Guns Don’t Kill People, Bullets Do…

As I stated last week, Teach for America can be considered a piece of low hanging fruit in the discourse surrounding their role in public education.  This week, I’m aiming my sights on another piece of progressive rhetoric, poverty.

In their book of the same title, Howard, Dresser and Dunklee (2009) noted that “poverty is not a learning disability.”  It seems as if progressives, in particular progressive teachers working in low income, urban areas have increasingly wanted to condemn their students because of their parent’s socio-economic status.  This is the epitome of the type of deficit thinking that has permeated public education for the last few decades. Incidentally, I would attribute the increase in this type of thinking to several things. The main elephant in the room in American public discourse is that it is much easier to discuss issues in terms of economics versus race.  However there is an interconnectedness that cannot be uncoupled when it comes to public education, particularly in urban areas (which is another example of us being uncomfortable with race – “urban” more often than not equals “Black and Latino”).  Thus liberals and progressives find it easier to frame the discussion as one of economic neglect rather than racial inequality.  This is problematic.  It is even more so because of the increasing lack of diversity in terms of the teacher population.

Without going too Stephen A. Smith on folk, we have a race problem, not a poverty problem when it comes to public education.  (In best Stephen A. voice) There I said it.

As the teaching population ages, those teachers who mirrored the communities in which they taught are retiring.  As Time Magazine recently reported, one in six teachers are teachers of color.  For some of us who have been in public schools and in teacher training arenas, this is a duh moment.  While there is absolutely nothing wrong with white teachers teaching black children, and children of color, what is cause for concern is how they are teaching them and what kinds of expectations they hold for those children who look different from them.  While I do not have empirical evidence, I would strongly hypothesize that there is a correlation between white progressive thought centered on the “woe is them, those kids” mentality versus the retiring black teachers who came from the community and knew how to balance tough love with reality of their students’ surroundings. Let me be clear, this is not 100%.  There are a silent number of black teachers who also held (hold) a deficit thinking mentality towards their minority students, but the preponderance of them do not.  Equally valid are the small number of white teachers who hold minority students to high standards regardless of their parent’s economic or social status.

In another recent study, Nikole Hannah-Jones from ProPublica found that there is (in her words) a “resegregation” of America’s schools.  As someone who has studied the landmark Brown v Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision for years, and has taught the case in AP US Government class, I can attest that desegregation, in urban areas never occurred.  As late as the 1990s there were court cases in the north seeking to racially balance public schools (see: New York Times). What Brown did accomplish was that, in places where there were one or two public school options, especially high schools, they became “integrated.”  However, segregation still took place inside the school walls with white students and higher SES students being “tracked” into one type of academic coursework and those students of color and poorer SES students being tracked into another.  Thus economic and racial inequality in public schools has existed as a unspoken reality for far too many educators unwilling, or unwanting to articulate what was in plain sight, for decades. 

Remember the Titans 2000, Buena Vista Pictures

In an interview with Democracy Now, Hannah-Jones articulated that black and minority students tend to be in schools where they are receiving an “inferior education” based on their lack of rigorous curriculum, unequal access to Advanced Placement courses, and high number of inexperienced teachers.  Thus the notion of “separate but equal” is still par for the course.  What is interesting is that Hannah-Jones articulates this through the lens of comprehensive public schools and not charters.  So the question is can charters contribute positively to level the playing field and reduce the differentiation in educational opportunities for minority students versus their white counterparts?

What is…insidious in the underlying insinuation of this question and of the overall tone concerning the use of such terms as “resegregation” or worse “apartheid schools” (more on that in a minute) is that it perpetuates the problematic tome of “if it’s white it’s right, if it’s black, it’s whack.”

Hannah-Jones highlights important points concerning rural and small town areas in which there is great possibility to increase racial equity in public schooling.  However, in large urban areas there is another factor which contributes to racial inequity in public schooling, housing.  In many of my graduate classes, I received the side eye from not just professors but colleagues as well when I proposed that perhaps it is time to open up enrollment citywide for all urban public schools.  What this idea has the potential to do is to try to diversify schools in a more equitable manner.  What we cannot do is legislate where people can and cannot live.

Finally, the new buzz word around trying to discredit charter schools, is the argument focusing on them being “apartheid schools”- meaning they have over 90% minority enrollment.  I’m sorry, but if you examine ANY urban area, there is a strong stench of “apartheid” in every type of public school imaginable, perhaps save for magnet schools.  Why single out charters?  Here’s why…

People are pontificating about “silver bullets.”  There is no such thing as a silver bullet, not for the Lone Ranger, not for a sports team, not for a city, and definitely not for a public education fraught with as many moving parts, and as many localities as we have in this country.  PERIOD.  Stop trying to find one.

