White Folks Who Teach in the Hood

March 29, 2016 7:36 AM

Dr. Christopher Emdin talks to PBS Newshour about what he calls a pervasive narrative in urban education: a savior complex that gives mostly white teachers in minority and urban communities a false sense of saving kids. Also linked in the article is this one on the same topic from another perspective.
posted by Man Bites Dog (68 comments total)

I just read this book a few weeks ago, and found it very enlightening. Boland talks a lot about the lack of support for white, privileged teachers going into these schools and the complete disarray of education in NYC specifically.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:38 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

that same system creates black teachers with white supremacist ideologies and they’re just as dangerous as white folks who don’t understand culture. Part of a system of oppression is allowing the folks who have the power to create change feel as though they’re responsible for keeping the narrative. So a lot of black teachers go into urban schools and within the first 3 months they become the king or queen of discipline. Why? Because the system sees a black face as a person who’s supposed to help them meet their goals. But I don’t want to meet those goals; I want kids to feel free. I want those kids to feel what emancipation is like in those classrooms, to feel like they can be themselves, their culture to be expressed. Just a black face in the classroom helps the kids to connect, but it’s not enough if that black person feels their role is to be the enforcer of a white folk’s pedagogy.

This is a powerful idea. I'm interested in what this person has to say.
posted by Miko at 7:57 AM on March 29, 2016 [25 favorites]

I've taught in poor Latino and Vietnamese schools, and most of the teachers were middle class whites, and the white savior thing totally exists there. There's also a lot of straight up racism. Just some stuff I've seen:

- a teacher storm into the lounge after being cut off in traffic raging about g**k drivers... most of her class was Vietnamese.

- POC applying for teaching jobs and facing an all-white hiring committee and really not even being considered, even though most of the kids at the school are also POC from the same background.

- Latino kids having to learn songs and poems about Columbus discovering America. (I talked to one Latino sixth grader about this, and he said his parents taught him that Columbus enslaved the natives and was a terrible guy, but his teachers had just had them sing about how everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus proved them wrong... WTF! Why would he ever trust a teacher to be right about anything??)

In my (limited) experience, 1st and 2nd grade kids are the same no matter where they're from. They're all smart, happy, curious, etc. By the time they get to 6th grade, I think they're realizing that the world is working against them, and who wouldn't be affected by that knowledge?
posted by Huck500 at 8:03 AM on March 29, 2016 [40 favorites]

I used to be one of these! I worked at some really, really high-needs schools in DC and I tried really hard not to have a savior complex AND ALSO tried really hard to help kids, and I quit because I was so drained and nothing was getting better and it was super, super clear to me that I wasn't helping and all the TFA-style platitudes in the world weren't going to make me a more effective teacher in the context of a system that broken.

There is so much truth in what Dr. Emdin says and a lot of grossness in the way young white people position themselves as heroes at the center of the story in these schools. Like, why does the classroom have to be about the journey of you, the teacher? Shouldn't it be about the kids? And people will say "of course, it's all about the the kids. They've taught me so much!" and you're like "...uh, shouldn't YOU be teaching THEM?". There's a huge problem with the way whiteness is prioritized and the fact that narratives about kids of color are being shaped by the way white people talk about themselves.

I I know I've linked to this before but I think this Onion point/counterpoint really is one of the best commentaries on this phenomenon I've ever read on some of the issues with the way white people with virtually no teaching experience are shaping the narrative around high-needs schools with big minority populations. It's not a fucking summer camp to validate your journey, it's these kids lives and educations and they need real teachers who care about teaching and not about make themselves feel like heroes.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:06 AM on March 29, 2016 [82 favorites]

So, I haven't read Dr. Emdin's book, but this article ignores a major problem related to young white teachers in inner-city schools: a huge proportion of them are in those schools with inadequate preparation for what they are going into, and with nonexistent support from administration. Programs such as the NYC Teaching Fellows, while well-meaning, take young people, often with zero teaching experience, and then throw them into an inner-city school after a ridiculously short training. Here's the worst part: because these new teachers have no seniority, they can get assigned to the problem classes that no other teacher wants.

I was assigned to teach a class of fifth graders which, as I found out from a fellow teacher, had made two different teachers quit the previous year. I tried. I really did. And maybe if I had support from the school I might have made it. But, there's this: one morning a student decided to start jumping from desk to desk. Now I can't touch the student, of course. So when I try to convince him to come down, he starts threatening to kill me (I'm not worried, he's a tiny guy, but still). Eventually I get him down (he's still yelling about killing me) and send him to the vice-principal's office with a note explaining the situation. Five minutes later, he comes back into the class with a big grin on his face and hands me back my note. On the bottom, the VP had written the following (verbatim): "Please to put Tyriq in your time out corner."

That was about the typical level of support I could expect as a brand-new teacher in an inner-city school. Of course, I can't speak to the situation at every inner-city school, but I'm guessing my experience wasn't that unique.
posted by Gaz Errant at 8:07 AM on March 29, 2016 [35 favorites]

Interesting article -- makes me think of this MadTV skit about the Nice White Lady.
posted by cider at 8:08 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

- Latino kids having to learn songs and poems about Columbus discovering America. (I talked to one Latino sixth grader about this, and he said his parents taught him that Columbus enslaved the natives and was a terrible guy, but his teachers had just had them sing about how everyone thought the world was flat and Columbus proved them wrong... WTF! Why would he ever trust a teacher to be right about anything??)

White privilege in a god damned nutshell.
posted by Talez at 8:09 AM on March 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm part of a volunteer program that gets working tech people to teach classes in basic web development in 'under-resourced high schools' (their term). The class I'm teaching is extra-curricular so it is voluntary for the students as well. The school I teach at is about 98% black, the principal and most of the staff is black as well, and I'm fairly privileged white. I don't have a background in teaching, just many years of doing web development. My motivation for doing this was partly to foster more diversity in tech, partly as an opportunity to get experience teaching and honestly because I was feeling a little unfulfilled at work. I definitely came in with some preconceptions but was blown away by the wonder of these students!

They are so bright, creative, disciplined and goal oriented. I just want to show them what to do and get out of their way because I know they're going to come up with some great things.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:11 AM on March 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Gaz Errant, that is SO SIMILAR to a lot of my experiences, and a big part of the reason I felt like I wasn't doing any good! I partially stopped teaching because I was afraid one of my students was going to get badly hurt and there wasn't anything I could do to prevent it. There are definitely systemic issues that relate to this too!

I also think part of the problem is that we keep telling young white people (technically adults but not by much) "you can totally do this if you just CARE DEEPLY and are SUFFICIENTLY INSPIRATIONAL." This narrative definitely hurts the kids who are getting underprepared teachers, but it hurts the teachers too because it makes people going into these schools without real support or preparation feel like it's their fault if they fail because they just don't CARE ENOUGH and puts all the responsibility on them, and makes it easier to perpetuate the system because when teachers burn out after two years school districts can constantly churn through earnest young adults who really do want to make a difference and haven't yet realized that the problems are systemic and can't be solved by One Hero Taking on the Challenges and Saving the Children.

There are definitely enormous systemic problems and those are a huge part of the reason that underprepared young white people fail, but the White Savior narrative also adds to this because convincing well-meaning kids who don't know any better to take these jobs means that schools don't have to address the real issues and they can just keep blaming the teachers they aren't supporting instead of coping with the issues affecting the kids.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:17 AM on March 29, 2016 [31 favorites]

Gaz Errant and Ms. Pterodactyl, that jives with my experiences, too. Lack of support up the chain of command is death to quality education in any school.

