Here at the beginning of the school year (yes, here in the Deep South, school is back in session!), I revel in the annual excitement of the first days of school. Students and teachers alike are pumped and ready for this year to be different, better. However, I'm also experienced enough to know that in a very few days, that excitement is going to dissipate. For some, it will settle into a solid work ethic fueled by genuine desire to teach and learn. For others, it will crumble and corrode what could have been a great opportunity into a intolerable burden.

Particularly vexing to me: Why are so many Black students so indifferent or openly hostile towards their own education? (Warning: I'm going to repeat some things I've said before).

I once saw a photo in an old Life magazine  (circa 1955) of black students in South Africa under apartheid who, having no supplies, were using their fingernails and some old pins to cut out pictures to use in a learning activity in elementary school. Others were using their fingers in the dirt to write their lessons.

I thought about that photo on a recent visit to my mother's hometown, one of the only remaining settlements established by former slaves at the end of the Underground Railroad in Canada. In its prime, the school offered courses from Latin and Greek to vocational training. After the Civil War, some of its graduates returned to the U.S to help educate the newly freed slaves. So great was the reputation of the settlement school that it attracted blacks and whites from great distances.

Americans of African descent were the only group of people in the history of this country who were forbidden by law to read or write. It was punishable to be caught teaching Black people (slave or free) to read or even to give them a Bible. Yet the more it was denied them, the more Black people pursued education for ourselves and our children.

About five miles from where I now live is another town created by former slaves: Mound Bayou, Mississippi. With assistance from Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin Benjamin Green led a group of former slaves to develop a thriving community in the heart of cotton country. At its peak, Mound Bayou's 8,000 black citizens had a newspaper, bank, telephone system, railroad station, several businesses and industries, churches, and multiple schools. Like its Canadian counterpart, the quality of Mound Bayou's schools was legendary, producing generations of leaders and productive citizens. At one point, over 95% of the town's graduates went on to either college or the military.

A 1988 study of literacy here in the Mississippi Delta region focused on teachers and students at two traditionally Black high schools, one of which was in Mound Bayou.  The author was curious about the remarkable success rate of these students on the then-new state mandated test (Functional Literacy Exam) as compared to other students (Black and white) around the state.  By all statistical measures, the students in these two districts were "at-risk," yet they consistently performed well on standardized tests and had high graduation and college attendance rates.

What happened?

In an unexpected consequence of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, more than 38,000 of the 82,000 Black teachers across the South lost their jobs, as did over 90% of the Black principals when white-controlled school districts refused to hire them to teach in the newly desegregated (albeit unwillingly) schools.  This despite the fact that many of the Black educators were actually better trained than their white counterparts. The percentage of Black teachers in America has been on a steady decline ever since.

Although the segregated Black school suffered from lack of materials, space, and equipment, they relatively luxuriated in the control of their curriculum and teaching methods (relative, that is to many of today's Black schools both inner city and rural).  Within the bosom of the community, young African Americans learned not only language arts, including impeccable standard usage, but also the literature, stories, histories, ethics, songs, hopes, and expectations of our people as well as those of the nation at large.  This is not to romanticize the degrading realities of segregation or to suggest that all the teachers and methods of the past were excellent. But learning itself had a mission and reason; and that reason was much larger than "You need to learn this so you can pass the state test" or even "You need to get an education so you can get a job and make a lot of money."   

What I remember most about my own childhood and throughout my school years was the unrelenting encouragement from all the adults around me to "make something of myself" so I could contribute to the overall community. Too few of our children hear that message today; some never hear it; some infrequently.

We should reclaim our children and their future by reviving our commitment to the value of their education.

Many thanks to Paul Gorski and ASCD for bringing reality (and research) to bear on the crippling, stereotypical educational philosophy that poor people are a monolithic, anti-education human wasteland.

I also appreciate the comments on the article, especially those that "get" what I think is Gorski's main point: It's teachers' expectations of poor children that do the most damage to their academic achievement.

Back when I was student teaching, my supervising teacher oriented me to her class by reciting a tired litany of how the students were from a lower socioeconomic group, and why I shouldn't get my hopes up about teaching them "too much."  Her approach was not to teach them at all. She accepted whatever they turned in (this was an English class) and graded it based more on pity than content. Simultaneously, she clearly and verbally held most of the students and their parents in contempt for their "lack of interest in education." 

