by H. Rebecca Eaton, New York City Elementary School Teacher
What’s worth saying about race in my first grade classroom is what it isn’t. Race is not an object of discussion or discord in the classroom. Who shares magic markers is; and what matters is who plays with whom on the playground.
I have 23 six and seven year olds in my public school classroom overlooking West 77th Street. About half our kids are of Latino, African-American, and Asian descent—and among these are countless permutations: two children have one white and one black parent, one has a Japanese mother and German father, one black child has parents from the Caribbean. Half the class is Caucasian, some first generation immigrants, and some with grandparents born and raised in New York. Perhaps such a mix of children is rare in New York City, or rare anywhere in the Unites States, for that matter. But what seems rare to me is the amount to which race doesn’t matter in my classroom.
The kids play together and help each other with spelling words or ideas for stories. My students get upset when one child refuses to share the only light blue marker at the table; they argue with each other about what to build in the blocks area, and when someone knocks it down against the others’ will. Hurtful words are “I don’t want to be your friend anymore,” and these occur between some children and not others, regardless of race.
When I went to Hammond Elementary School, a yellow bus picked me up and drove past cornfields, a dairy plant, and houses and townhouses surrounded by little yards. My classes were overwhelmingly white and Christian. I remember Sumitro, the only Indian child in my class, because he was the only child with parents from India, a very foreign seeming place at the time. My father came in and played dreidel with us before Hanukkah every year; that way kids would know what Judaism was.
In sixth grade I entered Hammond Middle School, where my elementary school joined with the kids from Laurel. The first apartment building I ever visited was in Laurel; the one friend I made from the other elementary school lived in one. Laurel was a lot more pavement and a lot less farmland. It was also a lot more black and brown and a lot less white. What I remember about those early middle school years is that the kids from Hammond stuck together and the kids from Laurel stuck together.
Was our self-segregation a result of our earlier, separate educations? I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed at the beginning of middle school. For one, there were just more kids and, maybe also, it was the fact that the kids from the other school looked different. No matter that my parents taught me to treat everyone the same, regardless of race or class: this didn’t change the fact that I had spent the formative years of my life playing, arguing, and learning with mostly white kids.
Children’s thoughts will always be shaped by and reflective of the greater society in which they live. And our society remains divided. But when my students play together, argue together, learn together, regardless of color, they are learning to function with people who look and come from very different places. To echo Langston Hughes’ words—For America to be America again, for it to be America to those for whom it never was, we need, desperately, to learn to live together in those early years, when we can learn to ignore the color codes that abound in society.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Guest Blogger: How 6 Year Olds Do (or Don't) See Color
Friday, June 29, 2007
Equal Opportunity and Diversity: A Teacher's Perspective
In response to yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings on school integration, Michael Petrilli of the National Review published a 10 item “to do list”, directed towards educators and activists who “really care about the future of black and brown students.” Petrilli argued that surest way to achieve an integrated society is to improve the quality of education in urban school districts by hiring better teachers, giving principals control of budgets and hiring, implementing strict discipline programs, and holding both teachers and schools accountable for their academic results. Such an approach, he argues, will “make more difference to [minority] kids than the skin color of those in the adjoining desks.” As a former teacher, I agree with many of Petrilli’s recommendations for improving the quality of urban school districts,but I disagree with his proposition that the goals of integration and educational excellence are mutually exclusive.
I spent the entirety of my teaching career in segregated schools, many of which produced outstanding students. I taught for three years in a public school in a large city that was 100% African American and Hispanic, but my students scored higher on the state achievement tests than any urban students in the state, and as high as students in the wealthy suburbs nearby. The school I taught in had a small student body, complete control over hiring and finances, a strict discipline policy, and teachers from Ivy League universities. I cannot say that my students’ ability to learn reading or math was compromised by the fact that there were no white students in the school. However, I am certain that their cultural understanding was limited as a result.
