The Real Cowards
This was said to me as I tried to get my athletes settled down on a bus ride across the city before our first race. One of them had thrown a full Styrofoam cup of soda out the window at a pedestrian. Others were cussing and carrying on and demanding the bus driver turn up the speakers.
“You a white racist bitch!” said a girl when I began discussing Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. She stormed out of the room, slamming and breaking the door.
“Some of the kids say you’re racist,” said the black history teacher to me.
Baffled to hear that this non-sense was going around and had gotten to this teacher, I asked why they thought this.
“I don’t know – it was something you said – didn’t come off right. You have to be very careful.”
Those things happened last year and were part of my introduction to city school teaching and were the most realistic forms of diversity training a rural white guy could ever have imagined. I didn’t know how to react when I was accused of racism or told I didn’t understand the students I was paid to teach in a school with a 99% black student body.
When I started here, I was put into a huge room – Room 303 – and given a few wishes of good luck. I had no resources – worksheets, teacher guide books, overhead projector - nada; the desks were full of graffiti and strewn across the room. The one window was broken and didn’t fit in the pane. There was a broken blackboard that didn’t fit on the easel it came with. I almost broke a finger setting it up. I was scheduled to teach 11th grade, which actually did come with a textbook, and 12th grade, which did not. I was told to make up a curriculum a few days before school started.
For some reason, there was a stack of novels left in this room I inherited: Richard Wright’s Native Son. I had enjoyed this book thoroughly in high school. I remembered being unable to put it down as I read the final section before Bigger gets sent to the electric chair. I chose to teach the book to my students.
This went very poorly. The themes of race, class and stereotypes seemed much more poignant to me than, I thought, to my students. Many were very low readers, so I had to explain every last thing in the book to make sure they understood it. They must have thought, who the hell does this white guy think he is? Coming into my house and teaching me about racism and the difficulties of living in the inner city!
In trying to discuss the book’s themes, I bumbled and stumbled, but we plowed our way through it. I probably did sound racist – patronizing even. I felt so ridiculous. At the very least, I felt very cognizant of my own white skin in a place where there was very little. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder accused the country of being cowardly when it comes to dealing with race. Was he wrong?
We are a very special country in that we believe all children, regardless of race, creed or income level have an inherent right to an education. But we fail so many children, especially minorities, in subpar schools, because we expect and get less from them and are so used to it. And with the value we place on an education in our country in terms of job opportunities and higher education, it seems even worse than if we flat out denied certain groups of people the opportunity to learn and relegated them to specific jobs. Caste systems are horrible, obviously, but don’t people know that we cast kids out of opportunity for advancement when we put them in abysmal schools? If we’re going to make this a society where everyone has an opportunity to succeed, we can’t let schools in certain areas fall apart. Schools just five or six miles up the street from here achieve at collegiate levels.
The school system in this city is a big fat lie. The stats are juked every year to show some tiny bump in reading scores when everyone knows the ugly truth – a few “good schools,” predominantly white schools, are factored into the overall city school average, thus bumping up the scores on whole. The school I teach in and this system as a whole is a mockery that doesn’t get mocked enough by the press, politicians or academics. Perhaps they are afraid of being called racist.
When you teach 100 kids in a day and only one of them is white, it’s hard to not believe this is a black/white thing. When you get reading tests back from these same 18 year-old seniors telling you they read at grammar school levels, it’s hard to not believe it’s a black/white thing.
I’ve had to accept my many shortcomings here and have come to grips with the fact that race is an issue that can’t be ignored. I am “culturally sensitive” to the troubles and travails of my students, but we have an understanding now that I expect the best from them whether its behavior or academics. These are basics that go beyond racial debates. Schools must be a place where American citizens are developed into productive and respectful members of society.
Race affects how we’re asked to teach students and what we are supposed to teach them, but it shouldn’t ever affect what we expect of them. We must expect greatness because this is the burden we’ve put on ourselves in this country in our determination to educate every child, rich or poor, black or white. With this expectation comes the responsibility of taking on the burdens of the poor, which often have much more to do with basic necessity than of higher learning. So we can argue for vouchers and charter schools, but at the end of the day, the poor will be with us and we just can’t forget about them.
We need to call the achievement gap what it really is. White kids are succeeding at a much higher rate than minorities in this country. Minority areas are the ones suffering the greatest when it comes to unemployment and dependency on government assistance. The correlation between the failed systems is so apparent, yet we continue to talk around the real issue – race and expectations of all students. Teacher education programs are geared towards teaching methods for “diverse learners.” I argue all the time in my program that we need to worry more about teaching kids, period. If we’re always worrying about what method it takes to teach diverse learners, we’ll never teach anything.
We can’t have a public education system that consistently gets greater output from one group and expect to have as productive a country as we’d dream of. The achievement gap is a glaring and disturbing and embarrassing reality in America.
A lot of people think failed schools in areas that aren’t near them have no bearing on their lives, but I’ve seen up close that it’s false. What happens in our schools – high income and low income, black and white and Latino alike, needs to be known. Let’s call it what it is. You’re not a racist just because you expect that kids of all colors can succeed; I think this is as common sense as conservatism can get.