During that same semester, the school was involved in a fundraising effort that required students to bring in sales receipts for purchases their families made at a particular grocery store chain. This teacher sat in the faculty lounge ridiculing these families on their choices (many purchased with food stamps), as in "what business do they have buying X brand, they're supposed to be poor...."  That struck a nerve with me because my last year in teacher ed and my first two years as a FULL TIME teacher in MS, my family of six qualified for food stamps and my kids for free or reduced lunch in the school system (and my husband was working full-time at a minmum wage job...what does that tell you about our teacher salaries). It was her disdain for the children and their families that I remember and that the children perceived in her classroom demeanor.

She was too happy to turn the class over to me and hideout in the teacher's lounge for the duration of my student teaching, which remains one of the best times of my teaching career. Not only did I complete my requirements as a student teacher, but also the students proved themselves capable of much higher level of learning than they had been given opportunity to attempt. It was not so much that I was all that great a teacher (it was my student teaching semester, after all), but that I took their learning personally. When I looked at the class, I saw my own children, who were all in the same school district and would pass through that same school. How, I asked myself, would I want my children to be taught?

That experience helped shape me as a teacher and has undergirded my teaching practice over the years. To paraphrase Delpit, we should be teaching other people's children as if they were our own.

Ever come across something that made you wonder whether the author had been reading your mind?

I've experienced just such an epiphany with the recent article by David Mathews of the Kettering Foundation that appears in Phi Delta Kappan, called The Public and Public Schools: The Coproduction of Education.

I'll resist the urge to quote the entire article, but here's one of several passages that had me shouting, "Amen!"

"The accountability that people do want is more relational than informational. Americans don't object to using test scores, but they think the scores should be used for diagnostic purposes rather than for punitive ones. Citizens want face-to-face accountability, with educators giving a full account of what happens in classrooms and on playgrounds. Most legislated accountability measures don't create a relationship of shared responsibility. Instead, the laws leave citizens on the outside looking in."

As Mathews thoughtfully develops in this piece, the public (including, but not limited to parents and teachers) have a deeper role in the education of all of our children than just attending the PTA or making sure Jasmine does her homework. As he deftly notes, "The community itself is an educational institution." Raising well-educated children has always required more than what could be done within the confines of a classroom or school day. Even more so as information and social interactions are less and less bound by physical space or time. Wiser parents have always understand this concept and sought out learning opportunities outside the schoolhouse, or exploited teachable moments during the ordinary activities of life.

Before the old proverb, "It takes a whole village to raise a child" became a socio-political catchphrase, it was a heartfelt practice in neighborhoods and towns.The entire community took the raising and teaching of children as a collective responsibility. I could as much expect Mr. Alexander across the street to quiz me on my times tables as I could my teacher. Mrs. Duncan at the corner store was well within her rights to chastise me for acting "unladylike" in public, and would make sure my mother heard of it before I made it home. I, and thousands of other children in our communities, first learned the art of public speaking not at school, but in church.

It was the neighborhood little league team (before the ascendancy of Hummer-driving "soccer moms" and overly-aggressive fans and Dads) where we learned what it meant to work together, never quit, be gracious in loss, and thankful in victory. The local public librarian knew all of us and our favorite books. In its better days, my hometown Detroit Public Schools made sure every pupil attended at least one concert of the Detroit Symphony and visited at least one of the local museums each school year. The deterioration and fragmenting of neighborhoods, along with the dispersion of families (among many other factors) has resulted in the weakening or loss of these community interactions which so richly supplemented children's formal education.

Another high point in Mathews' piece is the reminder that: "Schools were made public for democratic, not pedagogical, reasons. And the educators who administer schools and teach in them are unique among professionals in their historic relationship to democracy." Educators have always had a higher calling than simply to generate a workforce; we were to produce thinking, responsible citizens. However, we were never expected to do it entirely on our own.

Mathews also points out what has come to be a common misperception of the relationship between the broader public and the work of its schools: ""These days, the most common strategies for restructuring the relationship between the public and the schools treat citizens as consumers."  Mathews, correctly, points to NCLB and other such school reform initiatives as results of this view.

