Curricular Segregation
Consider:
Each day as students entered the building, security guards instructed them to empty their pockets, empty their backpacks, empty their purses, stand over here for pat downs, hurry up and gather materials, stop pushing, stop yelling, stop cursing, get to class. At the same time, teachers were arriving in the main workroom to sign in and check their mailboxes, only to hear the principal reminding them how many days remained before the test, meaning, of course, the state assessment.
“Make today count,” he said each day, as teachers filled Styrofoam cups from one of three stained Mr. Coffee Makers. “If I walk by your room, I want to see standards written out on the blackboard and students in their seats and working. In their seats and working.” One day, not able to listen to his admonition yet again, I asked if he was serious—that students always needed to be in their desk seats to work.
“Yep,” he replied.
“Why?” I asked. “What if they need to be standing up, say, to give a report?”
“Not our kids,” he said. “Our kids stay in their seats.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, sure that he was going to break out in a smile, and we’d laugh at his comment.
He stared at me with no hint of a smile, not even a twitch. “Some kids,” he said, nodding out toward the bus lot teeming with students, “like those out there heading to class right this minute so they aren’t late, learn best with rules. Rules and structure. We give it to them.” And then he walked away (2).
The science teacher chimed in: “Some kids can handle the higher-level thinking discussions you might see in other schools, but not the kids here; the kids here haven’t had anyone show them how to act, so we do. We demand they sit still and answer questions, and they learn how to do that. We demand that they memorize information that they would otherwise never learn. In fact, if we can get them to memorize facts, we believe we’ve come a long way. That’s what those kids need” (2-3).
One woman teacher [said] “… those kids, well, they need you to treat them differently if they’re going to make good grades.”
“Differently from what?” I asked.
She stared for a moment before answering, “You know, from other kids, other kids who don’t need this type of structured education.”
“What type of education do other kids need?” I asked.
She bristled through her smile and said it was obvious to her that some kids could handle the freedom that allowed them to do more creative things, to “handle the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy,” to interact more with their peers, and if I understood more about the students in their high school, I’d understand that.
And there it was—that declaration that those kids, those kids whose lives are limited not by their potential and not by their poverty but by the interpretation of what that poverty means they can achieve, those kids require an education that does not look like the education of children whose lives are lived in the security of abundance, or if not abundance, then at least the security of enough. That assertion was accompanied by the genteel smile of someone assured that I, too, would see the value of this diminished educational experience once I had spent time with those kids.
That declaration has guided too many instructional decisions in too many schools. Too many school boards, superintendents, principals, and even teachers choose instructional materials and strategies for those kids that in all likelihood would not be offered to the gifted kids or the kids whose parents know how to demand and can afford better technology, libraries, textbooks, teachers, supplies, tutors, playgrounds, gyms, and . . . well, anything that can be bought with the money these parents will willingly, can easily, supply. No one would ever suggest that a scripted program be used to teach these kids; …
In the end, we are left with an education of America’s poor that cannot be seen as anything more than a segregation by intellectual rigor, something every bit as shameful and harmful as segregation by color (3).
On the face of it in action, it IS by color. Take KIPP. It is geared specifically toward “urban” school systems, systems with low standardized test scores, and its methods are for their kids, not middle-class kids, not private school kids, not suburban kids. Often, intentionally or not, this adds up to not-white-kids. This adds up to a segregated, two- or three-tier system where the top suffers, too, because the floor is so low, anything looks good.
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Beers, Kylene. “The Genteel Unteaching of America’s Poor.” National Council of Teachers of English. March 2009. PDF.
