogate the textbook that delivered it. I have also seen inquiry drift into vagueness, where content gives way to conversation that never quite lands. The relationship between mastery and meaning is not automatic. It has to be built, lesson by lesson, and some days it fails. That difficulty does not weaken the work. It defines it.
This orientation toward learning stands in contrast to systems built around control and consistency. When predictability becomes the priority, the range of acceptable responses narrows, and over time, so does the range of students who remain within the system. What appears as success often reflects alignment with the structure as much as it reflects intellectual growth. Students who do not fit the model are less likely to persist within it, reshaping the outcomes that are later used to justify the model itself. Seen in this light, the conversation about rigor is not only about instruction. It is about what we choose to value.
I first encountered the work of Jacob H. Carruthers outside of formal schooling, in my own effort to better understand what it means to teach. I did not treat it as supplemental. I treated it as central. Carruthers argues that what we call “classics” reflects the outcome of a struggle over truth. That insight does not diminish the importance of reading those texts closely. It intensifies it. You cannot dismiss a formation you have not understood.
The work of Asa Hilliard deepened that understanding. He reminds us that the issue is not the capacity of students, but the conditions and expectations that surround them. When we confuse symptoms with problems, we misdirect our efforts, focusing on outcomes while leaving the structures that produce them intact. This is evident in how disparities in achievement are often discussed. The focus remains on what students are able to demonstrate, while the context shaping those outcomes receives less attention. When classroom practice is isolated from these conditions, responsibility shifts away from systems and toward explanations that locate the problem within instruction alone.
The limits of that thinking become clear when conditions are unstable. When students are asked to make sense of uncertainty, to interpret incomplete information, and to respond to change, the ability to reproduce correct answers is not enough. What matters is their capacity to think, adapt, and construct meaning in real time. This is what rigor demands. Rigor, in this sense, is not defined by performance under controlled conditions. It is defined by the ability to engage complexity without reducing it. It develops through sustained engagement with ideas that do not resolve quickly and through the expectation that students are capable of that work. In classrooms where this expectation is present, excellence and equity are not competing goals. Students are asked to know and to think. They build knowledge and learn to use it. The work is demanding, and it exists within systems that do not always reward it, but its value is not diminished by those constraints.
What is often defended in critiques of anti-racist education is not rigor, but a narrower vision of schooling that privileges what can be measured over what can be understood. It produces visible outcomes, but it does not always cultivate the capacity to make sense of the world. Education cannot be reduced to performance without limiting what it makes possible. We cannot mistake demonstration for understanding. We cannot define excellence in ways that exclude the work of thinking. Rigor that cannot examine its own assumptions is not rigor. It is only discipline.
