Is the glass half full?

June27

Gratification Paradox
Student: My school district hires too many white teachers – The Washington Post is a really thoughtful first-person piece from a student in the New Orleans school system that was posted in a private teacher discussion group which I’m part of. Since it’s a private group, I’m going to talk pretty generally about that aspect of it. When I first looked at the discussion I thought it looked pretty good. Lot’s of folks talking pretty seriously about the subject. The glass looked half-full, to me.

Then I thought about a recent back-and-forth on Twitter last week that was about who gets to talk for teachers (mostly women) and communities of color (pro-tip for man-splainers, when picking a fight with a black parent on this topic, refer to them as a “mommy blogger”). So I read back through the comments and saw some stuff that while seemingly positive, were just full of racial stuff that was not good. Most of it was from men who based on their response were white saying, race does NOT matter, we need to be color-blind, that’s how I teach my kids! I do wonder truly how “de-cultured” their teaching is because they really seemed to love the students, but telling a roomful of black and brown students that color doesn’t matter and it’s just about their attitude is really, really setting them up for failure. Do I think a class of elementary students need to be masters of critical race theory? No, but many of them are already, so I don’t need to teach them that. What I need to do is not lie to them (and myself) about reality.

Suggestions about how to appropriately teach in these situations are helpful, because the reality is that there are not enough teachers of color to go around. Lisa Delpit (who was referenced or whose work was clearly alluded to by some commentators) recognized this and used it to frame her book “Other People’s Children”. Others commented cogently on the overall context of New Orleans, the city featured in the piece, and the “plantation-like” aspects of education there, and that no amount of cultural sensitivity can make up for having a school-district full of black teachers fired, and replaced with a bunch of folks who aren’t just white, but aren’t from NOLA . Words like cultural genocide come to mind when you think about that situation. That part of the conversation left me hopeful about the commentators if not the general situation.

But these insights don’t take the place of trying to deal with the horrific re-segregation of our schools, and the lack of teachers of color. We need to STOP using programs of dubious merit to evaluate teachers that have such a disparate impact that you have to really wonder what cultural-biases clog them. We need to stop sending so many black men and women to jail and have more of them going onto college. Society needs to make our profession attractive to the potential professional class in the black and brown community by stopping the bad-mouthing teachers, and treating the profession with the respect it deserves. Improving pay would help that along because we all do it “for the children” but rent must be paid! Getting rid of due-process and heavily metricized evaluations won’t help this as some of the links above show, and will only make it worse. Neither will pretending that racial categories don’t matter when they do.

Image Credit: Gratification Paradox by Khan Mohammad Irteza, on Flickr

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