by Dirk Tillotson
We have a serious “Other People’s Children” problem in education reform. Many, if not most of the spokespeople and decision makers really don’t represent or often understand the communities they are “reforming”. This has a distorting effect on the reforms and also gives folks the often real impression that reforms are being done to them rather than with them.
When parents are polled around the general outlines of reform—parental choices of schools, charter schools, and accountability based on achievement—they agree and are generally positive, but I bet if you asked parents in many “reforming” communities whether they liked the advocates of reform—the numbers would be radically lower, and marked by distrust.
And when you work with the reformers, you get where this mistrust comes from. Most of the people really making decisions are White, they did not grow up or work (for more than 2 years in TFA) in the Hoods, and their kids would never ever go to the schools they are advocating for.
Let me repeat, they would never ever send their kids to the schools that they praise, no matter where they were located. Their children need to experiment and have self-directed learning with projects, arts, small class sizes, and differentiation. A fertile ground for individual development.
The schools they praise have all the (Black and Brown) kids sitting quietly, tracking the teacher with their eyes automatically, never talking out of turn or getting up, walking silently in line, eating lunch silently—they are models of social control.
While there are “no excuses” for aberrant student behavior or families, the staff have abundant excuses around the students they can’t serve, and who are quietly shown the door, punished into expulsion or more likely, voluntary withdrawal.
I could replay a hundred different “conversations” I have had with reformers, on how race doesn’t really matter (“it’s all class”), on their misguided educational theories (too many to quote), how not all kids can be prepared for college (though all of their kids can of course) the problems of Black culture (“there isn’t one”), or a host of other things that make you want to punch someone, literally or rhetorically.
In particular, I had this long conversation with a Thurston Howell the Third type on the importance of schools having strong academics AND cultural competency. As one of the very few students of color where I grew up, I got great academic skills, but culturally felt put off by school, and felt how the invisible, White, curriculum was weighing on me. I gave a long impassioned plea around the need for kids to understand their history and themselves from a positive place. I thought this guy is going to get it.
He sums up our conversation, by repeating the stereotype that for Black kids in the Black community academic achievement is frowned on, and that they will get called “punks” for doing well in school when they get home. We were done.
Probably two decades ago, I read Lisa Delpit’s “Other People’s Children”, which, to over simplify, looked at how schools and interactions with students of color embed a whole set of assumptions about student capacity, motivations, integrity and potential, and when one looked objectively at these schools, it played out every day in the way some schools are structured and the way educators interact with children. With predictable racial effects. These lesson reverberate even more as I climb the education reform hierarchy.
I am painting this landscape with an overly broad brush. I have met some reformers who have focused on listening, tried to understand their own limits and blind spots (which we all have), and have had true empathy for students. But they are the exception, many view or communities through a lens of pathos and dysfunction—and see those traits as indigenous and not a reflection of the broader historical dynamics or a rigged system. And so our kids need to be controlled, and good schools do that.
Change is hard, and reform is always a fight, but we need to do a better job of generating and supporting authentic leaders, who not only know how to fight but what we should be fighting for. If “winning” means a set of “no excuses” compliance factories to house poor, Black and Brown students I think I might be on the wrong team.
This post is republished from One Oakland United. Dirk Tillotson is founder and executive director of Great School Choices. Find him on Twitter: @dirktillotson
