Tuesday, September 28, 2021



The difficulty of balance in discussing America's racist past

History teacher Valanna White filed into the auditorium the first week of August for the customary back-to-school all-staff meeting at Walker Valley high school in Cleveland, Tennessee. What she heard shifted her outlook for the coming school year. On 1 July, a new law took effect banning the teaching of critical race theory in Tennessee public schools. White listened intently as a school district official gave a vague overview informing the group that critical race theory was prohibited, though without fully explaining what critical race theory entails. Instead, teachers were told a list of actions – such as discussing racial discrimination – that were forbidden.

White left the meeting confused and frustrated. Tennessee’s academic standards for US history require high school teachers to cover topics including Jim Crow laws, Plessy v Ferguson – the 1896 supreme court case upholding the separate-but-equal doctrine – and the civil rights movement. “I can’t talk about the civil rights movement without talking about Bloody Sunday and the premise behind Bloody Sunday, the premise behind voter suppression,” she said, dreading the repercussions “for just teaching my standards”.

As the one Black teacher in a high school of 1,400 students, White felt alienated. Racial discrimination is not an abstract concept to her. Classroom conversations about race and institutional racism were already a delicate dance of carefully chosen words delivered by White to her school’s majority white student body. “No matter what I say, it’s constantly scrutinized or even misconstrued,” she said, adding that students often equate material on race as her opinion, as opposed to factual information. Now teaching a precise accounting of history was going to be not just tricky but professionally risky. “It’s all about interpretation, regardless if I’m presenting facts or not … if they perceive it wrong, I could get in trouble.”

In Tennessee, teachers are now required to avoid materials that state “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously”. Among the repercussions for violating the new measure are Tennessee districts losing state funding and individual teachers having their licenses revoked or suspended.

Teaching America’s complex racial past has become infinitely more difficult with a spate of new laws passed in some states in recent months. As racial justice protests and a so-called national reckoning on race have prompted a closer examination of whose history is excluded in schools and why, outlawing critical race theory (CRT) became the rallying cry of conservative lawmakers in state houses, by state boards of education, and at raucous school board meetings. CRT emerged in the 1980s as an academic discipline commonly taught in colleges and law schools. The concept interrogates the ways that institutional and structural racism have fundamentally shaped the country’s policies and laws. Experts view it as a way of explaining deep racial disparities in the US and grappling with America’s history of white supremacy. Others argue that CRT amounts to racially divisive indoctrination of students.

Twenty-two states have passed or are considering legislation to ban or restrict discourse on race and racism in the country’s public K-12 classrooms, according to a Brookings Institution analysis completed in August. Starting this month, teachers in Texas are barred from telling students that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality”. And in July in Iowa, teaching concepts that could lead to “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex” were prohibited.

Heading into a new school year, many teachers are broadly feeling the backlash from scaremongering headlines and condemnations of CRT by lawmakers. But the overheated rhetoric has put Black teachers – already a meager share of the workforce – in a uniquely vulnerable position. Amid a renewed urgency to teach about race, some Black teachers are reminded daily that their racial identity is a liability rather than an asset – a consequence with historical significance and potentially long-lasting effects, including a shrinking pool of Black teachers in public schools.

Thomas M Philip is a professor at Berkeley’s graduate school of education whose research examines how teachers act based on their sense of agency in classrooms. He says anti-history laws that support a narrowly skewed, one-dimensional version of history undermine the purpose of teaching for many Black teachers. Studies show that Black teachers, in particular, come to teaching with strong commitments to providing a more nuanced portrayal of history and society. So as public schools move toward “teaching as conveying a narrow set of skills and discourse as patriotism”, teachers who are willing to have “complex dialogues in a classroom around issues of race, racism, and racial justice will find it harder to remain in the profession”, Philip said.

Monique Cottman, a Black teacher leader who trains and supports teachers in a large school district in Iowa, said her state’s law had a “chilling effect” on Black teachers, affecting their ability to be their authentic selves at their schools. Some are now questioning whether to stay in the classroom, said Cottman, who requested not to name her district. The dichotomy, she said, is answering their calling to teach or following a law that treats them “like a second-class citizen. Black teachers today are thinking about what it means for school districts to deny us our human rights in the name of legality.”

She noted the double bind the laws have created in schools, where school diversity is openly praised, but Black teachers are expected to closet a part of their identity at work. Cottman, a 15-year teaching veteran, recalled one example of a school’s administrators celebrating the presence of Black Lives Matter flags, but answering a Black teacher with silence when she asked what her value was at the school.

“That, I think, is indicative of the internal conflict,” Cottman said, “that a Black teacher knows I am going into a school that will wave a Black Lives Matter flag, but also lets me know in other ways that my Black life does not matter here, that I don’t have a voice in decisions that will make this a less hostile environment for me, that I can’t teach the truth now under this current legislation.”

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‘My body is not a distraction’: Thirty pupils suspended for protesting school rules forcing girls to cover up

Thirty high school pupils in Oklahoma have been suspended after protesting against “sexist” dress codes that forced them to cover their midriffs and shoulders.

The protest saw students at Mustang High School carrying signs with messages including “Dress codes are sexist”, “My body is not a distraction”, “Stop sexualising our bodies” and “I go to a school where the length of my shirt and shorts is more important than my education”.

Though the school district’s dress code does not specifically mention gender, many of its provisions focus specifically on clothes more often worn by girls.

As well as banning spiked jewellery, “gang dress” or visible underwear, the code forbids “cleavage”, bare midriffs, tube tops, spaghetti straps, “biker or spandex shorts”, leggings that are not covered by another garment, and makeup that “disrupts the learning environment”.

