THEY MAY NOT “KNOW” MATH, BUT THEY CAN TELL THEY’RE DIVIDED
In 2012, I had the pleasure of reading a poem dedicated to NYC public schools at a Save Our Schools rally in City Park Hall. In the midst of the rally, a handful of Black elders approached me and said, “Hey, before people came here, we had a rally about Black education and we’d hope you can join us.” I simply nodded and understood the gravity of what he’d been asking. For a generation of Black and Latinx folx, ethnic studies in schools was an extension of asking our school systems to see them as people, citizens deserving of an education as a whole. This solution spotlights racism and all its extensions into our students’ lives. The elders in front of me had seen how the ethnic students movement was borne of the larger civil rights movement and made its way through institutions of higher education.
Sadly, our school systems in PK-12 never addressed this on a substantial level, so while the anti-high stakes testing movement was at a peak in the years of the Obama administration, we still had a centuries-old question as to whether our Black students (and others) felt like full human beings in these spaces. More often, they didn’t, and still don’t.
To many, the basic pillars of education are reading, writing, and arithmetic. Generally, anyone with an opinion on education uses the conversation about these tenets as a touchstone for whether students are learning what they ought to learn. From there, the lines get blurry. Some believe students should learn from rote memorization and basic concepts that they too mastered in their academic careers. Others believe students should learn through so-called “progressive” means: ideation, inquiry, and CONTINUE READING: They May Not "Know" Math, But They Can Tell They're Divided | The Jose Vilson