Kids need to be empowered, not told they can’t get ahead
A plea to my fellow educators
“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”
My first teaching job was at William Penn Elementary School, a public school in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. The school is across the street from where Martin Luther King, Jr. once lived. In 1966, King moved into a run-down apartment in North Lawndale to bring attention to the issues creating slums. The principal of Penn while I taught there, Patricia Kent, took me to the window, pointed to where the apartment building once stood (it has since been torn down), and told the story of King during my job interview. Kent grew up in North Lawndale and graduated from Penn. She told the story out of pride and to highlight the problems of the community. After King was killed, rioters burned the area surrounding where he lived. Today, vacant lots and boarded up homes are in each direction of where the building once stood, and crime is an ongoing issue for North Lawndale. It was a struggling community while King lived there, but it got worse after his death.
I started teaching at Penn in 2007. Just seven years prior, on September 29, 2000, a shoot-out occurred outside of the school while school was in session. The students had to stay down, locked in the building for several hours. This is not the only shooting that has occurred outside of the school, but it was an infamous and memorable incident that left a lasting impression on the school staff. While I taught there, under no circumstance were students to go outside for recess. Teachers were to leave the school while the sun was up, and school staff who lived in the neighborhood routinely escorted public transit commuters to the bus stop to ensure their safety. Parents took the same precautionary measures to protect their children.
Like many schools that serve a high concentration of students from economically impoverished homes and communities, Penn struggles with academic achievement. They struggle to overcome the odds that poverty stacks against kids to ensure they learn the knowledge and skills required to earn a degree and land a good job—the things necessary for a better life. Linda Lutton, a journalist who spent a year at Penn, laments that telling students at schools like Penn to “work hard” and “you can do it” sounds false. “The problem isn’t that we tell poor kids they can make it. The problem is we haven’t made a world for them where that’s true.”
Instilling a sense of hope in a neighborhood like North Lawndale can be challenging. Nonetheless, many teachers take that up as their mission. The school sits on the corner of Avers Avenue and 16th Street. 16th Street was, and perhaps still is, known for drug dealing and gang activity. While I taught there, one teacher—we'll call her Ms. Heath—regularly preached to her 6th grade students that they didn't have to end up on 16th Street, and by that she meant: You don't have to join a gang or deal drugs, you are better than that. She reminded them that they are smart and perfectly capable of doing more for themselves and their community.
Now, imagine instead of empowering her students, as Ms. Heath did, she told them that they can't get ahead, simply because they are black. That there are systems and forces at play holding them back that are out of their control. That rational linear thinking, hard work, and self-reliance are white values and not for them. One can imagine how any hope these students possess would quickly turn into despair.
This is the risk of teaching through the lens of critical race theory. The underlying assumption of critical race theory is that racism permeates all structures of society, including schools. And the goal of critical race theorists is to uncover and expose racism through an examination of systemic power. Inherent within the idea of systemic power is the dynamic of the oppressor and the oppressed.
There is no denying that racism has been an issue for communities like North Lawndale and its residents. King moved to Chicago to raise awareness about discriminatory policies that were prohibiting the advancement of black communities, such as redlining—a “practice in which a mortgage lender denies loans [...] to certain areas of a community, often because of the racial characteristics of the applicant’s neighborhood”. If an academic researcher wants to use critical race theory as a lens to examine such issues in society, that is their prerogative. But K-12 schools and teachers should really think through what it means to use critical race theory as a pedagogical approach to teaching children. Telling kids that the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and that they are members of a permanent victim class, will not encourage them to think beyond their current circumstances to a brighter future.
Kids are not blind to their situation. At some point, they become aware of how their life compares to others. But a true liberatory education, which social-justice educators claim to advocate for, reminds students that they are more than their skin color and their socioeconomic status. Yes, they may have to work harder than kids in middle- and upper-class communities, but the task is not insurmountable. Not expecting students to achieve the correct answer when solving a math problem because of their skin color, for example, is infantilizing and disempowering. Helping young people acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful in the world is empowering. So is instilling a sense of pride in who they are and helping them understand their important role within their community, and society at-large, and how they can improve their life and community by getting an education.
Empowering all students should be the mission of every teacher in every classroom.
Teachers who take a social justice approach to education, I ask that you seriously ponder these questions: What contributed to your success as a student? Did a teacher or another adult point out something positive about you: a talent you had, an important contribution you made, something that made you unique? Or did they tell you that an immutable characteristic you possess would make you less capable and would hold you back? Which approach is more empowering?
From the Web
Civics Ed is on the Precipice of Becoming Common Core 2.0
“If you thought the fight about the wording of state reading and math standards got ugly, just watch what happens when the issue is whether public schools should be teaching students to label themselves based on race and ethnicity. If Obama incentivizing states to adopt the Common Core proved incendiary when the issue was how much fiction kids should read, wait until the issue is whether Uncle Sam should encourage schools to adopt materials that teach the U.S. is a “slavocracy.””
The Coming Bipartisan Backlash to Public School Wokeness
“I spent a decade working in schools and never could have imagined that the widely accepted liberal slant of many public schools would transform into a cult-like dogma that deliberately shames, denigrates and segregates children, compels speech, disallows dissent and uses rhetorical manipulation to bully teachers and students into compliance. But concerned parents have shared examples of all these and more.”