Do we need structural reform in public education? That’s been an engaging topic of discussion on LinkedIn this week. The general consensus is “yes” but the prescriptions don’t add up to much.
The robust conversation follows two disheartening media reports this week. On May 14, Teach for America teacher Eli Hagar wrote a piece about racial segregation in the Mississippi Delta’s schools. A day earlier, a giant article about the re-segregation of New York City schools occupied more than two pages of the Sunday New York Times. These are painful, powerful stories to read and I urge you to take a look if you haven’t yet.
But if we listen carefully, American public school teachers are giving us an even more powerful and alarming message: Our social fiber needs structural reform.
We at VIVA Teachers believe passionately that classroom teachers are the voice of authority in public education. I also think that public schools are the canary in the coal mine for American civic society. And, the warning bells are ringing loudly.
The Massachusetts Teachers’ Union is currently partnering on a VIVA Idea Exchange about the state’s troubling achievement gap, especially in those many cities that aren’t Boston. Chicago’s VIVA Teachers had all kinds of wisdom about how to broaden the narrow lives experienced by too many children in Chicago. Even in Minnesota, teachers point over and over again to the need for a new kind of cultural literacy amongst principals and teachers.
The common thread: Our country is as segregated as it ever was. We haven’t yet reached that mountain top.
A New Dialogue Needed
We can, and should, celebrate the end to the worst ugliness of violent racism, prejudice and discrimination that was part of the bedrock of our country through the 1960s. The heroism of those who stood their ground against injustice inspires me everyday and is an example we should all heed.
But, take a look in our schools. We are not providing every student a fair or equal opportunity to learn. Sure, there are probably some really lousy teachers out there. And fewer amazingly gifted teachers than we all wish for.
But, the problem isn’t teachers. The problem is us. We tolerate division, inequity and yes, racism, way too often. Maybe now we tolerate it by refusing to acknowledge inequity rather than through outright hostility. But the ill results are the same. Exactly the same.
So, let’s open a new kind of dialogue with teachers, amongst the most important public servants in our country (and I’m NOT just being rhetorical here). Let’s talk about how we can use our education system to overcome racism and prejudice, not just perpetuate it with a different strategy. That’s what VIVA is here to do. Join us.
Racism in America is enacted in America under the guise of education reform and the singular focus on test scores. We take test prep and lynch our students with the very education that least addresses their social emotional needs, choking the life out of the exhilaration and excitement that learning should be, choking out any relevance or connection to the real world they live in.
Instead of creating an education framework of civic literacy that teaches our segregated, impoverished students about policy and structures and institutions that explain and give them tools to understand their difficult iife circumstances, teachers are forced to use very narrow and constricting college readiness standards to raise test scores.
High poverty schools eliminate career readiness classes to make way for more college readiness classes, as if we do not need electricians or constructions workers or plumbers, high paying blue collar work with a hands on aspect that meets the needs of kinesthetic learners. High poverty students are expected to become middle class white students without any of the social structures in place that help them to achieve this supposed “norm.” White middle class students learn the norms of the middle class at the dinner table, while high poverty students are punished by laws, policy, and institutions for not knowing these norms, and then denied every possible opportunity to learn them in a classroom.
Social emotional learning that is much easier to absorb in safe neighborhoods and a stable family life should be a high priority in every school where students are subjected to the violence inherent in neighborhoods with high unemployment and a drug economy as the only economy that segregation forces on these neighborhoods.
We have created the worst form of Catch 22 in our education system, where the very students who need a broad, social emotional, civic literacy, enriched education that is the norm for magnet and elite schools are given test prep and more of it as this very narrow education experience, and if they can’t take it, they end up suspended or drop out. Instead of addressing the needs of high poverty, we ignore them and say “High test scores are your only salvation, the only way to make it in America!!!”
I know teachers who would love to teach students civic literacy and social emotional skills WITH reading, writing, math skills, but get terrible evaluations because they are not sticking to College Readiness Standards. This is a terrible conflict for teachers, a worse conflict that is enacted in classrooms in high poverty neighborhoods, where you know what is needed but get in trouble for doing something about it.
Elizabeth,
Thank you for putting the onus for inequality on a society that tolerates segregation and classism, not on the backs of hard-working teachers in the trenches. It’s time we recognized that poverty and racism are issues that are systemic and must be tackled systemically.