Sunday’s New York Times had an interesting article on charter schools in their city that have virtually all-black student bodies with majority white faculties. The issue was mostly about the difficulty in presenting more balanced diversity to those schools, a couple of sentences from one of the students struck me.
Amiyah Young is one of Explore Charter School’s best students, who aspires to attend Princeton and become a veterinarian. She experiences teasing among her classmates because of her intelligence. She deconstructs her sentences into phrases and smaller words so her friends do not belittle her by calling her white. Her parents and she are bothered more by the predominance of white teachers in the school.
Amiyah’s mother is quoted in the article saying, “What do they know of our lives? They may be good teachers, but what do they know? You’re coming from Milwaukee. You went to Harvard.”
Amiyah herself is quoted saying, “The white teachers can’t relate as much to us no matter how they try—and they really try.”
This is worth reflecting upon, and I wonder what you think about the sentiment. One of the charges leveled against the turnaround school process is that it empties poor performing schools of mostly black faculty and replaces them with mostly white faculty. While the record as far as student performance on state tests shows the schools improve, does it come at a cost of “relating?” Teach for America floods urban schools with top-drawer collegiate talent for their two-year stint. They show impressive measures of impact, but at what cost to relating to the students they teach?
Our GA Scholars of Illinois program has striven over 24 years to present cohorts primarily from underrepresented groups to our advanced teacher preparation experience. Still, the forty-plus percentage of those Scholars who are white will teach in predominantly “majority minority” school settings. Are they destined to become only so successful because they do not share the color of those they teach?
Needing further reflection: what message is imparted when models of knowledge and learning in school environments are primarily white? How debilitating must it be for any student of color to show promise and affinity in school to be disparagingly labeled white?
One of the white teachers in the article expresses the interest in, as she termed it, “unpacking” issues of race in her class with her students. This nation has carried the baggage of race with it throughout its history, with no inclination, even with a sitting black president, to unpack anything about it. And so the issues remain, and students like Amiyah ponder, and black students and white students congregate in schools as segregated as before Brown vs. Board of Education, and white teachers enter into their black students’ experiences, and the conversations remain muted.
Golden Apple 