Toward Clarifying Mechanisms of Racism as Fundamental Causes of Educational Inequality

This article proposes adopting fundamental cause theory (FCT) in education research. FCT’s emergence and application in medical sociology can serve as an example of integrating relational theories of inequality with causal designs to propose more effective interventions to address racialized educational disparities. Additionally, despite the many contributions from the expanding scholarship in critical quantitative and computational methods, limited work has clarified and operationalized the causal mechanisms of racism in education. We contend that FCT can sharpen and crystalize this synthesis between critical theoretical frameworks and quantitative methodologies through its premise that racism is a fundamental cause of educational inequality, defining and testing for fundamental causal relations, and focusing on flexible resources that reinforce the durability of racialized educational disparities.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Educational Research

• Publication date

  2025-07-15

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3102/0013189X251356448
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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