I would argue further that the push for application of free market principles in the reform of schools is insidiously counterproductive and may actually threaten American democracy in profound ways. Developing a rating system for schools based on flawed, limited testing instruments, then publishing those ratings in a push to get parents to shop around for educational options sounds like democracy in action. In reality, it exacerbates existing inequalities in educational and social resources.

The goal should not be to see how many schools we can close down or force out of business (considering in many places the schools that exist are seriously overcrowded), but rather how many schools we as a nation of citizens can reclaim, restore, and reconnect to the communities from which they should organically grow. 

I have kept a teaching journal since my days student teaching. Recently, I went through some of my older ones, and relived some classroom moments. Can anyone relate?

-- Classes reviewed pronoun usage today. It was fatally boring. I transcribed and returned their oral exercises. What surprised me in these was not the grammar but their responses to the question: Does a person owe something to the community in which s/he grew up. Traditionally, in the black community, the answer to that has been an unquestioned yes. But these are divided...

-- After-school session with a group of seniors struggling over S/V agreement. We talked through some examples from the text focusing on the “why.” One student was having an especially difficult time; he stayed with me until almost 4:30. Although the session went well, I am most concerned about not yet making a strong enough connection between their own writing and the usage issues. For that matter, I’d like more connection between all the aspects of language arts within the class. We’re supposed to be studying the early poets...NOT. I can’t even bring myself to go that way. Trying to think of a way to connect the study of those with rap lyrics...

-- Observations on [student] Interview #1. I’m intrigued by several of her comments. TL appreciates, even enjoys, drill and recitation in grammar. Copying rules from the book and then repeated drills. Her mother has told me, and I’ve observed that she is very serious about her school work to the point of test anxiety. When she talked about it, I could sense the security that this method gave her. “I know I’ve been taught; I know I’ve mastered it.” She also brought up that her Black teachers seemed to care more about whether their students passed or failed. She says we refuse to 'allow' children to quietly quit. We fight, pull, cajole, sometimes nag them to the point where they’d rather pass because it’s easier.

-- The counselor asked me to sit in one of the math teacher’s classes so that teacher could come to the office for a parent conference. I knew all of the students, and they were very relaxed with my being in the room. It was a geometry class. We joked, and I finished my lunch as they worked. They were actively, no, fervently, assisting each other with the assigned problems. There was no shame (visibly) or embarrassment among them about not knowing how to do the work. I had seen the same phenomena in my own room AFTER they finished our work on English, and they began helping each other with math or science homework.

Why, I wondered, (and asked them aloud) was there not this same attitude of sharing when it came to doing English assignments? I had observed (and they confirmed) that they would distrust and disparage one another’s knowledge of English, always wary of a classmate’s suggestion on a sentence or writing revision. Only my comments were accepted. They are embarrassed that they can’t “do” English, but they are also angry. One said, “Well, Miz Mo’, lots of people need help in math or science, but everybody s’posed ta know English!”

-- During a Saturday morning conversation, a parent [African American male] made this spontaneous and passionate observation:

“Personally, English offends me. It insults me. If you talk to someone who considers himself an English person, the first thing they want to do is correct me. I’m American; I’ve been speakin’ all my life. Why do I have to be corrected? I refuse to stop using my “com’ ‘ere’s” and “git da’ts.” What you’re saying and what most Black kids are probably thinking is that there must be something wrong with me that I don’t know English and I’ve been speaking it all these years. You feel like a captured slave. Like we’re still slaves. We’re forced to accept somebody else’s culture.”

-- Today during our class opening grammar activity, we came across the following sentence: “I took my dog Sam to the lake who was lame.” One of the students found this in an ACT practice exercise. The author’s intention is to create a misplaced modifier by suggesting the lake is crippled rather than Sam, the dog. However, my students all interpreted the word “lame” in its more popular connotation “boring.” Hence, their “correction” of the sentence was to change WHO to WHICH. The incident became a teachable moment for me to explain cultural bias.

-- A so-called reading specialist from the State Dept. waltzed in today and, without so much as a casual conversation with any of us, proceeds to announce that THE problem with our students is that they come from poor, single parent homes in which they were not read to often enough, if at all. We are, therefore, to compensate for this lack by taking 20 minutes of each class period to read primary level books to them. The fact that she looks like Shirley Temple and had only taught for a year or two in lower elementary before going to work for SDE doesn’t help her credibility with the faculty, many of whom laughed at her out loud, or cussed under their breath.