Six on Schools: 10 Ways Well-Meaning White Teachers Bring Racism Into Our Schools; Families receive offers to gifted & talented programs - but program designed to boost student diversity misses goals; The Dying Art of Instruction in the Digital Clas
panaritisp
"Thus, as we head into the first weeks of school all over the US, here are 10 ways that White teachers introduce racism into our schools paired with things we can do instead.
1. Lowering or Raising Achievement Expectations Based on Race/Ethnicity
It’s probably best to start with one of the more common and obvious ways that racism can enter teaching practice: our expectations of student ability and achievement.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are constantly inundated with racist messaging about what students can and can’t achieve.
Whether we see media narratives about the math prodigy Asian students or the “ghetto” Black students who are reading 5 grade levels behind, we end up getting pretty clear messages long before we start teaching about what our student can handle.
In my own teaching, I know that I had a hard time actually teaching my students within their ZPDs because I was told from before I even started teaching that they simply weren’t capable of writing complex papers about world events. But they could! All it took was coordinated effort from multiple teachers pushing them as hard as we could!
We know that the expectations students are held to often correlate less to their ability than their race and class, so what should we do about it?
What to Do Instead
First, we need to spend some serious time reflecting about our own internalized biases. We all have them (not sure about yours? Consider taking this test!). And if we are working to understand our biases, then we can begin to mitigate their effects.
Second, we need to be sure that we are using effective, non-culturally-biased measures to determine student ability and to push them to their zones of proximal development. By making sure we are basing the ways we push our students in data drawn from legitimate (if limiting)measures, we can hopefully use that data to check some of our own biases.
2. Being ‘Race Neutral’ Rather than Culturally Responsive
In my work with teachers, I sometimes meet teachers who claim that they “don’t see Color,” both in naïve attempts to be “progressive” but also in an ill-advised attempt to avoid tracking students based on race/ethnicity.
But our students don’t need a “race neutral” approach to their education.
There is endless research about how students of all races need a culturally responsive education; it’s just that White students who have White teachers are far more likely to receive one.
Culturally responsive teaching is not just a box that we can check with simple changes to curriculum. Instead, it is a pedagogical shift that all teachers must work to cultivate over the course of a career, one that works its way into every aspect of how we teach.
Part of culturally responsive teaching also demands that we not simply focus on the races of our students but, instead, turn the lens on our own racial identity.
Race neutrality lends itself to defensiveness to the ways Whiteness and racism are problematic in our teaching.
Cultural responsiveness demands that we do the difficult work of exploring a different way of being White, one where we see our liberation as bound up with that of our students and their families.
What to Do Instead
Start by reading the amazing literature on culturally responsive teaching, looking to Geneva Gay, Beverly Daniel Tatum, and Gary Howard for starters.
And get creative! One of the most amazing things I see in teachers is the wonderful imagination that so many use to reach students.
Apply that creativity to a race-conscious classroom, and we could see some powerful (and innovative) results.
Then share! Blog about them or publish them in educational publications (while being open to critical feedback) so that we can all learn together.
3. Using Racially Coded Language ... "
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Numbers released Friday show that out of seven programs, just three — at P.S. 77 Lower Lab School, Tag Young Scholars, and Brooklyn School of Inquiry — met their goals for enrolling kindergarten or first-grade students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, are learning English for the first time, don’t have stable housing, or live in public housing.
Last year, five of six schools met targets. And like last year, the goals are relatively modest. For example, P.S. 77 met its goal by making offers to just six students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch out of a total 50 offers, the data shows.
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"Of course, teachers have been reporting a loss of control in school classrooms for decades. I remember in the early 1970s a high school teacher working in a poor area of Boston telling me she might as well simply turn the radio on as loud as possible and spend her lessons listening to music. Friends in Milan today, teaching at the so-called scuole professionali, report similar experiences: the near impossibility of making oneself heard, the need to resort to more and more aggressive tactics to focus the minds of the pupils, many of whom simply don’t want to be there and can’t see the point. Having youth unemployment at high levels for so long in Italy hardly helps.