Also, my Masters in Teaching program was shit at covering any of this. So many useless classes about how awesome group work is (rolleyes) and so, so little about the realities of life in a public school classroom in any area that is less than affluent and lily-white.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:20 AM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

After posting and reading other comments I guess I sound a bit like I have a savior complex and I swear I don't, but just teaching at all must mean that you think you have something to give. It's totally possible that what I'm teaching them will be obsolete in five years, but as one student put it, just working on a project from start to finish is really satisfying and makes the students feel like they're accomplishing things.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:20 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

In fact, in relation to an earlier post, I described Teach for America as "Uber for Elementary Schools" to someone this morning because it disrupted an existing, well-regulated model with licensing requirements by substituting unqualified young people for the benefit of...someone. Man, fuck this shit, education systems definitely need serious changes but it's too important to the country in general and kids in particular to "disrupt".
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:21 AM on March 29, 2016 [60 favorites]

White male friend of mine, fresh out of college, went into teaching high school at a "bad" school on the west side of Chicago. He is a big, burly kind of guy, so in addition to making him take the "worst" kids for classes, he was also expected to be a security guard for all the lunchroom periods. Food fights? These kids were throwing chairs, upending tables... regularly. Oh, and stabbings, which don't make the news.

I don't think he went in with a savior complex. But he sure as hell didn't think he was there to make his fortune. He thought it was an interesting way to go after college. Plus, maybe he could benefit some kids.

He got out of "teaching" after two years.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 8:34 AM on March 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I bring teachers into the communities of their students: a barbershop, a black church and even hip-hop ciphers. It’s having teachers understand that it’s not them going to see the “exotic other” in their own element, but rather, an opportunity for them as teachers to learn about the students. Teachers go in there with notebooks, a pen and pad in hand and are really prepared to learn. They look at the preacher and his voice inflections, the way his hands move and how that garners a response from the audience. It’s a structured sermon but he’s allowing the audience to walk freely around and be creative.

Man, this is a really interesting and powerful idea. In order to make teachers effective, they have to have some kind of community connection, because otherwise how will they understand the students? And bringing in inexperienced white kids from super different backgrounds is going to erase all possible forms of understanding... so this program is, as I understand what he's saying, trying to re-teach that education.

But I'm not a K12 teacher and I've never been a student in a school like this. Does it work? It also sounds good to me inasmuch as it represents some amount of investment in prospective teachers, such that it's a burden to re-train someone new vs. keeping someone who is already experienced here... but I don't know if there's the will to actually pay for teachers with those skills, even in struggling schools.
posted by sciatrix at 8:37 AM on March 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I also think part of the problem is that we keep telling young white people (technically adults but not by much) "you can totally do this if you just CARE DEEPLY and are SUFFICIENTLY INSPIRATIONAL."

Absolutely this. It makes the White Savior problem worse by saying "hey, these inner-city schools are fucked up but YOU can fix them!" I fell for it.

Also, my Masters in Teaching program was shit at covering any of this. So many useless classes about how awesome group work is (rolleyes) and so, so little about the realities of life in a public school classroom in any area that is less than affluent and lily-white.

I think my teaching experience would have been almost exactly the same without my Masters program - that's how much the coursework lined up with what I actually needed to know.

Honestly, talking about this just makes me sad because the situation doesn't seem to have changed AT ALL for the better in the ten years since I was in that classroom. It's unfortunate that the discussion always seems to be about teachers and their teaching styles and never about the administration, because I'm convinced that, for the most part, it's not the teachers that are the problem.

I described Teach for America as "Uber for Elementary Schools"

I love this.
posted by Gaz Errant at 8:43 AM on March 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

I don't know if there's the will to actually pay for teachers with those skills, even in struggling schools.

I haven't read the book, but I think this is the crux of the problem. There is no shortage of imaginative solutions to the problems of public education. I really do applaud the notion of enculturating teachers from different backgrounds to understand the differences in social structure and communication style in nonwhite communities, and be able to use that experience to contextualize student behavior and diagnose the central problems in the lack of connection. And the pedagogy is creative, which in an ideal world, all pedagogy would be. But this is just one of many successful models that succeed as a pilot when applied in a situation where students are highly challenged and school structure is poor. The difficulty is that to implement any of these solutions at scale, takes real, serious investment, and we don't have the political will to do it. GZA cannot visit every classroom in New York. There are not enough university programs to infuse classrooms with research-based pedagogy and funding for support. The best we can do, apparently, as a society, is get jazzed up about privatization schemes and charter projects that pull a veneer of entrepreneurial capitalism over themselves. Real investment in public education - the kind that would hire aides and lunchroom monitors and create enough supportive/supervisory structure and inservice training and coaching to ensure teacher focus and success - is the least palatable option, and as long as middle-class people find they can get a decent enough education at their public schools in their well-funded communities where there are fewer obstacles, there is no coalition to support change.
posted by Miko at 8:44 AM on March 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

I should have realized this a long time ago, but I just clocked that Teach for America is in large part just an updated version of the Settlement schools. The idea is that it's exposure to the social model provided by people with a middle/upper-class background that is the special sauce that will overcome poverty.
posted by Miko at 8:47 AM on March 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

Wait, so you're telling me that actually fixing education inequality in America is more complicated than just sending a bunch of retired-Marine white ladies to inner city schools?
posted by tobascodagama at 8:52 AM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I also think part of the problem is that we keep telling young white people (technically adults but not by much) "you can totally do this if you just CARE DEEPLY and are SUFFICIENTLY INSPIRATIONAL."

This cuts two ways, too: there are schools that are absolutely succeeding at providing excellent educational outcomes to primarily poor, minority student populations. Two of the best three performing middle schools in the state of Massachusetts are charter schools serving 80%+ free/reduced lunch kids in Boston. (My wife is at one of them, so take this all with an appropriate grain of salt) The median age of the (primarily white, almost exclusively female, largely TFA-alum) teachers there is 26. 26! For a job that requires either a master's degree or a year of teaching "instruction" under TFA's tutelage. These schools are non-union, of course, because Disruption. In practice, what that means is young teachers who have had a lifetime of watching Dangerous Minds and thinking the secret to turning these kids' lives around is to just work a little harder, so they all work 80 hours a week and burn out after three years. Then they shuffle off to the wealthy western suburbs, but the schools are so highly-acclaimed that the TFA pipeline never stops supplying them with new blood.

Uber for schools is a closer analogy than anything I've seen before. Thanks, Mrs. Pterodactyl.
posted by Mayor West at 8:52 AM on March 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

I think overall this is laying the blame — as usual, though from a different perspective — too much on the teachers. The important part about the story I told about my friend (above) was that he was graduating, needed a job, was interested in teaching, then got ASSIGNED to the horrible situation I describe.

So it's a bad thing for him to go into the job thinking "Hey, I'll try my best, maybe I can make a difference"?

He and others like him don't necessarily ask to be put in minority, struggling, violent schools. And now we want to tag people going into teaching as potentially having a "Savior Complex"?

Got any more reasons for no one to ever want to go into teaching, ever?
posted by jeff-o-matic at 9:07 AM on March 29, 2016 [13 favorites]

If my kid hasn't eaten enough, is dealing with violence in his home or neighborhood, is dealing with traumatic loss of family members to death or incarceration or lack of commitment, is witnessing a bunch of people numbing on substances to cope with the physical and brain alterations and damage of overwork and little pay-

you know what I don't give a shit about? Grades. What sort of asshole sees a child dealing with this and thinks "The big issue here is how bad it is that you are failing in school."

