Advocacy as a critical role for urban school counselors: working toward equity and social justice

Professional School Counseling, Feb, 2005 by Fred Bemak, Rita Chi-Ying Chung

INEQUITIES IN SCHOOLS: THE NEED FOR ADVOCACY, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND EQUITY

As a result of the overall poorer quality of education and subsequent achievement gap experienced by students of color and lower socioeconomic students in the United States, there is a self-fulfilling expectation fbr their low academic performance (American Association for Higher Education, 1992). The National Initiative to Transform School Counseling was a first systematic attempt to examine the school counselor's role as a means for contributing to equity and services for all students. As a result, a redefinition of the school counselor's role emerged. Part of this role redefinition included a strong advocacy component contributing to systemic change aimed toward improving academic performance for all students. The attempt of the National Initiative was to decrease the achievement gap between students of color or low-income students and middle/upper socioeconomic groups of White students, leading to social and academic equity.

SCHOOL COUNSELING: MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO

School counselor training and practice has been in a position of perpetuating the status quo and maintaining the inequities that currently exist in our schools. School administrators and school systems have externally defined the job of the school counselor. In many instances, school counselors have adopted and then internalized these roles, with little or no input or discussion. In turn, entire school systems adopt these job specifications and provide supervision and job performance evaluations based on that definition. The great risk here is that the system, the administrators and supervisors, and the school counselors themselves implicitly and explicitly agree to maintain the traditional and externally defined school counselor's role, thus maintaining the status quo. In fact, we would suggest that the achievement gap that now exists for poor students and students of color not only is based on the inadequate funding and the subsequent poor quality of many schools serving these populations, but is also, in part, due to the negligence, low expectations, and job goals and outcomes adopted as important by school counselors and other school personnel. This is not to say that school counselors lack commitment and dedication to their work, but rather to suggest that school counselors, similar to disenfranchised students, have been in some cases inadvertent victims of the systems in which they work, adopting values and practices conducive to bringing about categorical discrepancies in achievement. Even so, it is our firm belief that school counselors can make a difference by becoming proactive and assuming responsibility to adopt a position as an advocate who no longer tolerates these discrepancies.

Criticisms of counseling have centered on the focus on individualism, the maintenance and perpetuation of the current societal power structures, and the disregard for social and political issues facing clients and students (Bemak, 1998, 2000; Kantrowitz & Ballou, 1992; Prilleltensky, 1997; Sue & Sue, 1999). To continue to emphasize the individual without regard to the ecological context of the individual's world (Bemak & Conyne, 2004)--which includes factors such as poverty, discrimination, racism, sexism, violence, and bullying--is to ignore significant contributing influences that impact on one's school life, academic performance, and long-term career. We would suggest that it is imperative that school counselors pay close attention to social, political, and economic realities of students and families, with an aim to simultaneously address these as critical elements within the school counselor's role. For school counselors to ignore the impact of inherent power structures that contribute to the achievement gap is to participate in the insidious cycle of low performance and failure for poor students and students of color. To break away from traditions that tenaciously maintain the status quo, it is critical for school counselors to become advocates who challenge old paradigms and power structures.