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Absent from School
Children Left Behind
Missing Black Teachers
It is strange, then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up
against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it. This crusade is much more
important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did
not start in the schoolroom.
-- Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro
Unexcused Absences: A Missed Education
“Out of sight, out of mind” is all I can figure. It’s disturbing that never once -- in my
twelve years as a public school student -- did I ever have a Black teacher. Having been
Black since birth, it’s more disturbing that never in those twelve years, had I noticed it.
A Black Teacher? I suppose since I had never seen one, the thought of having a Black
teacher just never crossed my mind. How I came to see myself being a Black teacher
frames these reflections on education, socialization and transformation in a diverse
society.
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
A constant presence in my journey is absence: the absence of people of color in the
curriculum; the missing connections between identity, scholarship and opportunity; and
the absence of African Americans in the teacher workforce.
The absences explored here are not excuses, justifications or explanations. No excuse or
apology could rightly accompany an on-going account of the painful slog out of cultural
blindness. What follows are observations while still emerging from that darkness, guided
by the light of various texts, including Carter G. Woodson’s, “The Mis-education of the
Negro.”
The study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why America became what
Walt Whitman called a “teeming nation of nations.”
-- From Ronald Takaki’s, A Different Mirror
A couple of examples illustrate how I was blind to the underlying diversity that was
present in my school. I remember playing on the soccer team with a kid named Sarung
who was from Cambodia. I had no idea why his family and others were in the United
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States or of his struggles in a new country; I also didn't care enough to know or know
enough to care.
-- Paul Spies, The MisEducation, ReEducation and Transformation of a "White Male
Educator Working for Social Justice
While acknowledgment of the relationship between education and culture is important,
unless the relationship between culture and the socioeconomic conditions within which it
is produced is recognized, the so-called at-risk conditions common to peoples living
under siege will persist.
-- From: Sandy Grande’s, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political
Every street boy – and I was a street boy, so I know – looking at the society which has
produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody,
looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this
structure is operated for someone else’s benefit – not for his. And there’s no reason in it
for him.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
Absent from School
Although I physically attended McKeesport Senior High School, I was absent in every
other respect. I drifted through the hallways and went through the motions in math,
language and history classes, but mentally and emotionally -- I never attended high
school.
Thinking back, I suppose I felt my education had little to do with me.
“He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the
other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never
contributed anything to civilization – that his past is nothing more than a record of
humiliations gladly endured.”
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
“ . . . a narrow but widely shared sense of the past -- a history that has viewed American
as European in ancestry.”
-- From Ronald Takaki’s, A Different Mirror
I skipped school because school skipped me. My culture – my understandings,
perceptions, truths -- were largely absent from the curriculum and classroom materials. If
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Black people were ever mentioned in school it was usually some embarrassing lesson on
slavery or the civil war. I had not consciously put that all together at the time, but
instinctively I knew to take anything said or done in school with a grain of salt – and
insult.
Most of my Black friends had the same disjointed, un-connected attitudes. We rarely
talked about our school. When we did, it was only to curse it. School was not discussed
as an institution of learning, but as a big building which was blocking out our freedom.
We had better things to do. The school had no place in our neighborhood. It seems clear
to me now that this attitude and ignorance was promoted by the fact that I had only ever
been taught what Ronald Takiki calls, the “Master Narrative of American history.” Our
neighborhood had no place in the school.
No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics,
history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of
morals, the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor. The
problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a
man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.
-- Woodson
In the teaching of fine arts these instructors usually started with Greece by showing how
that art was influenced from without, but they omitted the African influence which
scientists now regard as significant and dominant in early Hellas.
-- Woodson
From literature the African was excluded altogether. He was not supposed to have
expressed any thought worth knowing.
-- Woodson
Dr. Carter G. Woodson was a true prophet. His thinking was way ahead of his time. He
advocated for a culturally responsive curriculum that would encourage critical thinking
and prompt self-awareness. Many of the things he wrote in 1933 are so relevant -- they
could have been said yesterday.
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Dr. Woodson anticipated -- and rejected -- the ideas underpinning much of the No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001. He objected to measuring progress from statistical information.
Woodson proposed measuring the effectiveness of education by whether it was
successful in helping students help themselves.