I don't give a shit about grades that are a systemic tool of power used to abuse and disenfranchise vulnerable people. Stop using grades to rate and disregard the worth of human beings.

If anyone ACTUALLY wants to help as opposed to wanting to pat oneself on the back or get money on the backs of vulnerable kids-- then fight the problems actually harming them rather than playing into a system that says the problem is them and they need to be modified whether with drugs or behavior modification programs.
posted by xarnop at 9:12 AM on March 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

I think a major problem is that they're not allowed to offer hazard pay for those schools - so the veteran teachers simply don't want them. Why would they, when they get paid exactly the same to teach in a quieter setting? So all you have is new teachers. And whether TFA or union-hired, they burn out fast because that is their introduction to teaching. And so you have to tell people something to try to get them in there. And that's where "you can save them" comes from.
posted by corb at 9:13 AM on March 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think my teaching experience would have been almost exactly the same without my Masters program - that's how much the coursework lined up with what I actually needed to know.

Many people in my family are teachers or retired from that profession. Mostly public schools. In general, they enjoy(ed) their time in teaching, but most of them have nothing but contempt for graduate schools in education. They viewed it as a necessary ticket to punch in order to get a job in the field, but found the course work next to useless in terms of actually equipping them with classroom skills.

(FWIW, none of them had a Dangerous Minds savior complex.)
posted by theorique at 9:13 AM on March 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm finding myself interested on how a book about training teachers to be effective at teaching the kids is resulting in a discussion about the costs to the privileged white post-college teachers when they take on the goal. The article is pretty clear about its priority being the effects of these program on the communities and the children that these teachers teach, not the new grads themselves. But this discussion is circling around how hard it is for these new grads to come in and get burned out on teaching in these schools, and how there isn't a lot of support for those grads and so they burn out.

Respectfully, the burnouts aren't the ones who are bearing the cost of programs like TFA. What are the consequences to the students, and do programs like this help the students? I care a lot about the teachers who wind up in these programs and get hurt, but they have a lot more options than inner-city kids do both before and after they enter the program. What works?
posted by sciatrix at 9:17 AM on March 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

Respectfully, the burnouts aren't the ones who are bearing the cost of programs like TFA. What are the consequences to the students, and do programs like this help the students?

Except that the cost of burnout and lack of support is TFA teachers who teach for two years then go to law or business school, before they can really learn the craft and be effective. That cost is borne by the students.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:24 AM on March 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

I have seen initiative too to focus more on emotional needs and how you can't learn on a empty stomach or with a empty heart. Some kids have pressing needs for basic needs like food and clothing and also pressing needs for attention and socializing to meet emotional needs that are literally getting them through crisis.

Learning to meet the needs of the kids as whole people, will help with being in a good place to learn. Focusing on human beings who learn at their own pace, and who specialize in different kinds of skills than just book smarts and empowering skill development in a wide range of types of fields of skillsets is a better platform to help people learn in their own ways.
posted by xarnop at 9:28 AM on March 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

jeff-o-matic, I don't think that anyone's trying to say that all white people teaching in inner-city schools have a Savior complex. But enough of them do (even if subconsciously) that it's a valid concern.

[They] found the course work next to useless in terms of actually equipping them with classroom skills.

Having been both a lawyer and a teacher, I find it astonishing how neither of the required educations for those professions actually prepares you for their realities.

sciatrix, I'm one of the ones talking about the problems with TFA and its ilk, but my point is not just the burning-out of the teachers. It's that the programs themselves are actually making the White Savior problem worse, but the article in question doesn't really address that (I can't speak for the book). Dr. Emdin seems to be making this all about problems with white teachers, rather than problems with these programs and with school administrations. All the revolutionary pedagogy in the world is useless when you're a brand-new teacher with zero experience thrown into a tough class with little to no support. And it doesn't help the students at all to have a revolving door of well-meaning idealists who have the potential to become great teachers but can't get through their first couple years in these schools.
posted by Gaz Errant at 9:30 AM on March 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

I too was one of these. It makes me uncomfortable to admit it, but I thought I'd save some kids. Or, at least make English class tolerable.

I was brought up attending Title 1 schools, and lived in urban neighborhoods with kids from all classes and ethnicities, I also knew I was the Jewish kid, living in the big house on the hill. Guilt much? My parents were hippies who fought for social justice during the civil rights movement. My dad was a social worker, of COURSE I grew up dreaming of 'giving back.'

What I encountered was an educational system designed to fail poor and minority kids. I liked the kids well enough, but some were so entrenched in despair and hate and frustration that I knew that reaching them was a long-shot. I had classes full of bright, gifted kids, I had classes of immigrant kids who didn't speak English, I had classes of kids who had to solve 40 problems before coming to school, 10 of them related to their OWN kids.

I threw up my hands because I knew I couldn't make a difference, and it was killing me. I lasted exactly two years.

I have no idea why we keep doing school the way we do it. The model was designed to produce drones who could tolerate boredom so that they could go into factories and work there for their entire lives. Seriously.

I couldn't be a part of that.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 9:39 AM on March 29, 2016 [23 favorites]

It's that the programs themselves are actually making the White Savior problem worse, but the article in question doesn't really address that (I can't speak for the book). Dr. Emdin seems to be making this all about problems with white teachers, rather than problems with these programs and with school administrations.

The New York Times profile also linked in the FPP actually lays out Dr. Edlin's position much more clearly about the need for better training to teach in urban schools.
posted by yarly at 9:39 AM on March 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I am white and worked in college as a teacher's aide in Chicago Public Schools. I started with some idealism about helping less fortunate people, as well as a lot of faith in education as path out of poverty. My plan was to get some classroom experience, then apply to TFA or something to become a math teacher. I don't know if you call that a savior complex—it doesn't seem like an apt term to me.

I was completely mind-boggled by the condescension I saw, among teachers of all races, but especially the liberal white ones. Students were talked about like they were sociology experiments. It was presumed that everything we did was Good, and that all cultural influences that questioned our rectitude were worthless. Various hyperbolic valorizations of how "vibrant" black culture was, or hand-wringing platitudes about the plight of black people, were used to cover up the complete contempt that was actually felt for the students.

I eventually caught wise and ran screaming. For all hard work my teacher friends do, I can't shake the feeling that the public education system, and least the corner of it I saw, enshrines some screwed up liberal hypocrisies. TFA and its ilk display them most obviously, but I think they run a lot deeper. I don't have any grand theory here, but I do have a sense that the problems are not reducible to a specific "white savior" dynamic or programs like TFA.
posted by andrewpcone at 9:45 AM on March 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Christopher Emdin's CV doesn't cite any time actually teaching in these schools, or indeed at any school below the college level. Has he? If so, where, and for how long? Genuinely curious.

As to his hip hop methodology, I recall seeing much the same thing decades ago as a way of teaching English grammar to inner city kids. I've never seen a follow up on what happened to those kids. Only good, I hope, but who can say? Again, if anyone has information on this, I'd be interested.
posted by IndigoJones at 9:54 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

an educational system designed to fail poor and minority kids.

I don't know if I would say designed to fail them, but certainly not equipped to handle the social ills of poverty. Public schools unfortunately are the recipients of the community's failings, of which poor education is one of the failings. Education is still anyone's best shot at getting out of poverty.

I haven't read Emdin's book, and I'm having a hard time with the article alone simply because bringing teachers to barbershops is not going to solve the problem that our country just doesn't value education. I've been on the hiring end and have had the challenge of finding minority teachers -- forget good/qualified minority teachers, just getting a resume from one would have been rare. So are teaching programs not attracting minorities? I don't know -- I haven't read any recent research on that.