It adds: “Interpretation of questionable attire will be at the principal’s discretion. Violations may result in disciplinary action.”

Kirk Wilson, director of communications for Mustang Public Schools, said: “There was a small protest before school at Mustang High School on Friday, September 10, 2021. When class began, the protest ended and most of the students attended class as normal.

“There were a handful of students who violated the student code of conduct after class began and those situations were addressed ... we remain committed to supporting our students and providing a safe and nurturing learning environment.”

He declined to discuss their specific punishments, citing federal school privacy law.

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The Pandemic Broke a Fundamental Principle of Teaching

We’ve all been focusing on getting kids back into the classroom, but what happens once they get there? As the Delta variant threatens to wreak more havoc, kids are returning to school, at least for now—and teachers are finding themselves in a race to undo the damage of the past 18 months. Many of us, for the first time in our careers, will have no idea what our students know on the opening day of school.

More than 340,000 American children who should have been in public kindergartens last year didn’t show up to a single day of virtual or in-person school. Absentee rates were higher in kindergarten than in other grades, and in lower-income families than in higher-income ones, but in many cities and states, an alarming number of students across ages and income brackets never enrolled in the schools that were expecting them. And that’s just the students who missed the entire year. Millions more lost days, weeks, or months because of the pandemic; many who did attend didn’t learn very much.

Although the pandemic has exacerbated already stark inequities in the achievement gap, it’s impossible to know what the ripple effects of falling behind pre-pandemic standards will be when it comes to long-term success for students, financially or otherwise. According to a McKinsey report, “unless steps are taken to address unfinished learning, today’s students may earn $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetime owing to the impact of the pandemic on their schooling.”

We teachers typically enter a school year ready to teach a set curriculum that fits between what was taught the previous year and what will be taught the next. The expression we use for this is “scope and sequence.” Scope refers to what material is covered, and in what breadth and depth. Sequence is the order in which the material is taught. Third grade follows second and precedes fourth, and teachers all have a basic sense of where kids are when they begin the year and where they need to be when they end it.

But the pandemic has scrambled this system in unpredictable and irregular ways. Margaret Meyer, a longtime fifth-grade-English teacher at Grace Church School in New York City, always starts the semester with an abridged version of Beowulf— but now, she said, “I’m trying to prepare a million different options for whatever greets me on day one.” At schools around the country, we teachers will start planning to teach algebra II, only to find that some of our students don’t yet know the basics of pre-algebra. Lesson plans we’ve relied on for years or decades will no longer work for our students.

“It’s terrifying. On top of having to teach students who haven’t been in a classroom in almost 18 months, some of our teachers haven’t been in a classroom to teach in person in that long,” a New Rochelle public-school principal, who asked to speak anonymously because he didn’t have authorization from his district to talk with the press, told us. “Nobody really knows what to expect. It’s impossible to plan.”

Read: This school year is going to be a mess—again

The solution is complex. For starters, educators must assess—far more comprehensively than we have before—which skills our students have retained. We’ll need to believe assessments that show that some students are not yet ready to tackle the material that their age or grade level suggests they should. Then we’ll most likely be faced with a stark choice: to try to get through the material we’ve taught in the past or to focus instead on the underlying basics. We will want to achieve the impossible: catching up students who may be two years behind grade-level standards while simultaneously teaching and motivating those who are where they should be.

But we can’t “catch up,” and trying is counterproductive. We don’t have a playbook for this, and we don’t have enough time in the 185-day school year to cram in all of the material that was taught pre-pandemic. This moment calls for a sort of radical flexibility in reevaluating what needs to be taught and how best to teach it.

Because the sequence has been disrupted, teachers must both shift back in time to ensure that kids haven’t missed out on important material and cut back on scope. Much of what we teach kids is arbitrary, so we need to be more discerning about what we’re teaching. For example, a student might benefit from understanding animal physiology by the end of a high-school biology unit—but not at the expense of core topics like evolution or genetics.

These choices are more complicated in some subjects than in others: Third-grade teachers can’t introduce multiplication to kids who don’t yet understand addition. But in general, we’ve found that students benefit more from learning and practicing processes, models, approaches, and skills than from spending time on specific facts and details that they are likely to forget.

And no matter the subject we teach, teachers must collaborate as never before. Teachers rely on fundamentals taught by educators of lower grades—think of a seventh-grade-English teacher accustomed to focusing on literary analysis, who might not be equipped with the skills of his fourth-grade-teacher colleagues to provide instruction in comprehension and inference skills. Administrators should provide time for teachers to offer mini professional-development lessons for their peers.

Andy Hagon, the head of junior school at St. Bernard’s in Manhattan, emphasizes this need for all parties to work together. “Teachers will have to adapt again to the unique needs of kids who may have fallen behind,” he told us. “I hope that the adults involved can dig deep and find even more patience and collaborate on possible curriculum changes; the kids deserve nothing but our best efforts.”

Hagon stressed that parents would be a crucial part of this readjustment process. Sometimes it can be difficult for teachers to know whether students are struggling with course material, study skills, or social problems, so a quick note from a parent—or better yet, parental encouragement for kids to self-advocate and approach teachers on their own—can be invaluable.

At any given point, some students in class are confused while others are bored. But out of this crisis might come an opportunity to pay more attention to the wide range of starting points that have always been present in our classrooms. Schools can now assess and recalibrate which skills are taught at what grade levels, expanding differentiation and collaboration wherever possible. Administrators can provide opportunities for teachers of younger grades to help teachers of older grades instill or reinforce the basics. We cannot make up for lost time, but educators’ commitment to each student demands that we be deliberate in making the best possible use of the time we have now.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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