I taught world geography and culture, and was constantly amazed by how isolated my students were from other cultural groups. Many of them had never eaten Chinese food and had no idea that Judaism even existed, despite the fact that there were large Chinese and Jewish neighborhoods less than 1 mile away. Though my African American and Hispanic students were curious and eager to learn about the world around them, I always felt that their understanding of other cultures and experiences was purely academic. With no personal connections to what we were learning, other cultures remained profoundly foreign.
I had similar experiences when I taught for a year at a private school in Seattle with no African American or Hispanic students. One day, my students were studying imperialism and reading Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden. We talked about Kipling’s use of the n-word in the poem, a conversation which I concluded by saying, “But, of course, we don’t use that word today.” One of my students, a bright, kind, and funny kid, raised his hand, and said, in all earnestness, “Why not? There aren’t any black people here.” Though I expected that my students would want to discuss the statement, they were completely disinterested in the impact of racial slurs on society as a whole. Without any contact with people of other ethnic or racial groups, my students had no clear sense of empathy for them, and no desire to delve deeply into the experiences of other people.
What scares me most about the rollback on Brown’s promise of school integration is not the impact it may have on academic achievement (although I do think that school districts, spooked by this ruling, will be reluctant to even talk about race in schools, thus making it extremely difficult to provide at risk students with the additional resources they need). Rather, I’m troubled by the possibility that more children in this country will be educated in a segregated environment, lacking the understanding, empathy, and personal connection to people of other backgrounds which is necessary to participate in both American democracy and a global society.
In light of yesterday’s ruling, those of us who truly care about the education of students of color must continue to advocate for BOTH educational excellence in our schools AND for diverse and integrated learning environments. To reach one goal and not the other would be a specious victory.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Guest Blogger: Worlds Apart
by J.S., 6th grade history teacher in New York City
I'm not generally a politically minded person, but I am a teacher who has worked in two vastly different types of educational settings. It is upsetting to me, given how segregated our public schools are, that policy-makers are being discouraged from finding viable and voluntary ways to solve this problem. And it IS a problem.
Two years ago, I taught at a public school with a student body that was 30% black and 67% hispanic in the neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn. The school was run by an inefficient administration that was nonetheless bent on reminding the faculty at all times that they were subject to each and every administrative edict, no matter how nonsensical or inconvenient. The faculty was either inexperienced or burnt-out, with very few falling in the middle of that spectrum. New York City Teaching Fellows in their first two years of teaching comprised at least one-third of the faculty; I was one of them. Attendance was a significant issue, since at least a third of any given class was usually absent from school that day, and a significant proportion of students were classified as LTAs, or long-term absences, meaning that we hadn't seen them in months. Test scores also posed a problem, since only a slight percentage of the student body was equipped to legitimately pass the Regents each year. As a Special Education teacher, I taught 15-to-19-year-old students who read at 1st-5th grade levels and expended the majority of their energy on staying away from situations where they might "look dumb." This, of course, included actively engaging and learning the material, or even coming to school at all.
In the absence of a supportive administration or sufficient resources (we had to bring our own photocopy paper and guard it with our lives), the school hardly felt like a place where education was a priority. One of the most difficult consequences of this environment was how deeply the students had internalized the message that their education was not valuable. They knew that the school was not designed with their best interests in mind; moreover, they knew that attending all of their classes and working hard would not necessarily amount to much after graduation. Especially for the students in my Special Education classes, life in a gang was potentially more rewarding than the kind of low-paying work they would be eligible for upon graduation, if they made it that far. My students had come to believe, over time, that they did not deserve a good education. One of them asked me, upon learning that I had graduated from an Ivy League university, "What you doin' in a school like this? You shouldn't be here." Ignoring for the moment the fact that one's undergraduate degree has very little to do with one's merit as a teacher, my student's inference was clear: I live in the 'hood, so I'm not supposed to get the "good" teachers.
