Sorry I’ve been gone for a while: I’ve been working in the school district (I’m no longer at UW—more on that to come!) and enrolled in a certification program. Things should be slowing down by the end of March, and I hope to get back in to blogging a bit more as time allows. In the meantime, here’s something I wrote as part of my admission to my teacher certification program on the history of the American education system. Enjoy! Feedback is always welcome, especially as I’m new to the K-12 world.
In the last of my first-year teacher professional development meetings, we examined five presuppositions that underlie Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT). These five presuppositions provide a useful framework for considering not just the present state of American education, but also its history, which has perpetuated inequity from its beginnings in the 1700s.
1. From its inception, the American public education system was intentionally designed to produce inequitable educational outcomes. In the 1770s, Thomas Jefferson proposed a two-tracked system: one for the “learned” and one for “laborers.” Those who could afford to pay for their children’s education were expected to do so; those who were less fortunate attended for free. Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the other “Founding Fathers” did not believe that women should be as educated--or perhaps should not be educated in the same way--as men: their role as “mothers of the republic” was different from that of the men.
In the middle of the 19th century, educational inequity became even more pronounced, right as the Industrial Revolution motivated the norming of all aspects of American life. Indian Boarding Schools came into being as a consequence of the Civilization Fund Act of 1819. These schools were designed to strip Native Americans of their culture and to assimilate them into mainstream white American culture. In 1848, the Massachusetts Reform School at Westboro opened, where children who refused to attend public schools were sent.
The landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, KS in 1954 outlawed race-based school segregation. While the ruling seemed like a step toward educational equity, legal scholar Derrick Bell argued that desegregation only passed because white American stood to gain from it as well, a proposition he referred to as “interest convergence.” One important consequence of the Brown decision was that 50% of Black teachers and 90% of Black principals lost their jobs between 1954 and 1965: Black students were being bussed to white schools, but not the other way around, and white administrators were reluctant to hire Black staff. Despite the fact that segregation is illegal and great strides have been made toward integration, Jeff Chang makes a compelling case that our school system and our society as a whole is more segregated than ever. Charter schools and the current data-driven free market approach to education threaten to widen the gap between white students and students of color even further.
The pandemic has exacerbated the inequities in our education system (as it has inequities in most of our other social systems). The district in which I teach was able to give every student a laptop during the first week at school; however, I teach at two very different elementary schools in the district. One is a Title I school and the other is in a more affluent part of the district. Many students in the former live in multi-generational households, and English is not the primary language spoken at home. Many parents are “essential workers” and had to work on site, leaving children with grandparents, older siblings, or other guardians. In the latter school, the students are more tech savvy, and their parents have flexible jobs that allowed them to work from home and monitor their students’ school work. My daughter attends school in a neighboring district: they were only able to get laptops to all students by January, leaving many families to fend for themselves for the first half of the school year in terms of online learning.
2. The education system creates opportunity gaps, which in turn produce achievement gaps. According to the Glossary of Education Reform, an opportunity gap is the “unequal or inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities,” and an achievement gap is any “significant and persistent disparity in academic performance or educational attainment between different groups of students.” When resources are distributed inequitably among communities, those who have fewer resources begin their schooling at a disadvantage to those who have access to more and/or better resources. The ways in which public schools are funded has a lot to do with how these gaps are created. More affluent areas are predominantly white and are communities in which many people are homeowners, thus the tax base (i.e., school funding) is much higher. In lower-income neighborhoods, which are often home to communities of color, and people for whom English might not be a first language, properties are more often rental properties, which reduces the tax funding available to those schools. This is the impetus behind the Title I program: the government offers schools at which 40% or more students come from low-income families financial resources to help bridge these gaps. During the pandemic, many local school districts were providing (and many continue to provide) free meals to students as part of their mission to close opportunity gaps. As discussed above, the ability of one district to provide laptops to all students while the neighboring district was not prepared to do so is another example of an opportunity gap.
3. All students begin school as dependent learners by virtue of their age and development, but a disproportionate number of racially and linguistically diverse students remain dependent indefinitely because of inequitable practices.