The combination of computer use, Internet, and smart phone, I would argue, has changed the cognitive skills required of individuals. Learning is more and more a matter of mastering various arbitrary software procedures that then allow information to be accessed and complex operations to be performed without our needing to understand what is entailed in those operations. This activity is then carried on in an environment where it is quite normal to perform two, three, or even four operations at the same time, with a general and constant confusion of the social, the academic, and the occupational.
The idea of a relationship between teacher and class, professor and students, is consequently eroded. The student can rapidly check on his or her smartphone whether the professor is right, or indeed whether there isn’t some other authority offering an entirely different approach. With the erosion of that relationship goes the environment that nurtured it: the segregated space of the classroom where, for an hour or so, all attention was focused on a single person who brought all of his or her experience to the service of the group."
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A Gift That Never Stops Giving–Being a Teacher*
I wrote this post five years ago and re-post it now as both children and youth get prepared for the next school year. And teachers –both rookies and veterans–gear up for 2019-2020.
I began thinking of the often unspoken psychic rewards that accrue (in business terms, I would call it: the return on investment) to experienced teachers who have had many groups of students pass through their classroom over the years and how some of those students (such as Steven Strogatz) make a point of visiting, writing, and staying in touch with their former teachers. Fortunately, that has happened to me when a few former students at Glenville High School in Cleveland and from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. have stayed in touch. Ditto from some former Stanford graduates. When letters or pop- in visits occur, I get such a rush of memories of the particular student and the class and the mixed emotions that accompany the memories. Teaching is, indeed, the gift that never stops giving.
Those former students who stay in touch over the years, I have found, attribute far too much to my teaching and semester- or year-long relationship with them. Often I am stunned by their recollections of what I said and did. In most cases, I cannot remember the incidents that remain so fresh in their memories. Nor had I tried to predict which of the few thousand high school students I have taught would have reached out to contact me, I would have been wrong 75 percent of the time. My flawed memories and pitiful predictive power, however, cannot diminish the strong satisfaction I feel from seeing and hearing classroom tales from former students.
However policymakers and researchers define success in teaching or produce pay-for-performance plans the hard-to-measure influence of teachers upon students turns up time and again in those graduates who reach out to their former teachers. Those graduates seek out their former teachers because of how they were pushed and prodded, how intellectual doors were opened, how a ready ear and kind words made possible a crucial next step for that young man or woman. Student test scores fail to capture the bonds that grow between experienced teachers and children and youth who look for adults to admire, adults who live full, honest, and engaged lives. Am I waxing romantic about the currently unmeasurable results of teaching and the critical importance of retaining experienced teachers? No, I am not. I have a point to make.
My friend’s story of her former 11 year-old student still staying in touch because the relationship forged in 1960 between a group of sixth graders and a young teacher has resonated in a handful of graduates’ lives for many years. Something beautiful and long-lasting occurred when those bonds were forged in that Long Island elementary school, something that eludes current reformers eager for getting new teachers into classrooms and not worrying too much if they leave after two years since a new crop of fresh newcomers will replace them.
Turnstile teachers cannot forge those lasting bonds with students. Staying at least five-plus years give teachers the experience and competence to connect with classes and individual students. For those students lucky to have experienced teachers who had their older brothers and sisters, whose classrooms they want to eat their lunches in, whose reputations for being tough, demanding, caring, and a dozen other admirable traits draw children like magnets to their classrooms, the impressions and memories of these teachers will serve as guideposts for the rest of their lives. These are the teachers, district, state, and federal policymakers need to retain through mindful policies that encourage, not discourage teachers–policies that spur teacher growth in what and how they teach, foster collaboration among teachers, and motivate teachers to stay at least five-plus years in classrooms.
