urban schooling

Yesterday I sat to reflect on what I really want to do about the way non-white children are educated. I thought of it because I was creating my syllabus for this class I'm going to teach about education policy and I had to skim through the readings I was assigning to figure out what order I wanted them to follow on my syllabus. That's when I started to realize that it matters not where Inequity and Overcrowding or Censorship and Overrepresentation of minorities in special ed. were placed, they are all equally horrendous and nobody is doing much to solve the problems. Instead, more problems are being created and more education leaders are turning a blind eye because their children's private school education is paid in full.

I'll tell you something sad. I taught public school but I am an advocate for independent schools. I have stories to back my belief and I promise to write about that another day. My colleagues always snubbed me when I said that I would never send my children to public school in New York City but I guess they just never understood where I was coming from. I am a product of public schooling and what I now know about my history wasn't taught in my textbooks. NYC public schooling, for Black children, is just another medium of teaching survival and subordinance. "Here's your schedule," "No, you can't graduate early," "Take this class, it's good for you," "Apply to this school, your average isn't high enough," "Here's a scholarship application, don't tell anybody I gave this to you," "Take off your coat and put your bag through the scanner," "Walk slowly through the metal detector." I don't think that was preparation to be a leader or a corporate executive or a professor, do you?

None of my high school teachers ever told me that they expected me to be better than them. And that's a crucial lesson that I taught to my own students. Having taught at my alma mater, I told my students that I deemed myself successful and I expected that since I have taught them my secrets to success, I expect them to be greater than I ever was or could be. Teaching was not my way to keep them below me; it was my way of giving them the little I had and showing them ways by which they could get more. I remember one class that I taught. They thought I was a total bitch (another term reserved for Black female teachers who push students harder than their white counterparts and who tell students the truth) and that I was grading them unfairly. I gave them the grades they deserved. How could you write one-page summaries in AP English and get a 95? But that's the mediocrity that was expected of me and was now expected of them. I sat in a former teacher's classroom with them once and I was able to recite her entire lesson; she had taught it to me 6 years prior, in another century...and in the 21st century, she was teaching the same lesson. It was appalling. I can't recall a lesson in my years of high school that actually highlighted my experiences. Why? Because none of my teachers had actually lived my experience. Those who didn't live off in the suburbs of Long Island, lived in brownstones in fancy neighborhoods where many of us had never visited except to collect something from our West Indian mothers who sat in their homes babysitting their white children for a small, tax-free fee and second hand clothes--a far cry from stuffy apartment buildings. Maybe their children attended public schools but none of their children attended my school--they went to their neighborhood schools where most of the other students looked like them.

So when I started teaching, I went with one goal: To make my students better than I was. I wanted share with my students my own experiences and give them possibilities. No, you don't have to apply to state and city colleges; there are other great institutions out there! Nobody ever assured me of this--they just mentioned it in passing. So you don't have money for college, ever heard of a student loan? Nobody told me that loans were ok, nor did they tell me that there were programs that would forgive my loans. I had to go back and tell somebody! After all, I am African and that is how we learned to uphold traditions (and community stories): By word of mouth. I had to tell my students that it was not okay to keep scholarship information to themselves, even when they had no intention to apply. I had to tell my students that it is ok to travel abroad and see new places. I had to tell my students that applying to Harvard isn't such a bad idea even if you're a student in an inner-city school who has been told that he/she isn't good enough. I had to tell my male students there just aren't enough basketball scholarships for everybody and even NBA players needed a brain, that they weren't work horses responsible for dragging the load of keeping American sports competitive, that there was more to life than just sex and money and jewelry, that they were important and what they had to say was valid and that somebody was listening and observing their talents.

If I were to ask my students to tell you the things they have been told in schools, they would probably shock you. The sad reality is that oftentimes, children are hurt but they absorb what they are told because they think these things are normal. It is not normal to tell a child to apply only to city colleges. It is not normal to call a child an animal for break dancing in the hallway. It is not normal to tell a child to be quiet or else you will take off point from his/her grade. It is not normal to make a child feel inferior and second-guess him/herself. It is not normal because they don't do it to their own children. This is not to say I am not guilty of hurting students or that I have never offended them. I have. I have also loved them, each one differently for the difference they brought to the classroom. One poster I had in my classroom says, "an original is always better than a copy." I love that quotation.

A professor of mine once asked us "why would the colonizer teach the children of the colonized the way he does his own children?" And I pass that statement on to every Black parent today. And don't be mistaken, the colonizer is not always of a different race. I wish that every Black parent would follow the news and learn about the things that are going on in inner-city schools. I wish that every Black parent could be a fly on the wall in his/her child's classroom to see the atrocities that occur when unlicensed, untrained teachers become babysitters and no more than just that because they feel that their daily plight is to sedate rather than educate our children. They used to ask me how it is that I had no referrals from my class or how it is that I never talked about discipline problems and I used to simply say "because I'm too busy teaching." My students were too busy learning to find time to create problems with each other. I knew and understood that my students were civilized human beings with feelings and thoughts and ideas that were sometimes far better than my own and that the classroom was a place for sharing ideas, not for pushing my own agenda and I didn't need John Dewey to tell me that. Some white teachers take things too personally. They want to respond to every comment a child makes and to correct every "deviant" behavior through punishment. Never through love. When I interviewed for my teaching position, the interviewer said "you have the heart of a teacher." I wasn't sure of what she meant but I am hoping she didn't mean the heart of those babysitters.

Teaching is one of the most inspiring jobs one can have. When I woke up each morning, I wasn't fearing going to work. My greatest fear was failing to teach my students what they needed to know. I wanted to teach subject matter but I also wanted them to understand life and to feel that they had an advocate. Many of them had brothers and sisters and parents who had been successful college grads but some of them had no examples of success to follow. Most of them wanted be doctors but nobody had ever taken the time to explain to them the process of becoming an Oncologist or a Cardiologist. All they knew is that they were going to college. They didn't know how long it would take for them to achieve such goals, they just knew they had to do something "big". Now tell me, how can one do something big if he/she has no idea of the steps to take? Walking blindly into traffic, is what I call it. I shared every happy moment with my students and told them that failing was not an option. They had to learn to code switch, they had to learn to smile with a fork in their side, they had to learn to take responsibility for their work, they had to learn to present themselves with pride. The kids you see on the subway and on the bus and on the street aren't superficial: They have stories that they can tell if only someone is there to listen. They have real-life characters and plots, settings, climax, denouement. They have their own rhythms and their own rhymes. They have their own theatrical productions to write. They have their own ideas of what reality looks like and it does not always resemble Jay Gatsby's.

When it comes to teaching children of non-white parentage, it is imperative that people understand that their stories, like mine, aren't going to be read in textbooks, they will only be heard but only if we listen keenly.