I write these words because what we need to know at a very deep level is that African American children do not come into this world at a deficit. There is no “achievement gap” at birth – at.
If the curriculum we use to teach our children does not connect in positive ways to the culture young people bring to school, it is doomed to failure.
In order to teach you, I must know you.
When one ‘we’ gets to determine standards for all ‘we’s’ then some ‘we’s’ are in trouble.
We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.
A second reason African American students are not excelling is that we have all been affected by our society’s deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority.
Otherwise, as one New Orleans community activist told me, we are providing low-income schools with tourists rather than teachers.
We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment – and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze.
The worldviews of many in our society exist in protected cocoons. These individuals have never had to make an adjustment from home life to public life, as their public lives and institutions they have encountered merely reflect a “reality” these individuals have been schooled in since birth.
In other words, every human brain has the built-in capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it. No ability is fixed. Practice can even change the brain.
Kati Haycock has calculated that three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth.
The purpose of education is to learn to die satiated with life.” That, I believe, is what we need to bring to our schools: experiences that are so full of the wonder of life, so full of connectedness, so embedded in the context of our communities, so brilliant in the insights that we develop and the analyses that we devise, that all of us, teachers and students alike, can learn to live lives that leave us truly satisfied.
It is vitally important that non-minority educators realize that there is another voice, another reality; that many of the teachers whom they seek to reach have been able to conquer the educational system because they received the kind of instruction that their white progressive colleagues are denouncing.
To provide schooling for everyone’s children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it.
Because middle-class home culture is so taken for granted, so “transparent,” it often exists outside of conscious awareness for those who are members of that culture, especially in schools. It is assumed to be what “everyone knows,” just the background of normal life – knowledge that does not need to be taught. Consequently, when this knowledge is not exhibited by children or adults, there is a sense that something is wrong, perhaps a lack of basic intelligence.
Too often in schools, we either ask teachers to be lone rangers in trying to create better instruction, or we give them prescribed “teacher-proof” lessons that may or may not be appropriate for their students.
No matter what the standards dictate, there is plenty of room for teachers working together to refine mandated instruction so that it is more appropriate for their students.
Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them?
Assessment is a lot trickier than we think, especially if the children we are assessing are not from the same culture as the test makers.
Successful teachers of children marginalized either by income-level or ethnicity – or both – have long understood that their charges not only need strong instruction in skills, but they need to know that it is skills, and not intelligence, that they lack.