John Locke believed that we are born tabula rasa--blank slates--and it is the work of education to fill up that slate. The pedagogue Paulo Freire referred to this as the “banking model” of education: students are empty vessels and teachers are there to fill them with knowledge. Our education system has moved away from this in favor of a more constructivist model, which suggests that learning is actively constructed, experiential, reflective, and social. Most theories of child development recognize that students are dependent learners when they enter elementary school, and most become more independent as they approach fourth or fifth grade. Some students remain dependent learners for a variety of reasons: they are linguistically disadvantaged (that is, the majority of their instruction is in a language other than the language they use at home); the curriculum doesn’t correspond to their experiences with the world; and/or their different ways of knowing (i.e., multiple intelligences) are not recognized as valid within the American system of education.
Programs like dual-language instruction represent an effort to address the first situation. One of the schools in which I teach offers dual-language (English and Spanish) kindergarten, first, and second grades. As a specialist, my time with the students is part of their English instruction, but I make efforts to include music that might be more representative of their backgrounds. In a recent online lesson, I was playing a song by the Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade, and a parent came on camera just long enough to sing a bit of it--it was familiar to her. Another student relayed to me that her dad knew the song and it was one of his favorites. Even small gestures like this go a long way to making connections not just with students, but with their families as well.
James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me (1st ed., New York: Touchstone, 1996) points out the systemic biases that are present in many of the best-selling high school American History textbooks, arguing that the two biggest textbook markets in the country (Texas and California) have a disproportionate impact on what kinds of material the textbooks present, and how they present it. These biases privilege the white view of American history and marginalize the experiences of Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC). Efforts such as the “Since Time Immemorial” curriculum are a step in the right direction: curricular representation is important, but it is only one small step toward truly equitable educational practice.
4. In-school practices contribute more to the achievement gap than the student’s home life.
From its beginning, the public school system has been about teaching obedience and loyalty in the service of the country. Benjamin Rush wrote, ”let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.” Some fifty years later, Horace Mann pushed the country’s public education system toward the “Prussian” model, which was designed to create loyal soldiers. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution initiated a trend toward norming and averages, and this prevailing mode of thought made its way into the educational system as well. The ultimate consequence of this was the emergence of a national standards board in 1892, a committee comprising 10 university professors, and led by the president of Harvard University. A national standard cannot possibly be equitable across the board, given the tremendous variation in school systems, funding, cultural heritage, and numerous other factors, and gaps are bound to emerge under a model such as this.
In her book The Language Police, Diane Ravitch talks about how state boards of education (in particular in California and Texas) dictate what many students end up learning in other parts of the country, and how well-intentioned “pressure groups” from the political left and right often determine not only what the curriculum looks like, but also the content of standardized tests. These practices serve only to widen the gaps. Because Texas and California represent the two largest textbook markets in the country their buying power controls what is taught and what is left out, and other publishers are forced to bend to their wills. This is yet another example of how the free market shapes educational outcomes.
5. Culturally responsive pedagogy is focused on counteracting the system’s effort to under-develop diverse students’ cognitive skills, not simply “boost self-esteem.”
Carol Dweck developed the idea of a growth mindset: students who believe that they can do something are more likely to succeed than those who don’t think they can. This and ideas like it reinforce the myth of meritocracy, which is foundational to the American dream. Meritocracy is a myth because both opportunity gaps make it impossible for disadvantaged students to achieve educational objectives that were not developed with them in mind. Culturally responsive pedagogy has to do more than offer token representations of marginalized communities: there must be serious structural and curricular change in order to produce equitable outcomes for all students.
One thing that has been frustrating to me about the professional development classes that I have attended is that they seem to focus on race and ethnicity, but give very little space to other systems of oppression like gender and disability. In order to create equitable schools, we must acknowledge all systems of oppression and their intersections, and we must work to dismantle them. For example, we were asked to add our pronouns to our screen name, but given no explanation as to why this practice is important (I know why; I suspect there are at least a few of my colleagues who don’t). This omission became apparent when a music teacher colleague of mine started a PLC on culturally responsive music education with a song rooted in ableist language. After the meeting, I shared my concerns with her. I was invited to give a presentation at our next PLC on disability considerations with respect to culturally responsive teaching.