Category: education

Leave Him Alone: Microaggressions in Pre-K and Elementary School

Dr. Mama Esq.7 Comments

Photo: Me! All rights reserved.

Our school district has recently started a new task force looking at minority achievement. In such a resource rich district, but also with many social inequalities, its unsurprising but still really angering that we have disparities in the rate of college readiness, standardized test scores, and simply personal experiences. The number of times I’ve heard truly devastating stories of how kids are treated based on their racial, ethnic, or linguistic background is simply appalling in a school district that touts how progressive it is.

The creation of the task force got me thinking (as always) about my family’s experiences here. My children are in the second and third grades (and another a few years behind them), and we’ve been dealing with little things — microaggressions — since we started here four years ago. Microaggressions, a term coined by Dr. Chester M. Pierce, a professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard University, in the 1970s, refers to  “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.” I believe that my children’s teachers believed they were helping my kids — and my husband and I as parents. But their words and actions did a lot more harm than they realized.

Here’s a sampling of our experiences, from my point of view when they occurred:

Continue reading “Leave Him Alone: Microaggressions in Pre-K and Elementary School” →

New Blog: Dr. Mama Esq.

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New Blog: Dr. Mama Esq.

10392312_10204426183079730_1887093800961163343_nI have a new blog: Dr. Mama Esq.!

I recently graduated from Stanford with a JD/PhD, and I know that my journey as a black mother and professional may be inspiring to others. Over there, I am sharing my experiences as a young black mother and wife with mental health issues and three kids in a top graduate program. If you love CocoaMamas, please subscribe to Dr. Mama Esq. This site will stay open, but posting will likely be quite light here while I focus on this new endeavor. But I will continue to share my thoughts on raising black children in a world that is often hostile to their very existence. It will just be on the other site 🙂

I hope to see many of you there.

 

All Black Everything

Dr. Mama Esq.13 Comments

Uh, and I know it’s just a fantasy
I cordially invite you to ask why can’t it be
Now we can do nothing bout the past
But we can do something about the future that we have
We can make it fast or we can make it last
Every woman queen and every man a king and
When those color lines come we can’t see between
We just close our eyes till its all black everything

Last weekend, I found out that I can’t move to Oakland when I finish my degrees. This was huge news for me; I’ve been at Stanford, in Palo Alto, for the last seven years. I’ve brought two children into the world here, and placed my firstborn in schools here. I have a love-hate relationship with Palo Alto. For for all its suburban beauty and safety, I feel like I am missing something. A piece of who I am. I hate the looks I get. I feel like an alien in this community. The peninsula doesn’t have a lot of us. 

See, I grew up in Philly. I lived around all black folks. I went to school with all black folks in elementary and went to an integrated high school where everyone was “gifted.” I have always knew I was black without anyone having to tell me. I’ve never felt any shame about being black. LaToya was smart, and funny, and cute, and black. None of those things felt like a contradiction in terms.

My kids don’t have that. “Mommy, why am I the only black boy in my class?” I hate to tell him he’s the only black boy in his GRADE. “Mommy, I think my white dolls are cuter than my black dolls.” “But you’re beautiful. You look like me!”

So, for them, I desperately wanted to get out. But, I soon found out, race is not the only thing that matters. So does money.

Continue reading “All Black Everything” →

they learned it from watching you

Dr. Mama Esq.10 Comments

My four year old is the only black girl – hell, person – in her preschool. Last year this wasn’t the case, as her brother was there with her. But this year she is all alone.

Last year, there were some problems with “mean girls” – yes, in preschool. They would exclude Little A, and if there is one thing Little A cannot stand is being excluded. Even when children tell her they won’t be her friend, she replies, “Well, we don’t have to be friends to play together.” Yeah.

So imagine how pissed I am that now children in the preschool are still excluding – but making it explicitly about skin color, eye shape, and hair texture.

What is the school doing about it? Well, first they discussed it with the kids, pointing out how the teachers (none of them black, but two white, one southeast Asian and another east Asian) are all different but they all like and love one another. Next they plan to consult with folks who have experience handling this in early education. They also talked to a few parents, three of whom have a child of color and the other a parent of a white child, because “those were the names that came up.”

Will there be a parent meeting about this? Well, yes, but no date has been set. And their next step today in this conversation? Talking about animals.

Animals.

This whole situation pisses. me. off.