“Stand for Children” Folds in Massachusetts
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Thursday, August 8, 2019
Newsletter
Adolescence: 6 Facts to Know h/t Brian Ford
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Adolescents often get a bad rap, with many adults complaining that they are lazy, surly, and disrespectful. But a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine presents teens, tweens and young adults in a different light. The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth, identifies the period from age 10 to 25 as a unique opportunity to make progress and to recover from past adversity. The study addresses multiple aspects of adolescent life, including the legal system as well as education and health. Clocking in at nearly 500 pages, the report is a consensus-based study produced by top experts with deep knowledge of this period of life.
Neurobiological and Socio-behavioral Science of Adolescent Development a...
Neurobiological and Socio-behavioral Science of Adolescent Development and its Applications
The report focuses on eliminating or reducing inequities, culminating in more than 20 different recommendations for schools, health, child welfare, and the justice system. Contained within its pages are hundreds of facts and research findings about multiple aspects of adolescent life. This newsletter highlights six of these facts, pairing them with relevant National Education Policy Center resources.
1. FACT: Adolescence is a time when optimal development is stimulated through exploration, making and learning from mistakes, and trying on identities.
NEPC RESOURCE: A study co-authored by UCLA professor John Rogers found that when urban high school students took on identities as “critical researchers” examining their communities’ struggle for educational justice, they developed and used high-level academic skills in language arts, social studies, and math. The study appears in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, edited by University of Colorado professor Ben Kirshner.
2. FACT: Secondary schools that combined academic and technical curricula increased annual earnings by 11 percent overall and by 17 percent for men, according to a randomized controlled study of career academies.
NEPC RESOURCE: Although rigorous, academic career academies can generate positive results, a concern is that they might devolve into old-fashioned vocational education, which has often devolved into a warehousing of students from low-income families, students of color, and students with disabilities. An NEPC legislative brief, entitled Linking Learning to the 21st Century: Preparing All Students for College, Career, and Civic Participation, offers a model for the combing of academic and technical curricula. It provides statutory language designed to increase the odds that all students will attend secondary schools that prepare them for college, civic life, and careers.
3. FACT: Marketers, retailers, and credit card companies increasingly target youth as they reach adolescence, in an effort to harness their $211 billion-plus in spending power.
NEPC RESOURCE: In their book, Sold Out: How Marketing in School Threatens Children's Well-Being and Undermines their Education, Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger, co-directors of NEPC’s Commercialism in Education Research Unit, provide an in-depth look at the ways in which corporate marketers target children and adolescents in home and at school.
4. FACT: The Harlem Children’s Zone, which employs wraparound services such as health care, laundry, and summer learning, has led to not only short-term boosts to test scores, but to long-term benefits such as increased rates of college attendance and decreased rates of teen pregnancy and incarceration.
NEPC RESOURCE: The Children’s Zone adopts many practices of community schools, a longstanding model that focuses not just on academics but on students’ physical and emotional needs. Learn more about the approach from this NEPC/Learning Policy Institute report.
5. FACT: Despite the growing societal acceptance of people who identify as GLBTQ, there is evidence that things may be getting worse for GLBTQ youth. Mental health disparities, for instance, appear to be widening. And homophobic school bullying may be getting worse.
NEPC RESOURCE: Interested in learning about how to make schools safer for LGBTQ students? Read Safe at School: Addressing the School Environment and LGBT Safety through Policy and Legislation, an NEPC legislative brief.
6. FACT: Parental involvement is even more strongly associated with academic outcomes in secondary school than in elementary school, and the implications are longer lasting.
NEPC RESOURCE: An NEPC policy memo, Recasting Families and Communities as Co-Designers of Education in Tumultuous Times, offers recommendations for meaningfully engaging historically marginalized communities and families in education. An NEPC policy brief, Promoting ELL Parental Involvement: Challenges in Contested Times, by Beatriz Arias and Milagros Morillo-Campbell, is also available in Spanish (Promoviendo la participación de los padres de estudiantes que aprenden inglés: Desafíos en tiempos de conflicto).
NEPC Resources on High School and/or Secondary School ->