The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must
result in making a man think and do for himself just as the Jews have done in spite of
universal persecution.
-- Woodson
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more
good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of
those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. For example, the philosophy and
ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation,
and lynching.
-- Woodson
A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for
granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of
education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of
society.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
While in many respects I received a quality education, I soon came to realize that I was
also disempowered by my school experience, because the "real" world I have
encountered since high school is much more diverse, interesting, complex, and unjust
than I was led to believe as a teenager.
-- Dr. Paul Spies, The MisEducation, ReEducation and Transformation of a "White”
Male Educator Working for Social Justice
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Missing Connections
Anxious to get out of my broken home and my broken hometown in Western
Pennsylvania, I only stayed in school because graduating was part of my escape plan. I
was invited to join a Navy college program, having aced an exam taken through the
NJROTC program. Fully aware that I was not cut out for military service, it was a relief
when – at the last moment – I lucked out and was offered a full-tuition scholarship to
attend West Virginia University.
“Even the University of Minnesota, located in a state that is 98 percent White, requires its
students to take ethnic studies courses. Asked why multiculturalism is so important, Dean
Fred Lukerman answered: As a national university, Minnesota has to offer a national
curriculum – one that includes all of the peoples of America.”
-- Takaki
“When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to
see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the
world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked
in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul -- and not just individual
strength, but collective understanding -- to resist this void, this non-being, into which you
are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”
-- Adrienne Rich, partially quoted in Ronald Takaki’s, A Different Mirror
I didn’t have a Black teacher until my sophomore year in college. Until that point, being
Black had nothing to do with being in school. The experience was shocking. Not only
was the professor a smart, proud Black woman, the course subject was completely new to
me: African American history.
The experience is hard to describe. It’s truly the shock of the first look into a “different
mirror.” Not only was I faced with the image of myself for the first time, I was also
newly confronted with the existence of such a mirror. Do my parents know about this
mirror? Have they seen themselves in it? What about my friends? And why were we
allowed to be left out? Is there some conspiracy in the schools to hide this view of
history? Why was I left behind?
It was as if my thirst for knowledge once denied was thirst for water in a desert. I began
to take serious responsibility for my reeducation . . .
-- Paul Spies, The MisEducation, ReEducation and Transformation of a "White Male
Educator Working for Social Justice
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By the time I had received my undergraduate degree, I had re-educated and re-connected
myself to the world. I had not however, been able to connect to school. It would be years
before I could see any tie between my education and my own culture. I understood that
my people, my history, and my reality had been left out of mainstream scholarship – but I
still assumed that was because people of color had not had much to do with books, math,
history and science.
The difficulty is that the "educated Negro" is compelled to live and move among his own
people whom he has been taught to despise. As a rule, therefore, the "educated Negro"
prefers to buy his food from a white grocer because he has been taught that the Negro is
not clean.
-- Woodson
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one
begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education,
finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his
own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself
whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn
to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is
really anxious to have that kind of person around.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
A multicultural curriculum and culturally responsive classroom is an imperative. I don’t
know that at age 15, I would have fully comprehended Dr. Woodson’s book. I am certain
however, that I would have understood something profound about my own situation and
my own education, had a teacher given me “The Mis-education of the Negro” as a
reading assignment.
The absence of Woodson and James Baldwin is a presence I live with every day.
“For centuries such literature has been circulated among the children of the modern
world; and they have, therefore, come to regard the Negro as inferior. Now that some of
our similarly mis-educated Negroes are seeing how they have been deceived they are
awakening to address themselves to a long neglected work. They should have been
thinking about this generations ago, for they have a tremendous task before them today in
dispelling this error and counteracting the results of such bias in our literature. “
-- Woodson
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The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 dealt a severe blow to those advocating the
protection of minority cultures and languages. First, it mandated that states use highstakes standardized tests to measure educational out-comes. By their very definition and
construction, high-stakes standardized tests given in elementary, middle, and high
schools represent only a single culture. Given to all students, test questions could not be
based on knowledge known only to students in a minority culture. Since teachers must
teach to the test to ensure that their students are able to be promoted or graduated,
teachers are forced to teach the culture embedded in the test items. In fact, the No Child
Left Behind Act mandates that schools be ranked in quality according to the performance
of their students on standardized tests.