One, this is not a new issue, so I’m quite annoyed at the school’s reactive posture. This should have been seen as a possible problem from what happened last year with exclusion, and me specifically bringing up the problem of race and racial differences. Why they are unprepared for this blows my mind.

Two, why only have conversations with the children most negatively affected – the conversations should really be with the parents of white children. They are the ones doing the excluding. They are the ones acting out racial prejudice.

Which leads me to my last issue – having the teachers address it in school is fine with me, but let’s please recognize that these children learned this behavior at home.

They learned racial prejudice and exclusion from watching their parents.

Young children emulate their parents. They think their parents are the best thing in the world. And in thinking so, they copy what they see their parents doing. I know, because my kids, at 5 and 4, are copying me all the time. My son wants to “wear pajamas like Mommy.” My daughter tries to match my clothes each day. They talk like me, use the same idioms as me.

And while being an overt racist will probably lead to racist kids, you don’t need to be a verbal racist to show racism in your life. You don’t need to say that black people are bad or Asian people are weird for your kids to learn racism. They learn it through the daily experiences of our lives, from what we watch on TV to the people they see on the street everyday. And most importantly – who you hang out with, who you invite over, who are obviously your friends send messages to kids about what you value as a family. For my kids, living in an area that is 2% black, we practically have no choice but to live truly multi-racial and multi-cultural lives. We have white friends who come over, who are obviously mommy and daddy’s friends. We have babysitters that are white. We have good friends of practically every race. And our kids know they are our friends because we talk about them, we hang out with them, they have a constant pressence in our lives. So our kids don’t get any idea about excluding children based on race or appearance.

For (some of) these white kids though, their lives are white. Their parents don’t have friends of other races – they don’t have to. Their kids witness their parents having mono-racial ideas of who is worth hanging out with and who is not. And while kids may not, at this age, put an inherent value on thing like skin color, hair type, and eye shape, they do recognize difference easily enough to see that the only place they interact with people not like them is in school. And they make an inference that if Mom and Dad don’t hang out with these people, then I shouldn’t either – for whatever reason.

This is a nasty lesson to start learning at 4 and 5. I’m determined, however, to make this a teaching moment for all involved, especially the white parents.

Why I’m In Education Reform

Dr. Mama Esq.1 Comment

Below is the text of a speech I gave last week to celebrate the 2011 Bay Area Graduate Fellowship cohort Education Pioneers. I was a keynote, representing my cohort, along with Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento (who is engaged to Michelle Rhee – who knew??).

I never thought be working in educational reform, even though come from long line of teachers.

My mother always said: “LaToya, you don’t really like kids.” And that was true. My mom had a family day care – a day care in our house – for most of my life, and I came to resent those kids and their invasion of our space, their monopoly on my mother’s time, and the fact that I was forced to take care of them. I always knew I wanted my own children, but other people’s kids? Naw, son. That wasn’t me.

But this changed when I became a mother 5 years ago to my son, Big A, and again 4 years ago to my daughter Little A. Suddenly I saw my kids in every kid. I felt the same love toward each kid that I felt toward my own kids. I couldn’t explain it, but somehow I understood their vulnerability. I understood why they needed someone to take care of them. I understood why my mother had dedicated her life to other people’s children.

Early on in motherhood, I recognized the differences between my childhood and my children’s childhood:

  • My public elementary school was 99% black vs. my children attend a (very expensive) private preschool where they are the only black kids
  • We didn’t have a car when I was a young kid, so we walked everywhere vs. my kids complaining about walking a few blocks
  • We ate a lot of frozen foods, French fries, and fish sticks vs. my kids eat 75% organic from WholeFoods
  • I’d never been on an airplane until I was 17, and that was to Florida vs. I can’t keep track of the number of times my kids have taken cross country airplane trips

As a parent, I realized early on that my children have advantages solely due to luck of being born in the position of having two college-educated parents, living on a university campus. Unearned advantages. Advantages that have nothing to do with anything they did. Advantages that look like “merit” but actually make false the dominant ideology of the America that anyone can be anything because kids come to school with vastly different backgrounds and experiences, some of whom are much better prepared to fit into the culture of schools.

Yet my children still face challenges. Their black skin means that upon walking into the school’s doors stereotypes are attached to their little bodies. They are unlikely to see teachers or principals or superintendents or governmental officials that look like them, unlikely to see educational reformers with black and brown skins like theirs. They are more likely to end up in special education, despite my PhD education or almost-lawyer status. My son is more likely to end up in prison than in college.