I work in a NYC charter school. I've made my career in charters. Some have been a pet project of some rich white people, and some have been like the one I am in now -- filled with hardworking teachers, a heavy coaching model where teachers are observed daily, monthly professional development that is targeted at the instructional problems teachers are facing from the prior month, high expectations for behavior and achievement and strong connections to our families, and more than 80% of our kids passing the state tests and going on to the competitive NYC high schools. Are we playing the white system? I don't know. But we are giving our kids choices by including them in channels of success, rather than having choices made for them because they can't read grade-level text when they go to high school.

We are also co-located with a public school, and we are constantly going into the stairwells and asking the kids to move on because the constant screaming is distracting our kids who are trying to learn how to divide fractions. I have to walk through the other school to go in and out of the building, and it's literally dodging things flying in the air and kids running around ignoring adults and cursing at every adult, not matter what race they are. I don't think Edmin is advocating for minority kids to spend all day out of class dry humping and punching each other. I know everyone has to have an angle to sell a book -- but seriously, we should be so lucky if white savior mentality is the biggest problem in US education to fix.
posted by archimago at 10:03 AM on March 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

yarly, I did see that quote from Dr. Emdin in the NYT piece. I'll walk my statement back a little: he's not making it all about the teachers. I still think it's disingenuous to talk about the White Savior problem in inner-city schools without a single mention of TFA or related programs (in the PBS piece), considering that those programs are a big part of the reason there are so many white, undertrained teachers going through revolving doors in these schools.

a heavy coaching model where teachers are observed daily, monthly professional development that is targeted at the instructional problems teachers are facing from the prior month, high expectations for behavior and achievement and strong connections to our families

How I wish I had support like that when I was teaching.
posted by Gaz Errant at 10:09 AM on March 29, 2016

[Previously on Metafilter], featuring this 2013 article on TFA from Jacobin.
posted by Sonny Jim at 10:12 AM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Education is still anyone's best shot at getting out of poverty." I actually think if I am going to invest my time and energy on trying to lay extra work load on the backs of children already coping with too much, I need to examine what I'm really doing. If you've got extra energy to press someone in the world to work harder, to pressure them, to cajole them--

why not spend that energy on the adults with so much more power to change the system than these kids? I don't actually think "saving kids from poverty" by shaming them about their grade helps them as much as it seems it will. Let them have bad grades and expend the energy pressuring people with a lot more capacity to carry the weight of these problems than small children who are being asked to carry the weight of adults careless apathy and lack of effort to make real change in their communities and for their parents who are completely disregarded and demeaned in the efforts to "save the children" from what is too often called cycles of bad behavior or bad choices of the poor, rather than bad choices of the powerful who willfully turn a blind eye or make things worse for their own benefit and by feeding the narrative the problem is with the poor not what is being done to them.
posted by xarnop at 10:14 AM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think the whole system is broken in that school has become simply something you need to attend so you don't get into trouble. I have extended family members with kids who have this exact mindset. It's not about learning, or finding good quality friends to grow up with, it's just something that kids do to get them out of the way for 50 hours a week.

What happens when your entire life since birth was "trouble"? Broken homes, poverty, lack of food, violence, drugs, neglect, etc.? What is the consequence for not performing is school in that case? None. In a weird way, these kids have nothing to lose because they never had anything in the first place. School is just another hassle in an unending string of hassles.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:16 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

xarnop, I'm just as frustrated with you with the system, but you are inferring things I have not implied.

Not every teacher shames kids, of any color, about grades. I don't spend my energy on the adults because I work in a K-8 school. The solution is not to shutter schools and open adult re-education programs. I'm working to break cycles through education, which IMHO is one of the most effective ways to change lives of future kids.

I'm not understanding where your anger is coming from. How is expecting kids to engage in reading, writing and math education shouldering them with the weight of adults? I work with kids like mentioned above who have to solve 10 problems before setting foot in the classroom, but the solution is not to not educate them because their parents are doing/not doing X, Y and Z.
posted by archimago at 10:22 AM on March 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

Most white teachers in "majority minority" schools are there not because they have a White Savior Complex, but because those are often the entry-level jobs in an urban school system. I taught English in one of those high schools for ten years. I liked it. I enjoyed helping kids, most of whom had minimal writing skills, skills which are necessary for life. I liked almost all of the students; I didn't like being called a racist when I called out a student for misbehavior. The other teachers in the "English pod" were fantastic people.

There were fights at the school every day. Sometimes there was an empty seat on a Monday morning due to gunfire over the weekend.

Then twenty years at a school where I had to work 60 hours a week because the students turned in their work. But no fights. No discipline problems. Kids saying "Thank you, Mr. P_" when leaving the class every day. (But the increasing bureaucratic demands of the position drained some of the joy out of what used to be an ideal job.)

Most of us teachers do just what everyone else does: take what life gives us and do our best in what are seldom the work environments we would prefer.
posted by kozad at 10:33 AM on March 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

I appreciate your sincere question, and I hope you might read a little about it. Not all, but for many, poverty and adversity impacts school performance and attention. Processing adversity and emotional burdens is work, and it takes a lot of energy doing things that are very important for emotional well being but may not fit within a traditional expectation of work load.

Kids with high adversity and trauma load are overwhelmingly diagnosed with adhd, behavioral problems, and treated as problems in the classrooms, often because the classroom is not designed to give them to space they need to focus on peer or social interaction needs, laughter and play as self comfort and other behaviors seen as "lack of interest in school" that is just kids meeting their own needs to get through tough stuff.

My son has intergenerational trauma which is linked with these issues (as do I) so I've spent a long time learning about it and frustrated that the school expects him to do more work than he is able and shaming him if he just can't do that much and needs more time to play.

So it's a personal issue for me because I wish I could change the school so it was not teaching my son he should feel bad for not wanting to do all this shit that I don't even think is developmentally appropriate especially in a school that caters to kid with high levels of poverty and adversity. I see so many kids breaking down and crying in class and teachers not going to do the most basic thing these kids need which is have attentive care and nurturing, sometimes way more important than grades is getting these emotional needs met.

The idea that every child needs to learn at the same pace, in the same way, and to spend the same amount of time on focused school work per day is toxic and it hurts children who don't deserve it. I don't have any anger at you personally, what you are hearing is years of frustration with different school systems I am watching fail kids, and I see it happening to other kids I can't help. When I volunteer I'm not even allowed to offer support to kids who are weeping under their desks because they got bad grades in 2n-4th grades! It's ridiculous!
posted by xarnop at 10:34 AM on March 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Here are my radical ideas for making school relevant:

1. Have it be open all year round, dispensing breakfast, lunch and snacks to kids who experience food insecurity.

2. Be a place where people in the neighborhood can come and contribute. Older folks can watch kids in the afternoon until a parent or guardian comes home.

2. A. After school programs Homework help, cooking classes, life skills.

3. Smaller class sizes. Hercules couldn't keep track of 36 fourteen year-olds.

4. On site day care for the children of students.

5. On site health care for students. Real healthcare, including and especially birth control.

6. On site social workers to help students and their families sort out bad social situations, homelessness, job loss, signing up for benefits, whatever gets the kid into a stabile home.

7. Outreach for addiction, for kids and their parents.

9. Schools should be easy walking distance from home. Having kids on the bus at the crack of dawn or for longer than 15 minutes is terrible.

