One hell of a read. —Frank Roman, EAU
Despite almost 50 years of large and accelerating efforts to improvethe school achievement of African-American students, the gap betweentheir achievement and that of whites and Asians remains about as largeas ever.
Yet proposals for what to do about it seem basicallyunchanged: Spend more money and divert existing money to reduce classsize and train teachers better, have more students take a rigorouscollege prep curriculum, work on improving self-esteem, eliminateability-grouped classes, use cooperative-learning techniques, andreassign top teachers to schools with a high percentage ofAfrican-American students.
I have become especially doubtful about whether those approaches willwork better in the future than they have in the past when I read thisreport from the trenches.
Usually, we hear only from politicians and education leaders (who alsoare politicians) spouting lofty rhetoric. Occasionally, we hear of apromising program, but which never turns out to be scalable. Or we seea Hollywood movie about some amazing teacher.
We rarely,however, hear from a more typical teacher who, day to day, teacheslow-achieving African-American kids. So it was with interest that Iread this truly depressing account from a teacher. I’ve edited out acouple of unnecessarily snarky sentences, which are irrelevant to theissue. Nonetheless the essay is long yet, I believe, worth your time.)
Theessay does make me feel uncomfortable because while it presents aneye-opening report from the trenches, it is just one person’s reportand one that feels more extreme than what I experienced when I taughtin a heavily African-American school. Also, while the author madepassing mention that not all Blacks behaved as he described, thosecomments felt, to me, too parenthetical.. Of course, many blackstudents are high-achieving and motivated.