-- Joel Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality
------------------------------------------------------
But America has been racially diverse since our very beginning on the Virginia shore,
and this reality is increasingly becoming visible and ubiquitous. Currently, one-third of
the American people do not trace their origins to Europe; in California, minorities are fast
becoming a majority. They already predominate in major cities across the country - New
York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. . . . This
emerging demographic diversity has raised fundamental questions about America's
identity and culture.
-- From Ronald Takaki’s, A Different Mirror
If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes
learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be
liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about
their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of
anybody’s history, you must lie about it all.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
“The war for Indian children will be won in the classroom."
-- Wilma Mankiller as quoted in Sandy Grande’s, Red Pedagogy
Black Teacher Shortage
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Eventually, I came to see education as the central force in my life that it had always been.
I came to value my knowledge by learning that my knowledge was valuable. I went on to
get a graduate degree from the University of Minnesota. Emerging from cultural
blindness, I began to see that the aim of education is action, not knowledge.
Currently I am seeking a Communication Arts teaching licensure through Metropolitan
State University’s Urban Teacher Program. A central mission of the program is to
increase the number of teachers of color in urban schools.
To be more explicit we may go to the seat of the trouble. . . . Most of what these
universities have offered as language, mathematics, and science may have served a good
purpose, but much of what they have taught as economics, history, literature, religion and
philosophy is propaganda and cant that involved a waste of time and misdirected the
Negroes thus trained.
-- From Carter G. Woodson’s, The Mis-education of the Negro
At the "seat of the trouble" is a multicultural student population and a mono-cultural
teacher workforce. The lack of Black teachers is alarming. The teacher of color gap is
directly related to the achievement gap and to issues of disproportionality in Minnesota’s
urban schools and in schools across the nation.
According to a 2009 survey by the Minnesota Minority Education Partnership:
“only 3.3 percent of Minnesota teachers are racial or ethnic minorities. Three-fourths of
pupils in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools are students of color or Native Americans, but
just 16 percent of teachers are.”
If we’re to see progress, we need more culturally competent, culturally diverse teachers.
Research on culturally responsive teaching shows that learning is maximized when
educators remember to count each child as a singular and unique individual.
Decades ago, Dr. Woodson criticized the vicious circle of mis-educated students
graduating from school, then return as teachers to mis-educate others. The failure to heed
Woodson’s warning has been costly.
In a January 22, 2011 speech to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Education
Secretary Arne Duncan suggested Minnesota could do more to shrink the achievement
gap between its White students and poor, racial minorities. Duncan specifically said the
state needed to create alternative pathways for talented people from diverse backgrounds
to become teachers. The lack of alternative pathways to the classroom cost Minnesota
millions of dollars last year when it lost its bid in the federal Race to the Top grant
program.
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"We need to open this up and get great talent, wherever that talent may come from,"
Duncan said.
To be frank we must concede that there is no particular body of facts that Negro teachers
can impart to children of their own race that may not be just as easily presented by
persons of another race if they have the same attitude as Negro teachers; but in most
cases tradition, race hate, segregation, and terrorism make such a thing impossible. The
only thing to do in this case, then, is to deal with the situation as it is. Herein, however,
the emphasis is not upon the necessity for separate systems but upon the need for
common sense schools and teachers who understand and continue in sympathy with those
whom they instruct.
-- From Carter G. Woodson’s, The Mis-education of the Negro
I believe that exemplary teachers need to critically reflect upon their practice and have a
strong understanding of self when working with students. Without critical and often
uncomfortable reflection, there is limited awareness of the attitudes, actions, and policies
which thwart justice on an individual and institutional level. Whether these attitudes,
policies, and actions are conscious or subconscious, explicit or implicit, they affect how
we teach and how our students learn.
-- Paul Spies, The MisEducation, ReEducation and Transformation of a "White Male
Educator Working for Social Justice
America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way
– and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and
tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use
that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish.
