Resegregation: What I Worry About

Anthony Cody, a National Board-certified teacher in the Bay Area, has launched a project to get teachers to write to President Obama.  He’s planning on gathering the letters and mailing them to the White House on November 23rd. Here’s mine:

Dear President Obama,

I’m not a worrywart by nature. I teach 5th grade in a high-poverty school in Los Angeles, so I can’t afford to be. But when I do let my optimistic guard down, here, in a nutshell, is what I worry about:

The Resegregation of Education in America

On the one hand we have an America of students who arrive at school well-fed, well-dressed, well-cared for. They have a rich array of experiences and a consistent exposure to language and numbers. They participate in a wide variety of extracurricular activities with their parents or tutors or coaches. They attend schools with broad, creative curricula including art, music, science, and technology. They have little difficulty with standardized tests because, given their backgrounds and the knowledge frameworks they bring with them, symbolic manipulation comes readily to them. These kids look beyond standardized testing to a world in which they will move with ease, becoming doctors, lawyers, musicians, film makers, presidents. For them, school is a springboard into the knowledge economy.

Then there’s the other America.

This America is filled with schools of have-nots. These children come to school without an ease with symbols, be they letters or numbers. They come from families where the primary language may not be English, or, even if it is, where there may be little emphasis on literacy and numeracy. These children attend schools that, battered by standardized testing requirements, primarily teach language arts and math through scripted programs and test prep materials. These students may be able to speak fluently and function in an oral society, but when it comes to the more complex, creative skills of symbolic manipulation that offer entry into the knowledge economy, they are and will be at a loss. The rare few will escape from this confine and leap into the middle class, but the majority will stay where they are or fall further behind. For these students, school is a tall and untraversable wall.

Schools and public education are the nurseries of American democracy. Nurseries call for care, nurturing, creativity, and joy, not dreary rote testing and metrics. They should, to borrow from the page of Sidwell Friends, a small Quaker institution you may have heard of, “offer…a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.”

Shouldn’t all children have access to the sort of education you value for your daughters?  Or is resegregation the future we want for our country?

Sincerely yours,

MizzB

Tattleteaching.com

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