PART IV Rethinking the Role of “Culture” in Educational Equity: From Cultural Competence to Equity Literacy Paul Gorski George Mason University “Culture” has tended to play a central role in the nomenclature and operationalization of popular frameworks for attending to matters of diversity in education. These frameworks include multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant teaching, cultural proficiency, and cultural competence. In this article, I argue that too tight a focus on “culture,” the meaning of which remains intensely contested, stunts the possibility of real prog- ress toward educational justice. As I will show, although some culture-centric frameworks are grounded in commitments to educational equity, they often are implemented in ways that essentialize mar- ginalized students and mask the forms of structural injustice that feed educational outcome disparities. I argue for a new commitment to centering equity rather than culture in conversations and practices related to educational justice—recommending the equity liter- acy framework as one way to enact that commitment. Introduction In their essay on cultural proficiency as a framework for better serving English language learners (ELLs), Moyer and Clymer (2009) rightly bemoaned the fact that schools in the United States continue to privilege White- ness. They lament, more generally, “many teachers are unaware of the importance of helping ELLs—who frequently feel lost, depressed, alienated, lonely, fearful, and abandoned when immersed in a class of students that caters to a culture unlike their own—develop a sense of belonging” (p. 16). As a salve for this inequitable access to affirming, safe, and just educational opportunity, they endorse cultural proficiency: a popular framework for attending to matters of diversity in schools. Culturally proficiency was developed as an approach for respond- ing to diversity in part out of dissatisfaction with the stereotyping and simplifying tendencies of cultural com- petence (Lindsey, Robins, Lindsey, & Terrell, 2009). Many, although not all, educators and scholars who have embraced or helped to construct the cultural profi- ciency framework have grounded their conceptions of it in commitments to creating more equitable, more racially and otherwise just, schools (Bakken & Smith, 2011; Lind- sey, Terrell, Robins, & Lindsey, 2010) to at least some extent. Others, including Moyer and Clymer (2009), appear to have interpreted the cultural proficiency frame- work through a considerably less justice-oriented lens. While acknowledging the need for cultivating more equi- table schools, they described a process for doing so that was heavy on appreciating cultural diversity and virtually silent on the need to prepare teachers to recognize and respond to the racism and other injustices ELLs experience Correspondence should be sent to Paul Gorski, George Mason Uni- versity, 4400 University Drive MS, 5D3, Falls Church, VA 22046. E-mail: gorski@edchange.org Multicultural Perspectives 221 Multicultural Perspectives, 18(4), 221–226 Copyright Ó 2016 by the National Association for Multicultural Education ISSN: 1521-0960 print / 1532-7892 DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2016.1228344