So I work in education reform for them, and for all children who look like them. Despite the general lack of racial diversity that I’ve seen this past summer from the Bay Area’s educational reform leadership, I’m hopeful that educational reformers will begin to address the same issues that we know exists in schools within the very organizations that purport to be harbingers of change.

One thing I am sure of is that my cohort is ahead of the ball. From the midst of these 40 some odd people I’ve met teachers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and policy makers who are also working for my children and children who look like them, and I’m energized and full of hope due to their very presence. I’ve been impressed by their willingness to tackle difficult questions, like the lack of proportionate racial representation in educational leadership, even when it comes from someone as assertive as myself. So while I was honored that they asked me to represent them this evening, I’d really like to ask them to now join me up here.

I encourage everyone in the audience to take a look at these faces. The network created by Ed Pioneers is awash with people like this, people who are eager to work to erase the system of racism and oppression that exist in schools, people who are eager to erase the opportunity gaps, people who are eager to talk about race, class, racism, white privilege, and power, no matter how hard those conversations may be. It’s up to all of us now to make our organizations, our workplaces, and our schools safe places for those conversations to happen.

I’ll be continuing to fight the good fight here in the Bay Area as I finish my degrees and raise my children, hopefully continuing to work with the special education department in SFUSD and support the work that Education Pioneers is doing. I’m truly inspired by my cohort and the Ed Pioneers network that one day equality in education will be a reality for all children.

Why We All Can’t Just Get Along

Dr. Mama Esq.8 Comments

I’m comfortable with who I am and what I believe in. I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer for the same naive reasons I guess a lot of kids say they want to be lawyers: I truly believe in justice and fairness. As someone yesterday said to me, “Right is right.” I’ve never heard more true words.

I used to wonder why justice was so important to me. Why the littlest amount of unfairness touched me in a place so deep. So there was a time in my life where I routinely took personality tests.  I was obsessed with knowing about myself, trying to understand what made me tick. My favorite test is the MBTI, which splits people into 16 personality types based on combinations of pairs of four dyads: Introverted or Extroverted; Sensing or iNtuitive; Thinking or Feeling; and Judging or Perceiving. My type has changed slightly over the years, and I’m an almost even split between both Introverted/Extroverted and Perceiving/Judging. But as I’ve gotten older, I think I gravate more toward a particular “type.”

I am an ENFP: The Champion.

As a Champion, I’m an easy person to get along with. I smile, I laugh, I joke. I’m charming, in my most humble opinion. I make friends easily too, everywhere I go. But there are some things that I believe in, and when you mess with me and those things, when you mess with one of my values, then…well, all bets are off.

And so my life is one of a strong dichotomy. I’ve been accused of being too serious. I’ve been told to lighten up, take a chill pill, relax, calm down, and breathe. I’ve been told to choose my battles, that nothing in life is that serious, and that I just get too worked up. I’ve been told that I am intimidating, aggressive, overbearing, argumentative, contrary and loud-mouthed.

For telling my truth. For saying what I believe to be right.

I’m working this summer for a large urban school district that ranks at the almost bottom for educational equity. The opportunity and achievement gaps in this district are shameful. So when I go to work every day, and when I interact with my fellow interns who are working at other educational institutions this summer, I’m not always smiling. I’m not agreeing to so-called “community agreements” on how I’m supposed to talk about race, class, and power. I’m not giving everyone the benefit of the doubt that folks have good intentions. I’m not assuming that no one in the room is a racist.

I’m thinking about what needs to be said and done right here, right now, to get it across to these people that a crime is being committed again children – who look like my kids – every single day in the school that’s right down the block.

I’m thinking about what needs to be said right here, right now, to get these folks to stop experimenting on our kids and just teach them to read, write, and count. I’m thinking about wanting them to stop hiding the real issues of racism and classism and white privilege behind hollow conversations of “results-based-budgeting” that have no student results actually driving it.

That’s what I’m doing.

We can’t all just get along because getting along often means being silent. Getting along means being a bystander. Getting along means, if you want to keep it real, making white folks feel comfortable. Well, I’m not here to make you comfortable. I’m not here to make you feel good that you’ve chosen to work in education. I’m not here to sing fucking kumbaya. For me, while I’ve always had a passion for justice, now it’s personal.