-- From James Baldwin’s, A Talk to Teachers
A mind that remains in the present atmosphere never undergoes sufficient development to
experience what is commonly known as thinking. No Negro thus submerged in the
ghetto, then, will have a clear conception of the present status of the race or sufficient
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foresight to plan for the future; and he drifts so far toward compromise that he loses
moral courage. The education of the Negro, then, becomes a perfect device for control
from without. Those who purposely promote it have every reason to rejoice, and Negroes
themselves exultingly champion the cause of the oppressor.
-- Woodson
Cultural invisibility
What Takiki calls, the “Master Narrative of American history.”
Don’t know the fact that they don’t know
Adrienne Rich, what happens “when someone with the authority of a teacher” describes
our society, and “you are not in it.”
Prospero – 439
Much Ado about a Name
"What role have teachers played in shaping America's ever-changing education system?"
Also . . . Yes, teachers are being newly identified (blamed?) as central to student
achievement and to our education system -- specifically through teacher unions and
teacher culture.
Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality:
A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures
in the United States
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Joel Spring received his PhD in educational policy studies from the University of
Wisconsin.
Chapter 6:
The Great Civil Rights Movement and the New Culture Wars
School segregation, and cultural and linguistic genocide, were central issues in the great
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In fact, at the time of the movement it had been only two generations since the end of the
Indian wars and conquest of Puerto Rico; one generation since Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean Americans had suffered segrega-tion and discrimination; and three generations
since the end of slavery. *
* A generation is the average period in which children grow up and have children of their
own; it is usually calculated as about 30 years. Most historians forget the importance of
family con-versations in passing on knowledge about previous times.
African and Mexican Americans were primarily concerned with ending racial segregation
in the schools. Native and Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans, wanted to reverse
previous efforts by federal and state governments to destroy their languages and cultures.
They banded together in demands for public schools to maintain and teach Spanish and
Native American languages. They also wanted schools to provide positive images of their
cultural traditions.
The great civil rights movement confronted traditional opposition to inte-gration and to
protection of minority cultures and languages.
-------------------------
African American
President Eisenhower was to later write, “ Overseas, the mouthpieces of Soviet
propaganda in Russia and Europe were blaring out that ‘ anti- Negro violence’ in Little
Rock was being ‘ committed with the clear connivance of the United States
government.’”
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The school desegrega-tion issue was fi nally decided by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1954
in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka . The decision did not bring immediate
results, because resistance to court- ordered desegregation arose.
The key legal issue in the struggle for desegregation was the interpretation of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This constitutional amend-ment was ratifi ed
in 1868, shortly after the close of the Civil War.
The evolution of the mass media in the 1950s was an important factor in the civil rights
movement because it became possible to turn local problems into national issues.
---------------------------Native American
Kennedy’s secre-tary of the interior, Stewart Udall, appointed a Task Force on Indian
Affairs, which, in its 1961 report, states, “ To insure the success of our endeavor we must
solicit the collaboration of those whom we hope to benefi t— the Indians themselves . . .
for equal citizenship, maximum self- suffi ciency, and full par-ticipation in American
life.” 12 One of the results of the drive for self- determination was the creation of the
Rough Rock Demonstration School in 1966.
1969 the report Indian Education: A National Tragedy— A National Challenge . The
report opened with a statement condemning previous educational policies of the federal
government: “ A careful review of the his-torical literature reveals that the dominant
policy of the Federal Government toward the American Indian has been one of forced
assimilation . . . [ because of] a desire to divest the Indian of his land.” 17 After a lengthy
review of the failure of past educational policies, the report’s fi rst recommendation was “
maximum participation and control by Indians in establishing Indian education
programs.”
the Indian Education Act in 1972.
the 1975 Indian Self- Determination and Education Assistance Act
the Tribally Controlled Schools Act provided for outright grants to tribes to support the
operation of their own schools.
ASIAN AMERICANS: EDUCATING THE “ MODEL MINORITY”
Faced with the anger of black Americans demanding equal rights and economic
opportunity, some European Ameri-cans began pointing their fi ngers at the Asian
community and argued that they were successful in achieving the American dream
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without contentious demonstrations and accusations of prejudice and discrimination
against the white population. If, these European Americans seemed to say, the black
population acted like the Asian population they could achieve economic success without
criticizing the white population.