10. Schools need to shift schedules to accommodate learning. Teenagers should not be up at 5 AM to be in class at 7 AM. They don't work that way. Do elementary in the morning and high school in the evening. Same building, double duty.

11. Providing showers and laundry to folks who need that. (Good housing would be better, but one thing at a time.)

12. Updating school buildings for the modern world. More electrical outlets, no asbestos, good HVAC, no lead paint. You know, common sense stuff.

13. Provide alternative programs for school breaks, special learning camps, skill concentration, adult supervision. Spring Break is a nightmare for a working parent with no access to child care. Also, kids miss the meals.

14. Fix special education. (That's a whole book and I can't even begin to touch it, but MAN Special Ed is messed up.)
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 10:39 AM on March 29, 2016 [20 favorites]

6. On site social workers to help students and their families sort out bad social situations, homelessness, job loss, signing up for benefits, whatever gets the kid into a stabile home.

I feel like, especially from reading Ed Boland's book, this is the major thing that most schools need.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:41 AM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think we are arguing the same thing -- that our problems with education are much bigger than white savior complex.

I worked for 7 years in a trauma-informed charter school that tried really hard to do all of the things you advocate. We were the only one of our kind in the area and our staff was heavily trained in the effects of trauma on learning and socialization. And we still had high turnover because it is emotionally and physically exhausting. And we were the lowest performing school on state tests in our state, so it's fair to say that we prioritized social/emotional development over academic.

I wish you had choices because it sounds like your child's school is dreadful, and I'm sure it's endemic of many schools in poor communities. But teaching the teachers how to rap a science experiment is not going to fix all of that.
posted by archimago at 10:49 AM on March 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

will. Let them have bad grades and expend the energy pressuring people with a lot more capacity to carry the weight of these problems than small children who are being asked to carry the weight of adults careless apathy

Ugh, no. Please do not let children have bad grades that will negatively impact their entire lives as some sort of activism. Please do not make poor children of color your activist project. Teach them for the world that is, while simultaneously working on creating the world you want. Don't just give up on teaching them because the system sucks.
posted by corb at 10:50 AM on March 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

This trope/thought pattern has been around for a while, and probably springs out of the missionary paradigm; see, for example, The Cross and the Switchblade, in which a Pentecostal minister from Indiana goes to the heart of darkest Brooklyn to bring gang kids to Jesus. One of the first things that I thought of when seeing this FPP was the candidacy of Jack Ryan, the former investment banker who worked in a Catholic high school in Chicago's South Side before making his run for the Senate (aborted by the revelation of his treatment of his ex-wife Jeri Ryan).
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:53 AM on March 29, 2016

Ruthless Bunny, I seem to recall that the model of turning schools into a hub for services for all the neighborhood's residents of all ages, has been tried and shown to be fairly successful. However (as is probably obvious) it costs a BOATLOAD of money to do that. All the pilot programs that try it are run off of grants and soft money. Those grants run out. That's the issue with trying to go to private grant-making organizations for any of this. Aside from any possible dubious agendas of their founders and boards, they are not and will never be a source of permanent funding. So, pilot programs get seed money, prove their concept and then.... the funding period ends and the firehose of money from private sources turns into a trickle from the government and then even that trickle gets shut off and you're right back to where you started.

People do know what works pretty well, like you said. And there is zero political will to pay for it. Because, yanno. Racism. I have no solutions.
posted by soren_lorensen at 11:02 AM on March 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I don't think hounding kids with bad grades helps their grade performance. I see it happening to these kids where they are being told they need to try harder, and they need to work harder when the struggle with school to the point the are breaking down.

I think many of these kids would benefit from SO MANY THINGS that would help their grade performance- but putting that kind of pressure on them might spur a few forward to achieve but it also might be pushing many to the point of emotional breakdown and giving up entirely- and thinking the weight of that failure falls squarely on their shoulders.

So many of the teachers I see doing this to kids think the are helping- but I see them breaking small humans who have no power in the situation, and those wounds might actually impair future scholastic performance and work and social functioning even more than a 2nd grader not reading as fast as we would like would. By all means, we should offer learning opportunities, but shoving kids into working beyond their limits and telling them just to work harder when they beg to stop may be actually harming a lot of kids more than it's helping.

I never proposed "giving up on teaching kids". But hyperfocusing on grade performance may not actually help long term performance either.
posted by xarnop at 11:04 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mod note: This "how much focus on kids' grades" thing is kind of getting off track, maybe let's bring it back to the cultural-competence teacher-training the article talks about?
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:11 AM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I guess in a way this is me, but I have no savior complex. In fact, I think I suffer more from walking in the door some days wondering if I can accomplish anything, let alone save anyone. I think taking the serenity prayer to heart is an important first step when teaching.

Along the lines of what everyone has been saying, I think well meaning but way misguided liberals tried to reimagine schools as a way to correct all of society's ills. Against that has been a corporatization mindset hell bent on quantifying everything and making teachers 100% accountable for everything. I can't say if that's being done to shame teachers or just some sort of attempt to be efficient with public funding. It's hard not to feel powerless when you're just trying to help some kids but feel like a political football everyday.
posted by lownote at 11:18 AM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

White teachers haven't been cycling through urban school districts for a 2 year tour of duty forever. It is a relatively recent phenomenon dating to the 90s. Before that, we had schools that were dominated by teachers from the local community who made up the nascent black middle class that started to form in the late 60s, and it is not like it solves all the problems (or any). The author glosses over this by claiming that the teachers had the same "white savior" complex.

Part of the issue, and this has always been true about education, the teacher is a person who has succeeded in the school environment and yet is teaching a group of students who are not exclusively made up of those with that kind of temperament. But this has always been true. What has changed is the expectation that the teacher is serving a valuable role in the community of imparting those values to the students and that the families actively welcomed this role of the teachers.
posted by deanc at 11:20 AM on March 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

Here are my radical ideas for making school relevant:

1. Stop tying school funding to property taxes, ensuring that rich neighborhoods get well funded schools, while poverty stricken areas can't afford pencils.
posted by el io at 11:20 AM on March 29, 2016 [32 favorites]

Ruthless Bunny, I seem to recall that the model of turning schools into a hub for services for all the neighborhood's residents of all ages, has been tried and shown to be fairly successful.

But that would cause your property taxes to rise. Do you want that?

(Based on the way things operate across the nation, I think we've answered that question.)
posted by theorique at 11:23 AM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Lots of interesting things to think about as I'm reading through the comments here, thanks as always for your insights MeFi. My little sister is just finishing up her two year TFA "contract" in an inner city school in a far away state and very different culture from where she grew up and especially where she went to college. It has often been very difficult for her, but she is a great kid and has worked very hard to do a good job. In talking to her about her experiences I have tried to think more critically about this whole subject and been on the lookout for different perspectives, which is why this article caught my eye and why I posted it here.

And just as a bit of an aside, I visited her a few months ago and the school let me sit in and observe one of her classes, I don't think I've ever been more proud of her. Teachers, you will always have my respect and admiration.
posted by Man Bites Dog at 11:31 AM on March 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I don't know if I would say designed to fail them, but certainly not equipped to handle the social ills of poverty. Public schools unfortunately are the recipients of the community's failings, of which poor education is one of the failings.

The best take on this I heard is that school is fundamentally designed with the assumption that students have eaten and have had enough sleep, and at home have a quiet place to themselves to work. If these conditions don't hold, then it is no wonder that the students don't thrive.

And running the classroom through a "hip hop cipher" isn't going to change that.
posted by deanc at 11:41 AM on March 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

"Ruthless Bunny, I seem to recall that the model of turning schools into a hub for services for all the neighborhood's residents of all ages, has been tried and shown to be fairly successful. However (as is probably obvious) it costs a BOATLOAD of money to do that."

