Students Should Learn More About Their Perceptions of Race, But Don’t Leave Out Teachers
How can we un-teach racism if our teachers still discriminate against students of color?
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
A recent New York Magazine story examined a new initiative at for third grade students at Fieldston Lower School that separated students by race and asked each group to talk about their own perceptions about other races and how certain races perceived them. It became very controversial among parents for different reasons – some parents said they didn’t want to segregate their kids while others said their children didn’t belong in certain groups. A Jewish parent said their child didn’t belong in the white group and some biracial children identified more as white and didn’t want to be put in the multiracial group.
The idea is that children form ideas about race very early in their lives, so why not discuss race before those perceptions become entrenched and children stop forming cross-racial friendships?
However, there is an entirely different debate going on in K-12 education that instead focuses on the teachers and their role in perpetuating institutional racism in schools.
A report by The Center for American Progress, “America’s Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color” shows teacher diversity in the U.S. is very low, despite the fact that student diversity is increasing. Teachers of color make up 18 percent of public school teachers, but only a little over half of students were white, according to the report. Part of the reason for this is because students of color don’t transfer from community colleges to four-year schools as often as white students, where they would be able to get a degree in teaching.
“Because communities of color disproportionately enroll in community college and are less likely than whites to transfer to four-year institutions, students of color have reduced chances of earning a bachelor’s degree in teaching,” CAP’s experts,” Ulrich Boser and Farah Z. Ahmad write in the report.
That means that even schools with populations that are majority students of color often have a very white faculty. Faculty members are punishing children of color more severely, and according to a recent Stanford University study, they’re doing so because a student’s race affects how they judge misbehavior.
A report by the Discipline Disparities Research-to-Practice Collaborative found that female students of color, LGBT students and Latino students were disproportionatelymore likely to be suspended. Black students were 1.78 times as likely to face suspension and Latino students were 2.23 times more likely to be suspended. Students with disabilities were also punished more, especially if they were black students with disabilities.
“Society generally has an aversion to seeing children of color as actual children,” said Jose Vilson, a middle school math educator in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood and author of “This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education.”
Vilson said it’s important to make cultural competence for teachers a mandatory part of teacher development.
“There isn’t a current rubric for cultural competence, and that’s a struggle for a lot of parents of color … But there are people who should not be teaching people of color because they can’t serve students well because of their biases, and that’s something that needs to be dealt with,” Vilson said. “We need to speak up and say that cultural Students Should Learn More About Their Perceptions of Race, But Don't Leave Out Teachers | ThinkProgress: