schoolracetalk.org

Talking to teachers since the election, I've been struck by the need to frame Obama to students as a "both-and" figure along various dimensions.

On the one hand, his life path represents the need for hope -- the deep need to remain optimistic about one's future, and the necessity of striving to achieve one's dreams. On the other hand, his life path also represents the need for adults to offer youth educational opportunities that they can seize. (And his platform represents the need for critical thinking about remaining inequality.)

On the one hand, he transcends simple race categories, and shows that they are too simple for complex people; on the other hand, he is also our first black president.

On the one hand, his election demonstrates that racism can be surmounted; on the other hand, the campaign demonstrated that racism is still around and must be actively counteracted.

Explicitly naming the various both-ands that Obama represents is perhaps particularly important. He allows us to ask all sorts of fantastic questions with our students. To me, the most invigorating question for young people is this: what sort of world do we want, and how will we all participate in creating it?

I've been conducting 2-hr workshops designed to introduce Everyday Antiracism to educators. Here's the most recent version of the powerpoint slides I use.

As you'll see, a "gallop through history" is one key aspect of the workshop. In that "gallop," I discuss the history of race categories, racial inequality, and racist ideas about "types of people," in order to build the warrant for why "antiracism" is necessary in 2008 at all. I may well post a digital version of that "gallop" here soon.

Educators need good conversation starters. Here's a two-page handout that the authors of How Real is Race? and I put together.

It's an attempt to help people discuss the basic paradox of "race": race groups are social realities built on biological fictions.

Let us know here what you think of it.

Now that my new books are out, I’m starting one new line of research. What happens when educators are formally asked to discuss issues of race during professional development?

If you’ve had an experience with “race talk” in professional development, I’d like to hear about it.
Mica

Much of my work asserts the need for collaboration among the various actors whose actions contribute to children's educational fates. In Because of Race, I demonstrate how educators often resist the demands of parents of color requesting better treatment for their children. As educators debate blame for children's school experiences rather than setting forth to improve those experiences together with parents, these battles over serving children can destroy the very relationships crucial to supporting children's success. I thus suggest that parents and educators analyze necessary opportunity provision together.

Here's an article from EdWeek that describes a community attempting such a partnership.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/09/24/05covenant.h28.html?tmp=281...

Minneapolis Sets 'Covenant' on Black Achievement
Agreement is aimed at closing gaps, involving parents in education.
By Catherine Gewertz

The Minneapolis school board and the local African-American community have taken an unusual step toward healing fractured relations and improving schooling for black children by signing a "covenant" that places responsibility for improvement on the shoulders of parents and district leaders.

Capping a year of work, the agreement was adopted unanimously by the board on Sept. 9 and signed by its president and by representatives of two community groups that originated the idea and drove its development. The groups are the African American Mobilization for Education, or AAME, which is a coalition of local organizations, and the local YWCA.

The three-page agreement says education is a “shared responsibility,” and commits the district and the community to a decade of work “with a deliberate focus on African-American students in order to overcome a legacy of educational inequity.”

The district agreed to work with the AAME and other community groups to establish three model school sites with “stable teaching teams,” where best practices in offering a challenging curriculum, culturally responsive teaching, and effective parent involvement can be put into effect. Teams of parents, students, and community members at those schools will work with teachers and principals to develop programs.

A task force of parents, students, community members, and district employees, including teachers, will be set up to monitor districtwide implementation of the covenant.

Members of the school board and community groups that worked on the agreement see it as an important first step toward building a trusting, collaborative relationship so that the goals in the district’s 2007 strategic plan can be realized. Those include closing the achievement gap within five years, and erasing race as a predictor of academic success.

“It’s critical that we make peace with the African-American community, because we set such high goals that there is no way to achieve them without the support of the parents,” said board member Chris Stewart, who helped build support on the panel for the agreement.
Upcoming Referendum

Activists noted that the district could use the support of black parents on Nov. 4, when voters will decide on a referendum that would use $60 million from increased property taxes to support literacy and mathematics programs, class-size reduction, and other initiatives.

Nearly 40 percent of the Minneapolis district’s 35,700 students are African-American, but many of their parents have long complained of feeling disregarded in policy decisions and unwelcome in schools.

Their children are suspended at far higher rates than are white children, and graduate on time less often. Fewer than half score as proficient on state tests, compared with more than eight in 10 white students.

A 2007 report from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities found that the Minneapolis district’s per-pupil general-fund spending on teacher salaries is lowest in schools with the highest concentrations of minority children.

Last spring, four schools were closed in the northern part of the city, which has the biggest concentration of black families. Anger in those neighborhoods ran high when the closings were decided with little public input.

“This covenant came out of the neglect of the concerns of the African-American community,” said Kinshasha Kambui, a community organizer who led development of the agreement, which was inspired by a 2006 agreement the district made with the Native-American community.

Rosilyn M. Carroll helped draft the covenant with a core group of activists, educators, and parents. They pored over disaggregated achievement data and researched what teaching practices appear to work especially well for African-American students.

Ms. Carroll said the agreement marks an important departure from a common school district position: deciding unilaterally what is best for its families.

“This one says, ‘If you would partner not just from your perspective, but from ours,’ ” said Ms. Carroll, the academic director of the Center for Excellence in Urban Teaching, at Hamline University in St. Paul. “That’s the difference. It’s not just the district’s perspective; it’s from the black-parent community.”

