We teach who we are.

Tyrone Howard, a profoundly inspirational educator and speaker presented about teaching in urban schools and closing the achievement gap. I saw him when I first attended NHA training in Grand Rapids and his story and presentation was moving. He combined terrifying statistics with exemplary stories to validate the seriousness of race and education.

“A big challenge today in education is that people don’t realize that teaching is an intellectual exercise. It is a highly complex endeavor and it tends to be marginalized because people think that anyone can teach,” said Howard. “It is a challenging and physically, emotionally, and financially exhausting career.”

One of the great scenarios he provided included a hypothetical classroom comprised of just 30 students. If you could take the data of the 50+million students in the United States and represented the entire national student body with one classroom, it would look like this:

-12 students are poor
-3 live in extreme poverty (in a home of less than 20K a year)
-10 are non-white
-10 are non-native English speakers
-1 is homeless
-6 will move 4 times before they finish school
-7 are victims of abuse, though for each reported case, experts purport another case in unreported

As the old saying goes, facts don't lie. We no longer can teach the way our parents learned, or even how I learned. In order to become better teachers, our teachers have to learn how to make school relevant. We can't assume they will be interested and engaged the same way we were. A smarter man once said, "students start out in life as question marks and end up as periods." We are selling our students short and turning them into spectators and allowing there to be an end point in their education.

Learning has to be about asking and not answering.

As a elementary teacher in Compton, where Howard grew up, he instilled the important of college at an early age, calling Ivy League schools to send his students catalogs and packets without his students knowing. In the digital age, young people love getting things in the mail as it is unfortunately a rare occurrence. The students, impressed that the schools sought them out, would bring their packets to school and show the photos to Mr. Howard. Once, Mr. Howard saw a young student visibly upset and upon asking why, the child answered that he did not do well on his test and he was afraid Yale might find out.

This sort of story should not be extraordinary. This is what we need to be ordinary - we need this happening at every school.




Here is a great short documentary about race and education.