So in short: Poverty is not destiny, stop looking for silver bullets, stop looking at economic inequity without coupling it with racial inequality, and let’s move towards ways to increase positive academic and social outcomes for minority students -especially in all minority settings, rather than trying to single them out as being in “apartheid” conditions or worse. 

Quality is Job One

Back when I was growing up in Chicago, I used to describe what my mom did for a living as "teaching teachers how to teach."  Little did I, or she for that matter, know that she was also teaching her son how to teach.  Hearing story upon story of her drive up and down the length of Chicago (usually avoiding such high traffic areas such as the Kennedy or Dan Ryan) on Western Avenue or Halsted Avenue visiting her student teachers and recent graduates, I was privy to a daily report of the problems, inequities, successes and failures of 1970s-80s Chicago Public Schools from not just one side of town, but from the entire city. Hearing about such a diverse array of neighborhoods and schools was something that only in retrospect I realize was unique.  Most people only have experiences with their local schools directly, or on the peripheral, the larger system as a whole.  There are many in urban areas who have zero experience with public schools. With that background, coupled with my own practice in the classroom both in Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as my research and doctoral work in Philadelphia I should merit standing to be able to make the assertions I am about to make in this blog.  I'm sure, for some of you, my experiences will only count as an outlier or aberration.  For that, let me only say, in the words of Lonnie Rashid Lynn (aka Common), one day it'll all make sense.

I recently heard a piece on WBEZ (http://tinyurl.com/pupl9dt) about the push for teacher quality in the state of Illinois and how an unintended consequence of raising the entrance test scores on the Test of Academic Proficiency (TAP) has created a racial gap among new teachers.  Let me first say that for the past ten years I have noticed, perhaps because I've frequently been one of the few Blacks let alone males in the room, this phenomenon up close and personal.  It is an imperfect storm.  As teachers from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the same ones my mom used to mentor and teach, retire, the incoming mix of teachers has becoming increasingly monolithic.  One of the negatives (and yes, we can argue there are many more) about Teach for America is that they have contributed greatly to the "whitening" of the teaching population.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2010 (the latest numbers), the teaching population is only 7% Black. Further, even more problematic is that out of the approximately 235,000 Black teachers in the country, only 58,000 are male.  No wonder I was one of only the few in the room.  According to the documentary (which I HIGHLY recommend, American Teacher), the numbers are even more depressing.  In 1970, 34% of the teaching population was male.  In 2002, that number was 22% and today, it sits at an alarmingly low 16%. In fact, statistics such as these are the reason why it was so difficult for me to leave the classroom and start my PhD program. I didn't want to leave my students of color behind.  I came to the realization that having a PhD, and doing the type of research I intend to do will hopefully multiply myself 10 fold.

LAUSD Pay Grid

The WBEZ piece noted that in the past over 60% of Blacks passed the TAP exam.  Today that number is 17%.  As a qualitative person, I want to go beyond the numbers and try to understand what that really means.  Does it mean that there was an over-inflation of Black folk passing the test previously, and now this is a leveling out? Or does it mean that the colleges and universities are grade inflating and those wishing to enter the profession aren't as prepared as previously thought?  Is it a combination of both, neither, something else?  Those are tough questions to isolate.  What is known is that there is a problem.

In Illinois, and elsewhere, the population of white teachers has hovered between 82-85% for decades.  At the same time, we know the population of public school students, particularly in urban areas has becoming increasingly students of color (I would no longer use the word "minority" since they are clearly the majority of the school aged population).  So what can we as educators, activists and politicians do?

I strongly believe that we need a minority equivalent to Teach for America.  I also believe that we need to cease this us versus them mentality when it comes to veteran educators versus first year teachers.  I also feel that, much in the same way as there is a dearth of Black baseball players, some argue, because of the minor league system, some students of color feel as if the road to becoming a teacher is too long for the amount of pay on the front end.  Thus a program like TFA would serve as an alternative route, and of course tackling the challenge of teacher pay would be another.  Scholars such as Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond and others have also recommended a review of teacher pay.  We can no longer simply live by an outdated model of the current grid structure (see above LAUSD grid as an example).


As the Black teaching population continues to age out of the profession, I think having an honest, serious discussion of what, in the 21st century, does it mean for teachers of color to teach students of color.  In addition, let me be clear. I, by no means am disparaging white teachers who continue to serve students of color with honor and high expectations. In fact, my own schooling is littered with many such examples. Perhaps it is an expectations problem. In too many cases, for too long we have had low expectations of our teachers, and they, in turn, have had low expectations regarding their students.  When we examine good schools, two things are always present, high expectations and trust.  Let's trust that as we raise the bar for teachers, they will in turn raise the bar for their students.