Eleanor T. Coleman, who is the district’s point person on community and corporate partnerships, said the district’s success in building understanding with parents and activists has suffered in recent years with multiple turnovers of leadership in the superintendency and departmental offices. But she sees a smoother road ahead for implementation of the covenant under the current district administration, led by William D. Green, the superintendent since 2006.

The district will now broker conversations aimed at designing an “action plan” defining just what the district and the black community will do to be better partners, Ms. Coleman said.

At the same time, the district’s equity team is working on ways to improve education for children of all minority groups, and is conducting a series of four community dialogues about race and equity.

“I think they’re trying to tackle this, and it’s bold,” said Bill English, a co-chairman of the Coalition for Black Churches, which has been active on behalf of Minneapolis’ north side. “In good old ‘Minnesota nice,’ you don’t deal with racism. You pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Stewart, the school board member, said the next step—moving “from platitudes to practice”—could be a heavier lift than producing the covenant.

“That’s the essential work,” he said. “It is the tough stuff. It scares people. But where the real work is is getting everyone on the same page with what we are going to do for kids.”

In comments on my post “Talking about Striving” (8/26), readers headed toward an important "gold nugget": parents who train their children in behaviors that will be rewarded by educators help their children get rewarded by educators.

I have an article coming out in December 2008 called "From Shallow to Deep: Toward a Thorough Cultural Analysis of School Achievement Patterns" (Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39 (4): December 2008) that relates very much to this conversation. In the piece, I talk about how a truly thorough cultural analysis looks not just at how parents interact with their children, but also at how educators then react to children (and how children and parents react to educators, etc.).

Annette Lareau's book Unequal Childhoods argues that middle class parents, who have themselves been relatively successful in schools, tend to train their children purposefully in behaviors that they know will get rewarded by schools. (She finds this across race lines.) In turn, schools tend to reward behaviors associated with "middle class" people. Her book overstates some claims about class group behaviors, but it does demonstrate nicely how schools give “points” to particular behaviors -- and how some parents prepare children to get those “points.”

Lareau shows that it is not inherently better on some absolute developmental scale to train your child for particular versions of school success (for example, Lareau shows how many children whose parents are NOT constantly preparing them for school are learning usefully how to be self-directed. She also argues that many “middle class” children are exhausted by their parents’ constant “concerted cultivation” of school success.). A related argument can be made about behaviors often associated with “white people”: it is not inherently better to talk like a “white person,” for example, but schools and workplaces more often reward such talk (see John Baugh’s and Prudence Carter’s chapters in Everyday Antiracism.) Many useful behaviors are not typically rewarded in the schools we have. Why not reward a child’s ability to speak in multiple dialects, for example, or to translate? (See Ted Hamann’s chapter in Everyday Antiracism.)

Still, in the chain of events that produce a child's school success over time, parents can help propel a child toward such success by drilling them in the skills typical schools will reward. So, since schools will reward a kindergartner who shows up prepared for literacy, children whose parents read to them – or children who attend preschool – show up with a serious advantage. (See David Kirp’s book The Sandbox Investment.)

At the same time, so many actions aggregate to form a child's school achievement that a child is not guaranteed school success even if her parents prepare her for school success. As Baugh and Carter show, a child trained in "good school behavior," for example, can still be sanctioned negatively for ways of talking or dressing not associated with "white middle class people." Eugene Garcia shows in EAR that a child trained in "good school behavior" can still be disadvantaged if her teachers think less of her parents' other ways of parenting.

I created this blog in part to continue conversations I've started with my books.

Any thoughts or questions about Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools?

I created this blog in part to continue conversations I've started with my books.

Any thoughts or questions about Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School?

Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic convention last night, and reactions to it, got me thinking about a key tension in American discussions of education.

We have two discourses going simultaneously:

DISCOURSE 1: Youth should strive to reach their dreams, regardless of obstacles. Motivation is everything; opportunity is there for the taking. (As Obama put it, America should be a place where you can "make it if you try.")

DISCOURSE 2: Young people cannot succeed if opportunities are not provided to them. Therefore, adults must provide children with opportunities. (As Obama put it, Americans should give our children a "world class education.")

Obama talked almost exclusively about Discourse 1 last night, and said very little about opportunities denied to American children.

My new book, Because of Race, is largely about opportunites denied to children. I try to discuss a feedback loop: while children start out striving, they may stop striving if opportunities are not provided to them.

Educators need to motivate young people to strive toward their dreams regardless of obstacles, BY providing the opportunities that only schools can provide.

My other new book, Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools, came out in early August. Here's what I wrote to quickly describe the project on the back of the book. The book is about work I did between 1999 and 2001 in the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. Really, I consider it a book not about OCR, but about American debates over equal opportunity. -Mica

"In Because of Race, Mica Pollock tackles a long-standing and fraught debate over racial inequalities in America's schools. Which denials of opportunity experienced by students of color should be remedied? Pollock exposes raw, real-time arguments over what inequalities of opportunity based on race in our schools look like today--and what, if anything, various Americans should do about it.

"Pollock encountered these debates while working at the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in 1999-2001. For more than two years, she listened to hundreds of parents, advocates, educators, and federal employees talk about the educational treatment of children and youth in specific schools and districts. People debated how children were spoken to, disciplined, and ignored in both segregated and desegregated districts, and how children were afforded or denied basic resources and opportunities to learn. Pollock discusses four rebuttals that greeted demands for everyday justice for students of color inside schools and districts. She explores how debates over daily opportunity provision exposed conflicting analyses of opportunity denial and harm worth remedying. Because of Race lays bare our habits of argument and offers concrete suggestions for arguing more successfully toward equal opportunity."

I'll post specific findings from Because of Race here in the future.