See, my baby …

 

… my beautiful black boy. . .

is starting kindergarten in the fall. And I’m scared as hell.

Look, I don’t need friends, I need foot soldiers. I don’t care if you like me or not. I just want you to be as mad as I am that children like him are undervalued because of the color of their skin.

So I need you to be ready to  work for change. I’ll be right there with you. If I have to piss you off to move you toward action, then so be it.

Let’s get it started.

 

 

Yeah, I’m Young. So What?

Dr. Mama Esq.3 Comments

Something that’s really been bothering me lately is all the youth-bashing that has been going on around me lately. Not the typical “teenagers are young and dumb” type of thing, but the subtle dismissal of the around-30 crowd from the above-40 crowd. I suppose every generation feels this way about the generation above them. But when these people are actually your peers, when they are the people you work with, or the other parents you socialize with, it’s actually hurtful and really counterproductive.

Where I live and work, the trend is for parents to be relatively older. Women have generally established their careers in their 20s and early 30s, and had children in their mid-30s. They are now in their 40s, raising their kids. Cool.

In public education, administrators also tend to be older. I suppose working up the bureaucratic ladder takes time.  That’s cool too.

I’m different, which is okay, at least it is with me and my close friends, regardless of age. I had Big A when I was 24, before I had really decided what I wanted to do as a career. I had Little A at 26, right when I was starting my grad school career. I’m 30 now, still working toward my degrees. I have a baby face and am often mistaken for a high schooler. Everyone says I’ll love it in 10 years 🙂

But in any case, no matter what I look like, the truth is – when I start talking about my stuff, my research, my experiences – one QUICKLY understands that I know. my. Ish. I’m not at one of the top graduate schools getting a dual PhD and JD off of my looks (although I’m pretty cute if I say so myself. Just kidding.) I’ve been in graduate school for the past five years doing nothing but studying and perfecting and becoming an expert at what I do. THAT has been my career, my full-time job.

So it truly pisses me off when I’m at a meeting and the over 40 crowd starts talking about how young everyone is and starts pretty much dismissing the 30-something crowd based solely on age, even when the 30-somethings have positions and titles that deserve respect because they worked to get there and have demonstrated superior skills and performance. In education, this is particularly irritating because it is the younger people that are bringing the innovation, that are bringing the fresh perspectives, that are trying to work with folks for the betterment of educating children.

In advocacy groups, especially those wanting to advocate for black and brown children, I think one of the reasons it hard to mobilize parents is that younger parents don’t want to be treated like second-class citizens. If I go to one more meeting where 30-somethings or younger are talked about like they couldn’t possibly know how to do their jobs, or have cogent opinions, or just have anything of value to add, I really might blow.

And when it comes to parenting – UGH. That REALLY gets my goat. I’m young, yes. But PLEASE don’t make the mistake of thinking that I’m a lesser-than parent because of it. My mother was 19 and my dad 20 when they had me, and then had my brother 11 months later. Fast forward 17 years and I had a full scholarship to an Ivy-League university and my brother behind me went to college too. I learned everything about being a great mother from a teenage mother, so at 24 I felt OLD. I’m not perfect, but neither are the 40-something parents I know. We all have the same struggles, and go through the same issues.

I don’t know what this is all about, whether older folks feel threatened or what, but it needs to stop. I want to learn from people who have lived life more than me, but I don’t want my perspectives, my ideas, my expertise to be dismissed solely on account of my age or what I look like.

What is going on? What do y’all think I need to do or say to get these folks to quit it?

You Know What?

Dr. Mama Esq.2 Comments

Written by CocoaMamas contributor HarlemMommy

You know what’s dangerous? It’s dangerous to speak your mind as a Black child in an inner-city school. I’m an educator. I love (almost) all my students.  As a middle school teacher, I saw tons of kids who chose to be disrespectful, arrogant, or jerky. But except for one or two cases, I was always able to remind myself that they were children. Just kids stretching their muscles of power, testing limits and sometimes making others miserable because they themselves were miserable. As I taught in a school where the majority of students were Black or Brown, my skin color might have gained me some cred at first. Despite what other (white) teachers sometimes said, being Black wasn’t enough for a kid to respect or listen to me. They soon figured out that I liked them, cared about their futures and would do my best to help them succeed. They also soon learned that I knew my subject area and wouldn’t tolerate crap or chaos.