It's called a "Community Schools" or "Birth through 8th" model, and my district has a few (and I helped setting some of them up), so I can speak to a lot of these! It IS expensive, but there are SOME longer-term grants that help sustain it (like, the health department always has money to fight syphilis and will give us some). One of my kids attends one.

"1. Have it be open all year round, dispensing breakfast, lunch and snacks to kids who experience food insecurity."

Yep, pretty common, even without the community schools model. Summer meals outside of summer school are delivered by a different USDA program (not federal free lunch) but it has pretty steady funding. This is why we are reluctant to close our schools for snow even when it's actively dangerous to be on the road -- kids don't eat if we close. Moreover, pretty common for schools to have partnerships with local churches that provide weekend "snack packs" for kids who are food insecure at home. They slip a bag of granola bars and other similar foods that don't require refrigeration or preparation into the kids' backpacks when the kids are out at recess (so nobody sees who's getting them).

Moreover with the new federal community option -- which my district helped pilot -- if your school is above a certain percent impoverished, they just give EVERY student free breakfast and lunch. No reduced-price, no faffing around with some kids paying and some kids not -- every kid gets lunch. It reduces stigma by eliminating differences in who gets a free lunch (everyone!); it cuts costs because the paperwork portion is incredibly expensive at a certain point; it improves outcomes because a lot of kids slip in and out of poverty and in and out of food security over the course of a year, so this ensures they keep getting food even if they weren't food-insecure at the start of the year; and, unheralded but very real benefit, it helps with mixed-class schools because it gives all the kids something in come and all the parents something to talk about.

"2. A. After school programs Homework help, cooking classes, life skills."

The feds actually pay for after-school tutoring in Title I schools.

"4. On site day care for the children of students."
We only offer this at two of our high schools (out of four), but we've had this for 20 years.

5. On site health care for students. Real healthcare, including and especially birth control.
Yep. My kid's school has a full-service in-school clinic run by a local hospital and staffed by a nurse practitioner. We have good health insurance and a pediatrician we love, but my kid came down with an ear infection one day at school, and pink eye another day, and I was basically able to come down to pick him up from the school clinic and the nurse-practitioner was able to examine him right then and give me an antibiotic script and send the records over to his pede, instead of me having to schlep across town to the pediatrician and hope I could get in that afternoon. (Because we have insurance it was just billed to my insurance like anything else, but they provide free care to kids who don't.) They also provide care to families -- I swear to God every time I'm in there they're all "are you up on your vaccinations? Had your flu shot? Had your well-baby visits for the little one?" -- and, yes, they do provide birth control. (I know from when I was on the school board that, because this is a K-8 school and there is a nearby free women's clinic it doesn't come up a WHOLE lot at that location; but our similar clinic in a nearby high school is like non-stop birth control and STD visits. It makes a difference. Pregnancy numbers are down and STD transmission numbers are down. I was on a committee about it! I learned a LOT about syphilis and gonorrhea.)

"6. On site social workers to help students and their families sort out bad social situations, homelessness, job loss, signing up for benefits, whatever gets the kid into a stabile home."
We have this, in English and Spanish, and started by prioritizing it over sports, then over academic extracurriculars, and now over some fairly necessary administrative roles (assistant principals etc.). It is a HUGE, HUGE impact but it is expensive and these roles have high burnout. Also there is only so much you can do -- some parents simply don't give a shit. We even have a team of four whose job is "community liaison" and they're all from those neighborhoods and basically the school says "Hey we don't have Johnny's vaccination records" and the community liaison will turn up in your dangerous neighborhood at all hours of the day and night to catch you coming or going to work and find out where those records are and walk you through how to get them if you don't know. (Again, English and Spanish.) They kind-of find out what's going on with families and what services they might need that the parents aren't asking for, and they can drive people to appointments and go with them to meetings and whatever it takes to navigate the bureaucracy for these parents, or to get the neglectful parents to sit the hell down and sign things so their kid can get services.

"7. Outreach for addiction, for kids and their parents."
Some of this. Unstable state funding means that the programs and even the labs we use periodically disappear. It's definitely an outsourcing-requiring program so it relies on those programs being around.

9. Schools should be easy walking distance from home. Having kids on the bus at the crack of dawn or for longer than 15 minutes is terrible.
This is a problem about which I have a great deal to say! (Because around here it is often code for "Stop busing minorities into my white school, I want 'neighborhood schools' back." The reality of the situation is that neighborhoods are a lot less dense than they used to be. I sat down with some density maps of a dense urban neighborhood that I'm studying and just because of the change in household size and number of children, in 1960 you only needed a 1-mile cachement area to get 500 elementary school students. Now, in the same neighborhood with the same housing density, you need 1.5 miles. In neighborhoods built after World War II, the cachement area around here (still urban) is over 2 miles, AND involves a lot of unsafe roads that children can't cross. (Many of which have no crossings anyway.) In 1960, 2/3 of American households had children in K-12 schools (public or private); today, around 1/3 do. (And of course housing is a LOT MORE SPREAD OUT in a lot of places.) There is no getting around the reality of a larger cachement area that will not be walkable for all students, unless we a) mandate densities that Americans are unlikely to accept for their housing, or b) mandate families with children live in certain housing or exclude families without children from that housing. You cannot return to universally-walkable schools without a massive investment in housing density ... and some kind of compensation for the fact that the Baby Boom is over and not every household has children.

This is not a problem schools can solve, nor should they be criticized for failing to solve it, especially when the housing preferences of the wealthy have created the problem.

"10. Schools need to shift schedules to accommodate learning. Teenagers should not be up at 5 AM to be in class at 7 AM. They don't work that way. Do elementary in the morning and high school in the evening. Same building, double duty."
The same building can't accommodate high schoolers and elementary students. Physically can't. Like, bathrooms are built to smaller scale for elementary students. (Which is why you can put a high school in an abandoned storefront but not an elementary school.) You'd have to swap out the desks twice a day every day so little kids could reach to write! You'd be removing toys and physical play areas from the classrooms so you'd have space for the teenagers! Elementary morning/HS evening would also put a LOT of families on the hook for childcare for those elementary students who had been watched by older siblings or cousins. It would mean families already struggling with shift work or multiple jobs had to accommodate yet ANOTHER schedule for their children. And it would leave you no place for those after-school programs you envision above. Splitting the day like this is a total non-starter and would add enormous stress to the families involved.

Flipping start times so elementary is earlier and high school is later is easier, but a hard sell because people don't like 6-year-olds waiting for their morning buses in the dark in the winter. They feel better about 14-year-olds doing that. (The other semi-related problem is that elementary school kids probably have too long a day as it is, and with work schedules for parents if elementary school kids go 8 to 2 instead of 9 to 3 (or whatever), they're still going to be sitting around in aftercare until 5.)

Like many districts we have an optional "twilight" school for junior high and high school students who cannot function on the traditional schedule, or who have to work during the day to support their families. Classes in the afternoon and evening, with some supports in place for those students unique challenges. It's not suuuuuuper popular because it wreaks havoc with family schedules, but for kids who need it, it's great.