That was hard to take; it was even harder to face when I did in fact decide to leave for a school that was more supportive of its teachers and its students and where students had significantly more resources, both financial and educational, at their fingertips. My students now are mostly white, and they take for granted the luxury of attending a school that will furnish the resources, support, and experience to convey them smoothly into a bright future, if only they apply themselves. They do not know what it is to be disempowered or left behind. I can't help but feel that I abandoned the students at my first school, who were truly in need. If anything, students in inner-city schools need more resources, better teachers, and more love and support; not less. If we are not willing to distribute funds disproportionately to the schools whose students need these resources most, we at least need to support the efforts of those school districts that are willing to work to solve this problem in other ways. This is not an issue of race as much as it is an issue of investing in a common humanity, so that all children can grow up knowing that they deserve a good education. So long as the virtual apartheid in our schools persists, and so long as we continue to resist efforts at change, we are betraying ourselves. And if that argument is too "bleeding-heart liberal" for you, then consider this: what is going to happen to the army of less-well educated graduates without the skills or the experience to support themselves? The labor market has changed substantially in the last few decades; most types of work require a college degree at the least. What course of action will these abandoned students take when they find that the system has deserted them in almost imaginable way?
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Guest Blogger: Democracy, Integration, and the Classroom
by Cara Furman, New York City Elementary School Teacher
Since I began teaching, the first questions that people ask me about my school are where I teach, is it public, and what is the racial demographic. My impression is that when people are asking this, their interest is connected to what each answer connotes. When I explained that I worked at a private school on the Upper East Side, people asked about facilities, famous families and spoiled students. When I described my work at a public school in Harlem, people asked about behavior problems and test scores. They often offered consolation.
Now, when I share that I teach in the East Village, people seem less clear on how to categorize, which typically elicits questions about demographics. When I explain that my school is mixed racial and mixed income, people seem shocked and unable to categorize. "What is that like?" they ask, "I didn't know there were schools like that in New York." In fact, when my father came to visit my first and second grade classroom, he spoke later in awe to a friend: "its amazing, there's everyone, children with nannies and the children of nannies. About 17 different countries represented in a class of 21!"
In my current classroom, my students are learning about diversity and human relations from each other. After one student told another that he “didn’t like black people,” my class spent two hours (their choice) trying to figure out why the student had said that, what he meant, and what such comments mean in our society. For the first time all year, some of my shyer African American students rose to the center of the classroom articulating frustrations and hurt. White students who often dominate conversation took a back seat, listening and processing. These six and seven year olds, who typically start to fidget after 15 minutes, listened, spoke, and processed the incident instead of having free time. Within the conversation, for the first time in my teaching experience, Martin Luther King (who we had discussed months earlier) came alive for them in important ways as they debated whether anger was a fair response to the comment and then worked past their anger to try to explain to the student why he had hurt them. The conversation ultimately ended when the student refused to apologize and we seemed to have hit a stalemate. Yet, despite this result, my African American students (and their parents when told) expressed pride and some feelings of success. They had explained themselves and defended themselves. Nevertheless, I went home concerned that maybe I should have defended the African American students and punished the child for his comment. Yet, when the next day, the child returned to school prepared to apologize, I became convinced that dialogue in safe places--where students of different races share power--is the most effective tool against injustice.
Today, I am horrified that diverse classrooms, which teach children how to be human in a diverse world, are at risk. My research, conversations, and experience have made clear to me that, where the white community holds the power, there will never be equality when there is not integration. While we remain a nation just as representative as the students in my classroom, we are not a democracy where the people of these nations necessarily interact. In a country where, according to public school advocate, Debra Meier, schools provide one of the last places for people to have sustained interaction with those from a different background, schools are crucial to maintaining the interaction necessary for the democracy to viably exist. If we do not integrate our schools, if our human sense of community does not cross racial lines, then as long as one community has power and another does not, separate will always be unequal.