School: Everyone begins on a different starting line

I see it every year in my classroom. I can tell you on the first day of school a lot about a child just by spending a short amount of time with them. Usually it is evident which children have summer birthdays and which went to a pre-K program and which have older siblings. No one likes to prejudge, but it is a social cue that comes with our innate humanness.

We do not all begin school in the same place, therefore even just at the end of the first full year of public school many black and brown children are already at an extraordinary disadvantage from their white peers because the experiences, language and styles of parenting they may have had, has influenced their abilities in school. The Harlem Children's Zone recognizes this race through school that leave many kids never able to catch up and continually fall behind grade level expectations. They are embracing education in a ground breaking way and following the 17,000 children in the 100 block radius of Harlem from birth to college graduation. Their offerings of formal education for each step, along with social services outreach, parenting classes and health and nutrition services. Even with such services the Geoffrey Canada, director and CEO of the program, still notes the disparity of achievement and a fight against a nationwide race through school which leads to the eventual drop-out of students of color that cannot keep up.

http://www.hcz.org/about-us/video-faqs

Clearly early childhood support is critical in eliminating the racially predictable achievement gap. This means reforming many of the ways that early childhood education and the primary years grade K-3 are taught. Giving up unethical practices that may be "fun" or something that has "always been done" but is not directly tied to student learning certainly should be the first step. Being creative with our time and integrating social curriculum and combining it with literacy and math skills has become a norm. What are the next steps that we can take to set the tone for amping up the early years so that our black and brown students may begin to align in a more parallel way with their peers of other races?

It is unfortunate that Jonathan Kozol's book, Savage Inequalities, now seems like a timeless classic

I first read Kozol in 1995, as an undergraduate in education. Four years later, I lived his writing while teaching an a large but ill-equipped and strapped for money school. I was the the only white face in my classroom and learned to deal with roaches the length of a deck of cards. Many of my third graders did not read beyond a kindergarten level. Years later, Savage Inequalities, as it was published first in 1991, I am struck by what Mr. Kozol says right at the top of page 4.

" What seems unmistakable, but, oddly enough, is rarely said in public settings nowadays, is that the nation, for all practice and intent has turned its back upon the moral implications, if not the legal ramifications, of the Brown decision. The struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulation only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned."


By what means as educators are we beginning to question this dual society when we know that black and brown students are not being reached in the same manner as their white peers?

Unethical Practices in Education

Are educators indirectly and unethically damaging students?

Gloria Ladson-Billings, in a speech to the National Wriitng Project on unethical education:

"I do spend a fair amount of my time in schools. I get to hear many things about what's quote "wrong with our students." And one of the things I hear is that children lack exposure or experiences. I hear this really at the early level a lot. So as a consequence, many of their classroom days are filled with day after day after day of experiences, but little, if any, teaching. Now I do believe that schools can and should offer students some interesting and new experiences, but those experiences have to be tied to student learning. . . . To take kids to the zoo or to the amusement park without some learning link to it, particularly when none of these high-stakes tests are going to ask them or hold them accountable for whether or not they've been to Six Flags, it's not only unfair, it's unethical."

Let's talk more about what is wrong with the teachers. Most of us, work hard. We get to school early, we stay later than we should. There is the daily lugging of a notoriously heavy bag of work home with us in the evening. We are educators because our strengths and passions fuel us to teach. We are all fallible in more than a few ways, our innate humanness make us so. We all have off-days and moments we'd rather the world not see, but the students entrusted to us in our classrooms see it all.

What regular practices are we continuing in our classrooms just because we have always done it that way?

What damage are we doing to our students?

What amount of time, not including that for community building such as in a Responsive Classroom model and social curriculum are we wasting on any given day?

What is the difference in your classroom between busy work and productive engagement leading to skill acquisition?

Looking with a critical eye, what are the unethical practices you could let go of?

Check-out more of Gloria Ladson-Billings speech to the National Writing Project:

http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2513n practices