"12. Updating school buildings for the modern world. More electrical outlets, no asbestos, good HVAC, no lead paint. You know, common sense stuff. "

School buildings go through 10-year inspections and are required by law to remediate the problems found by these independent inspections, via a mandatory tax levy that is one of the few not subject to voter approval or state laws limiting the percentage increase. The asbestos and lead paint is long gone and has been for decades. (Asbestos was remediated in the 90s and lead paint before that.) In my district, it will cost us $44 million to get HVAC just in all the elementary schools (where children are more often sent to the hospital after collapsing from heat stroke than at the high schools). Our total property tax base (combined value of all properties in the taxing district) is $1.2 billion and falling. The state (which has no budget right now anyway) is 17 years behind on providing capital funds to school districts for these sorts of improvements; a referendum that would have funded this via a half-penny sales tax was defeated because "these schools are awful, we're not giving them any more money." This is an obvious no brainer for districts, but there's no money for HVAC.

"13. Provide alternative programs for school breaks, special learning camps, skill concentration, adult supervision. Spring Break is a nightmare for a working parent with no access to child care. Also, kids miss the meals."

Commonplace, and we provide the meals through various other programs and grants. The YMCA does a lot of our Spring Break childcare programs (which are still in the physical school). The local teachers college does some of them, too, as part of their students' practical experience.

But yeah, a lot of this is asking schools to be comprehensive social service delivery locations because we can't be arsed as a society to deliver social services otherwise. Which I am WHOLLY IN FAVOR OF DOING for the children who need it and supported every step of the way in my time on the school board, but it's clearly a band-aid on a sucking chest wound, not the intensive care that's necessary. It doesn't solve the problems. It helps kids in shitty situations and that is very important. But it doesn't solve.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:11 PM on March 29, 2016 [69 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee, you are amazing and I learn so much from you on the reg.
posted by lauranesson at 1:29 PM on March 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Taught for 2 years in an inner-city school, if you could call it that. Basically, I spent more time being cop, psychologist, social worker, and angel investor (I spent a staggering percentage of my salary on supplies, photocopying, and basic necessities for learning). I wasn't there to "save" anyone. The neighborhood surrounding the school had the unholy trifecta of crime, drugs and poverty that I couldn't even begin to solve. All I wanted to do was impart some knowledge to children for the part of their day that they were in school. Unfortunately, the problems are brought with the children to school every day and become complete time-sucks to what you are trying to achieve.

I work in IT now. The only kids I am saving from that kind of life are my own. I went into teaching totally willing to put in the work. Everybody else (the kid's parents, the school district, the federal and state governments) were not. Unfortunately, it's the kids who suffer because of this.
posted by prepmonkey at 1:41 PM on March 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I did my student teaching at the toughest junior high school in Utah. I continued in inner county areas because I had great classroom management classes in my Masters program, and I feel I do more, working where students have difficulties. Not a hero teacher, but an island of fairness, reason and calm, to make my classroom a place where people are respected, and free to be, and considered, and facilitated. I sought out mentors. I taught at several types of schools, and subbed at many schools in every grade level, and every level of ability or disability.

My first full time assignment was on the Navajo Nation. What a great place, I hope to return there. I helped to build the Oljato Cemetery fence while there, and love the opportunity to serve the educational needs of what was said to be a school with a 50% homeless rate. Was great, will be great. I owe a great debt to my public school teachers, and I remember what it was they offered me, that was of use in my chaotic young life.

I know that teachers aside from delivering curriculum, are catalytic, offering gateways to interests, facilitators, helping students find entry to lifelong paths of self determination. I think if you go into teaching knowing you have something to offer and it is difficult, the difficulty of it, will make any heroic self congratulation, laughable.

You just have to be sure you have adequately communicated, the proof of that is certifiable understanding. We had to have classroom objectives up at the beginning of every class, and briefly discuss them, it is a good plan. After a couple of months, I asked my students if they understood what we were going to do that class period. Yes they did, then I asked if they knew what the word objective meant, and they didn't. So we discussed that a bit.

I met a woman who was the principal at the Owyhee School, in north central Nevada. She had been there for thirty years, on her small Shoshone-Piute Reservation, she had an 85% college graduation rate. Her k-12 students graduated from college at that rate. Anyway students, willingly or not, are in schools because our society needs educated members in order to survive. Schools are not there to give teachers validity as human beings, or to feed hero complexes, or the many other good and awful complexes that spring up. Teachers have to be inclined to teach, under whatever circumstances present daily. They have to have skills, and exceptional human skills. Fearful, angry students do not learn. Fearful, angry teachers do not teach. It should never be the task of students to bolster the fragile egos of would be heroes.
posted by Oyéah at 2:54 PM on March 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Teaching is so difficult because it's easy to allow your own authoritarian tendencies to influence your students in a way that only in retrospect do you notice was present. Emdin's "7 C's" is very much about finding an antidote to this dynamic, which is very much a deep, general case:

Emdin draws parallels between current urban educational models and Native American schools of the past that measured success by how well students adapted to forced assimilation.

It's still a sign of hope that PBS can openly publish this kind of language, knowing that some readers do get it.
posted by polymodus at 3:03 PM on March 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

A small P.S. about the Owyhee School. The principal was Shoshone-Piute and most of the students returned home to live their lives there, after college.
posted by Oyéah at 3:48 PM on March 29, 2016

As a rebuttal to the premise of "white saviors". My daughter is a first year teacher at a rural school that is 80% black, in her 4th grade class of 16 students, she has 2 white children. She didn't choose to work there for any "white knight" reason, she did her internship there and she developed a deep connection to the students and faculty. The county is far more racially balanced than what her school would indicate. She teaches at the "bad" school, they have an F rating and everyone is panicking because the state has taken over (which they're semi ok with), but in doing so has required that every single teacher reapply for their job and show proof that they have improved test scores.

Her school has very similar programs to the ones that Eyebrows McGee listed, my daughter tutors every day after school, she worked every day during spring break trying to help get kids to the point that they might not flatly fail the FSA coming up in 2 weeks. Every student is received free breakfast and lunch, as well as a "snack pack" that goes home over the weekend that contains bread, peanut butter, protein shakes and other things because so many of her kids are food insecure. Last week she had a student come school so dirty that she sent her kids to another classroom so she could give the girl a sponge bath in her classroom sink and new clothes.

Her kids LOVE her. One little girl sings "we are family, me and (my daughters name) and Harvey". Nearly half of them say "Miz B is my mama" and really work their asses off to succeed. They're motivated. And my daughter is not one bit concerned with FSA grades or her job or any politics. What my daughter feels is her job is (direct quote) "I want my kids to have someone to go for 6.5 hours a day where they know what to expect, that they are safe, that someone cares if they had breakfast, that lets them sleep in the corner because they told me that they didn't get to go to bed because they had to sit in the jail waiting for grandma to get daddy unarrested. If I can teach them some spelling or to read on grade level, that's a bonus". She has no grand illusions that she's saving anybody from anything, she just wants to do what she can to give them a sliver of a chance of a future.
posted by hollygoheavy at 4:57 PM on March 29, 2016 [9 favorites]

This is a great thread.
posted by zipadee at 5:20 PM on March 29, 2016

I was raised in an all-white environment, in a culture I now think of as "Sundown Town: Multi-generational Edition." Because after reading James Loewen's Sundown Towns many years later, I realized that my family had sought out—probably on purpose—all-white environments for at least three generations.

It stunted me. I knew it, starting when I got a job at an alternative school for kids with behavior problems and realized I didn't know SHIT about the lives of black kids. I was no white savior and this was no ghetto type school, but I was definitely an undereducated white lady teacher with a healthy load of black kids who needed me to be better than I arrived.

So I think the most important thing as a young dumb-ass white teacher with black students is to be honest about your educational deficits. And more importantly--re-educate yourself, in the absence of the OP's type of "multicultural education" classes.