Suzuki concludes, “ The personality traits exhibited by Asian Americans are the result of
a socialization process in which the schools play a major role through their selective
reinforcement of certain cultural behavior patterns and inculcation of others that are
deemed ‘ appropriate’ for lower-echelon white- collar wage workers.”
Historian Robert Lee
In Lee’s words, for these ethnicity theorists and politicians “ who sought both to develop
the Negro and to contain black demands for the systematic and structural dis-mantling of
racial discrimination, the representation of Asian- American communities as selfcontained, safe, and politically acquiescent became a powerful example of the success of
the American creed in resolving the problems of race.”
I would argue that the model minority image created in the 1960s and 1970s might have
distorted the image European Americans had of Asian immigrants arriving from
Southeast Asia, particularly the Hmong and Cam-bodians.
Asian Americans: Language and the Continued Struggle for Equal Educational
Opportunity
HISPANIC / LATINO AMERICANS
In 1946, a U. S. District Court ruled in Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of
Orange County that Mexicans were not Indians as claimed under the 1935 California law.
The judge argued that the only possible argument for segregation was the special
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educational needs of Mexican American children. These needs centered around the issue
of learning English.
The continuation of de facto forms of segregation resulted in the formation in 1967 of the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund ( MAL-DEF). Initially, MALDEF
focused on cases dealing with students punished for participating in civil rights activities.
In 1968, MALDEF focused its attention on the inequitable funding of school districts in
Texas that primarily served Mexican Americans. Not only were Mexican American
children facing de facto segregation, but the schools they were attending were also
receiving less fund-ing than schools attended by Anglos.
During the 1960s, Mexican Americans began to demonstrate for the use of Spanish in
schools and the teaching of Mexican American history and culture. In 1968, Mexican
American students boycotted four East Los Angeles high schools, demanding bilingual
programs, courses in Mexican American history and culture, and the serving of Mexican
food in the school cafeterias. In addi-tion, the students demanded the hiring of more
Spanish- speaking teachers and the fi ring of teachers who appeared to be anti– Mexican
American.
MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION, IMMIGRATION, AND THE CULTURE WARS
The multiculturalism movement renewed the culture wars. Opponents of multiculturalism
argued that the public schools should emphasize a single cul-ture— traditional AngloAmerican culture. In contrast to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were greeted with Americanization
programs designed for deculturalization and the implanting of Anglo- American values,
the new immigrants were swept up into the debate over multiculturalism initiated by the
civil rights movement.
James Banks, Christine Sleeter, and Carl Grant, were con-cerned with empowering
oppressed people by integrating the history and culture of dominated groups into public
school curricula and textbooks. In general, they wanted to reduce prejudice, eliminate
sexism, and equalize edu-cational opportunities.
In addition, multicul-turalism should pervade the curriculum, including the general life of
the school— bulletin boards, lunch rooms, and assemblies. In other words, all teachers
and subjects should refl ect a multicultural perspective.
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Supporting ethnocentric education, Jawanza Kunjufu argued that the inherent racism of
white- dominated institutions hindered the education of African Americans. In his words,
“ We must develop programs and organiza-tions to protect and develop AfricanAmerican boys because a conspiracy exists to destroy African- American boys. The
motive of the conspiracy is rac-ism, specifi cally European- American male supremacy.”
68 He proposed an edu-cational program that will prepare African American boys to
understand their oppression and to be able to have a career. An important part of his
proposal is to present strong African American male role models to young black boys so
that they can break through the conspiracy. Similar arguments can be pre-sented for
Native American–, Puerto Rican–, and Mexican American– centered educational
programs.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 dealt a severe blow to those advo-cating the
protection of minority cultures and languages. First, it mandated that states use highstakes standardized tests to measure educational out-comes. By their very defi nition and
construction, high- stakes standardized tests given in elementary, middle, and high
schools represent only a single culture. Given to all students, test questions could not be
based on knowl-edge known only to students in a minority culture. Since teachers must
teach to the test to ensure that their students are able to be promoted or graduated,
teachers are forced to teach the culture embedded in the test items. In fact, the No Child
Left Behind Act mandates that schools be ranked in quality according to the performance
of their students on stan-dardized tests.