In Maya Angelou’s Heart of a Woman, Maya is summoned to her son’s school one day. Guy had been explaining to some white classmates on the bus about how babies were made. Well, the little white girls freaked the heck out and Guy was in trouble for using bad language in front of students, especially girls. When Maya was in the principal’s office and heard the story, she asked what her son had said about the incident. Turns out, they hadn’t even asked Guy for his side of the story. They just assumed that what the girls conveyed was true. Maya was, of course, upset and demanded to see her son. She then gives voice to how many parents of color feel: You give your child to people who often do not look like you. You have to trust that they will not mar his sense of self, and if they do, you must do your part to repair it. I’ve read this book many times, but reading it last month this part really struck me.

The success of my students was personal for me. The more Black and Brown faces without a degree meant less of those faces in power; meant more of those faces dead or in jail. I knew that my eventual child would be okay academically, but some cop or lady on the street wouldn’t necessarily distinguish between my polite, kind, hilarious kid with the high reading level from a “dangerous thug up to no good.”

I pushed my kids academically, stressed the importance of respect for each other and themselves and laughed with them. (Middle schoolers are hilarious. Especially if you find fart jokes funny. I do.)

However, there are many teachers that are not like me: teachers that call students “dirtbags” teachers that see any deviation from given instructions as dangerous, defiant and insubordinate behavior. Too many Black boys are in special education classrooms because they are “behavior issues.” We have to ask though, how much is it about the behavior and how much is it about the color of the kid? The same behavior — being wiggly in class, speaking without raising your hand, being mouthy — by a white kid in Scarsdale is seen as childish antics, but in a Black or Brown child in Harlem is seen as insolent. (Now if a parent wants to have different standards fine, but schools need to be consistent.)

The guidelines for suspension are so very subjective. Was the student was defiant or disrespectful? Defiant is suspension, disrespectful is a detention. There are shades of meaning there that are left to the beholder. Don’t have too many suspensions on your record or it will be harder to find a school that wants you in NYC. (Students must apply and matched to public high schools in New York City in a complicated system.)

I get it. It is extremely difficult to itemize what exactly is meant by defiant. There are millions of ways a kid will find to be defiant. But we have to do better. We need to somehow quantify how bad an attitude must be before a suspension. Otherwise, we just give license to suspend kids for being jerks instead of working with them through this angsty, trying period in the lives. How many of us would want to be judged for how we were at 14? Yet, by suspending kids for arguably age-appropriate behavior, and not helping them grow through or learn from the process, we are stunting their growth academically and emotionally. We need to hold them accountable for bad behavior, but still care about them as people. We must do better. If that means more time is taken to really piece out events that have occurred, so be it. Just as our justice system would rather let a guilty man go free than an innocent one imprisoned, we need to make sure suspended kids really deserve it.

Schools are supposed to be the place where it’s okay to fail sometimes. You see how far you can push and experience safe consequences. Too often, this is not how school operates for Black children. A student that feels that he is heard, respected and valued is more likely to succeed at school and at life. Teachers are not the bad guys. But I will make sure to be in my kid’s classroom when the time comes. That teacher will know that I am paying attention. I am a fierce ally for the teacher, but I am also an advocate for my son.

HarlemMommy is a breastfeeding, cloth diapering mother of one. She works with middle schools and loves to read. Her husband is very funny and they love to travel. She also writes at www.BoobsAndBummis.wordpress.com.

I Believe The Children Are Our Future

Dr. Mama Esq.6 Comments

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Has education in this country ever properly served black children? Sadly, the answer is no. Never has the education system in the United States provide black children with a equal and adequate opportunity to learn and succeed in this country. But still, we fight.

Show them all the beauty they possess inside

This summer I am engaged in two projects of education reform, and I’ve never been more excited to change the world. Not the entire world, but my world. The world that I live in, a world in which very few numbers of black children are suffering in school districts that are failing them. A world into which my two little brown babies will enter, one this year. A world that does not value them. A world that does not believe they can learn. A world that considers them expendable.

Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

The first fight is in San Francisco Unified Public School’s special education department. EdTrust West gave them a “D” when it comes to educating low-income children and children of color. The achievement gap between white students and students of color in SF rank them near the bottom (144 out of 146) of California school districts for both low-income students and students of color. One large reason for that is their special education program. Like many large urban school districts, they enroll disproportionate numbers of black and Latino children in special education, and specifically enroll Black boys in a category of special education called “emotional disturbance” at a rate of 7 times that of other children. Special education in SF is generally an educational wasteland once one is placed in it; while children are supposed to be educated with their same-age peers in non-special ed classes as much as possible, in actuality they are segregated amongst themselves receiving a subpar education that does not challenge them and that leaves them unprepared to lead productive lives after graduation. My job this summer is to analyze their data to provide a solid, clear picture of where they are now and provide guidance as to where they need to focus their efforts to get better. I’m working through an awesome organization called Education Pioneers, which brings together grad students with extensive work experience prior to grad school to work on high impact projects in education reform.

Let the children’s laughter remind us how it used to be

My second fight is at home, right here in Palo Alto. While students of color do well compared to other students of color in the state, the achievement gaps are still huge. Part of the problem here has to do with the fact that 50% of black students in Palo Alto aren’t eligible to attend California’s state universities after graduating from high school. To get into a University of California or California State University, one has to have satisfied something called the “A-G” requirements in high school. Many high schools in California align their graduation requirements with these A-G requirements to make sure every graduate can go to one of these colleges. But not Palo Alto.

Why? Because many of the classes they offer are above what is required by A-G; to offer what would be required by A-G would be, according to some teachers, “dumbing down” of the curriculum. Students don’t take what is required to meet A-G because the classes are too hard. Parents put their kids in summer tutoring and afterschool tutoring just to be prepared for, and pass the class. If a parent cannot afford, or isn’t hip to the tutoring game, then a student will have a hard time even getting through the basic-classes-that-arent-really-basic. Instead of seeing alignment as an opportunity for equity, where a regular class can be added, and the steroids class can be made into a honors, so that there are classes are accessible to all students, the teachers are floating the thinly veiled racial rhetoric of lowering standards.

I decided long ago

Never to walk in any one’s shadow

So I am just all over education news, education articles, education blogs. Someone asked me, given my wild and crazy career path to where I am now, how I got to education as a passion. And the truth is, it wasn’t a passion really until I had children. I didn’t even like kids! But the funny thing is, as soon as I had my children, I started to feel like ALL children are my children. Rather than feeling selfish about securing educational benefits for my kids, I feel like I need to secure educational opportunity for all kids. My heart aches for every child. I never imagined I would feel this way.

If I fail, If I succeed

At least I lived as I believed

I started my SF job yesterday. An hour commute both ways. I collapsed in my bed last night. Tonight, after work, there is a Palo Alto school board meeting. I’ll be there. I’ll be there.

No matter what they take from me

They can’t take away my dignity

Because the greatest love of all is happening to me

The greastest love of all is inside of me

~ The Greatest Love of All, Micheal Masser and Linda Creed

Black Teachers are Umm…Black Too

Dr. Mama Esq.2 Comments

My mother is a teacher. She has been a teacher all my life, first at day cares and preschools, then at a family day care in our home. A few years ago, she began teaching in the public school district in Philadelphia. She teaches in an elementary school that is 96% black, with 95% of the children eligible for free or reduced lunch. The school is located in a high poverty, as well as high crime neighborhood. Children come to school with no supplies, sometimes no clean clothes, and often hungry. My mother and her colleagues often not only teach the children, but they feed and clothe them. My mother did not have to become a public school teacher. She chose to because she loves black children.

So when Joel Kline, the former head of the New York City Public Schools, and DropOut Nation, a blog that covers school reform, both criticized the NAACP for joining forces with the American Teacher Federation in their effort to close 19 NYC schools, I instinctively gave pause. Both sources made the claim that effectively said that the NAACP were “hurting black children,” who, in their opinions, the group was supposed to be protecting. The teachers’ union and the NAACP say the lawsuit is based on the fact that the City should be fixing the schools, rather than shutting them down. In their view, the City’s process of gradually phasing out the schools means that the students left behind inherently get a worse education than the students in the schools that replace the shut down schools. The City is also allowing charter schools – which notoriously do not have to hire unionized teachers – access to the facilities previously held by the phased out schools. The City argues that the unions and the NAACP is standing in the way of reform and meaningful student, and parent, choice, and that all the union cares about are teacher jobs. They consistently express their “disappointment” at the NAACP for failure to protect black children.

But aren’t black teachers black too? Continue reading “Black Teachers are Umm…Black Too” →