What I did (and this was 1989):

1. Deliberately started reading all the African-American literature I'd never been assigned in my college English classes. Like I swear that's all I read the first year teaching.

2. Asking kids what they wanted to read about. Held out books and asked them, "What do you think of this?" And then when we read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and the part came up about the Black National Anthem, the kids were more than happy to sing it to me so I'd understand. I treated them like they had just as much to teach me as I had to teach them, and we got along. We learned together. They got my respect and as a result, I earned theirs. We talked. It was awesome, and I remember this time fondly.

3. I remember right after the riots in LA... I had a fourteen year old kid from Evanston who came in and wanted to read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I read it for the first time at the same time he did. He wanted to know more about black separatist culture. This was in Chicago, so I went down to the two Afro-centric bookstores I could find in the city, drove there on my own time, and picked up a bunch of educational coloring books about Africa, audio tapes of speeches by Malcolm X and... seriously, we discussed this stuff. (And believe me, walking into those stores was intimidating, because I felt like everyone was looking at me. It was like being a black dude walking into a redneck bar in a rural town. Everyone was Very Polite, but I was definitely On Display.) Later, this kid talked about going on his own to see Louis Farrakhan speak. By this time, he and I were able to discuss the difference between latter-day Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan and how things had changed in the Nation of Islam. Again, he respected the fact that I'd bothered to learn enough about it to be able to talk about it thoughtfully.

Seriously, it's not hard. Teaching a large class in an under-funded urban school is not really something I've done much of, but it seems like it's just as simple as making an effort to treat the culture of who you're teaching just as much as one would if one were moving to Japan to teach Japanese kids. Learn about the culture where you are, and never ever treat it as if it's somehow less than yours.

Yes, it is true that some schools are a shit-show for everyone that's being forced to go there. But a lot can be done by simply recognizing that you are not always a Cultural Gifter to the Woefully Underserved. You are actually there to learn too. Kids will see sincerity, even if you're naive. It goes a long way.

Too many young white teachers go in *thinking* they're operating from a position of privilege and humility, but immediately flake out emotionally and blame the culture the instant some kid gets angry at them for no reason or calls them a racist in a knee-jerk sort of fashion. Thicker skin is necessary, but so is a constant self-examination and a real sense of commitment. I hate teacher movies for their savior complexes--I find them unwatchable. But I also remember why they made me want to teach.

A real teacher gets over themselves right quick.
posted by RedEmma at 6:11 PM on March 29, 2016 [12 favorites]

I thought this was a really insightful article, thanks for posting it.
posted by threeants at 6:16 PM on March 29, 2016

Thanks to the few posters for keeping this from turning into another absurd "white people suck amirite?" thread. Ironically, I get the feeling a lot of responses are just another manifestation of savior complex.

Let them have bad grades and expend the energy pressuring people with a lot more capacity to carry the weight of these problems than small children who are being asked to carry the weight of adults careless apathy

I can understand where you're coming from. But, uh, I don't think this would work out the way you think it would. We already do this. Huge amounts of energy is spent "pressuring" people now, and it hardly solves a thing, let alone improve anything resembling the description of actual education.

Plenty of parents in failing schools do care greatly about the quality of their kids school. Letting kids have bad grades hurts these families most, demonstrating that even when you put effort in to do well and succeed, it will not be supported or encouraged.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:17 PM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

A brief word of caution about Boland, linked in the first comment - the opening prologue of his book starts with introducing a teenage female black student by the colour of her underwear and the first chapter doesn't improve from there.

I'm hoping there are better examples that the learned people in this thread might know of, particularly to give more background to the conflicting demands involved in teaching and admin? (Other than Eyebrows' amazing comment history, of course!) It seems like the intensity of competing demands has only worsened over time at all levels of administration.
posted by E. Whitehall at 11:52 PM on March 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Huge amounts of energy is spent "pressuring" people now, and it hardly solves a thing, let alone improve anything resembling the description of actual education."

And yet despite the lack of efficacy we seem no have to problem doing it to kids. What I mean is not, don't help kids learn more so they wind up doing better at tests, but focusing on the learning and meeting complex needs throughout the day other than just existing to generate academic success as the only metric of you are and what values you have as a person. Focusing on the grades and on pressuring kids about their grades not only hurts kids but it doesn't work! My message of "let them get bad grades" is specifically to the context of the teacher who thinks a kid needs to be told it's not ok to get bad grades and gives them this message (often because the school system is punishing the teacher for the kids grades so they are afraid of the kid getting a bad grade and increase shaming and pressure on the kids as a result).

All this focusing on test scores HASN"T WORKED, it hasn't even improved test scores.
posted by xarnop at 6:32 AM on March 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm a veteran teacher, having taught in Boston Public as well as rich suburban schools for years.

There’s a teacher right now in urban America who’s going to teach for exactly two years and he’s going to leave believing that these young people can’t be saved,” says Dr. Chris Emdin, associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

I call bullshit on the entire premise. In all of my years teaching, I have never once worked with a single teacher with a Savior Complex. Sure, there may be newbie teachers who come in and have no idea what to expect in a tough school and after a few years get out of the game. But I disagree that they leave thinking those kids can't be saved. They leave bemoaning the complexity of issues in tough schools. They leave wishing funding was better. They leave wishing schools had more all-encompassing care. They leave wishing schools had effective administration.

But they don't leave thinking the kids can't be saved. Teachers KNOW we can have a positive effect on kids but I have never once met a teacher who thought they could save a student.

At my daily morning team meetings we quickly go through our caseloads and who's on our radar, etc. and we end the meetings by saying, "Let's go mold some young minds today," which makes us laugh.

That "Freedom Writers" White-Teacher-As-Savior-Who-Gets-Kids-To-Love-Shakespeare-But-Also-Learns-A-Lot-FROM-Those-Kids trope is bullshit.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 8:05 AM on March 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

I like what you write yes I said yes I will Yes. It's a weird direction in which to cast blame.

Teaching in general now is *talked* about as a heroic field (probably to justify the amount of labor, emotional and otherwise, required in exchange for the wages). A teacher who isn't willing to be 'heroic' - to spend their own money, sweat, blood, etc, in service of a school whose administration may or may not be doing them any favors, is considered uncommitted and inadequate. But then people who go into the field and admit to wanting to do some good in the world (and who end up working at the schools where the jobs are, where they are literally being recruited to) get blamed for... the regrets of people who decided it wasn't for them? It's pretty easy to retroactively recast a desire to do meaningful work that has a positive impact on individual's lives (and how is that a bad way to look at teaching) as a savior complex - in retrospect.

Being a new teacher is grueling. I think that the enrichment ideas suggested are great, and that they would be most successful if they were supported by having a reduced workload with increased support and structured time for that kind of professional development (and having it be recognized by administrations as professional development). Otherwise, it's just another volley in the the unending round of trends that put personal (unpaid, outside of work time, unrecognized for rating/tenure purposes) responsibility for a systemic problems on the shoulders of the newest and most vulnerable teachers.

Not having a rich supply of teachers from diverse backgrounds is a systemic problem that needs to be addressed by every level of the educational/certification system. Title one schools full of non-white students with high needs and minimal funding and administration's hands tied by demands from beyond them is also a systemic problem that needs to be broadly addressed. New white teachers whose aspirations are a bit racist and a bit naive... are good fodder for books/articles (marketed mostly towards other white people), it seems, but are not the crux to solving educational inequality.
posted by Salamandrous at 1:59 PM on March 30, 2016 [2 favorites]